Elisabeth Donnelly

This story, almost heartbreaking in its poignancy, could almost have slipped from the pages of Mary Oliver, one of Williams’s favourite poets – or, for that matter, from one of her own films, which are filled with such moments combining the elegiac and the everyday. (Tom Shone, Michelle Williams “Blue Valentine” interview, The Telegraph)

Is it me, or is there something somewhat creepy in the way that profiles of Michelle Williams fetishize her very famous loss? How they make her sound so delicate yet so strong, mentioning her love of poetry and her lovely young girl and her tenuous loveliness. Since these pieces have to follow certain lines - she had a child with another actor, he died, accidentally, he won an Oscar - they never seem to get beyond that narrative. Which in some ways may be good for her, I suppose, since her actual life could be far away from celebrity machinery.

Driving around Brooklyn today, Williams keeps seeing ‘these little ghosts of me and Ryan doing these things. It’s strange and it’s sad. I’m the one left holding the memories because I’m the one who’s in that place. Everyone else is gone.’ It is the first thing I learn about Williams: she is never more than a beat from elegy. (Tom Shone, ibid)

And in other ways, it leads towards whole Modern Love columns about how maybe some Brooklyn writer’s child could marry Matilda Ledger and he could hang out with Michelle Williams, Michelle Williams, the two words known as “Michelle Williams,” all the time.

Michelle Williams peered around the counter at us, and I smiled and told her I’d keep an eye on things while she placed her order. Matilda ran back and joined my son, the two of them pounding on the tabletop for several minutes until Michelle Williams sat down with her coffee.

In case you ever wondered, Michelle Williams — very nice. (Modern Love, “He Had Her Attention, and Then He Lost It,” Albert Stern)

Aiming at charming, I suppose, it just ended up as creepy namedropping and a violation of personal privacy. The ickiness set in because there was no way this article would’ve been written without the repetition of “Michelle Williams, Michelle Williams, Michelle Williams” as a near-koan. It is, perhaps, the ultimate example of how your persona can shift into two words that mean something to the majority of people - the sad wife in Brokeback Mountain, the Dawson’s Creek ingenue made good, a Brooklyn bohemian Mom bravely muddling through - without ever becoming a reflection of the real, the tangible, and the everyday.

As we settled onto the sofa in front of the fireplace on the second floor of the house she had shared with Heath in their happier days, I presented her with her gifts. A gasp escaped her as she saw the Howard Moss book. Her eyes had already begun to mist as she ran her finger down the Table of Contents through the myriad titles and allowed it to come to rest at one of Moss’ most beautiful poems, “The Pruned Tree.” She turned to its page. There was one tear. Then there were two. But that was all. She flicked them away. It was her smile that now registered such wonder. (The Daily Beast, “Michelle Williams on her new film Blue Valentine,” Kevin Sessums)

The Sad Jackie O photo negative of Michelle Williams that you get in interviews these days is boring. But the Michelle Williams at the fringes of these articles, well, she’s fascinating.

I’d love to read about her someday.

mollylambert:

Author Photos, Facebook, & How To Portray Yourself, ML x TR

One star for Laura Lippman’s Baltimore Blues:

A Letdown for Rowers, January 11, 2010

By 

[redacted]

This review is from: Baltimore Blues: A Tess Monaghan Novel (Tess Monaghan Mysteries) (Hardcover)

I read about one novel per decade. I picked up this one, having heard that it has characters who are rowers. (I myself row.) I was astonished, however, to encounter on page 10 a passage in which two rowers are in singles and one reaches out to touch the other. This is simply impossible to do! In fact, because of the way the oars and riggers stick out, it is impossible for two boats, side by side, to be more than eight feet from each other, and even then, there would be danger of capsizing one or both boats in subsequently separating them. Conclusion: the author, who has made her main character a rower, knows next to nothing about rowing! She has thus violated the cardinal rule of Creative Writing 101: write what you know about. I stopped reading.

This won’t, I realize, be an issue for non-rowers, but rowers who seek a novel about rowing would be well advised to look elsewhere!

Go read Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, one of my favorite books ever, I have all these FEELINGS about it - as a winter read, it is difficult, wrenching, and heartbreakingly beautiful - and then go read firstpersonsingular’s great interview with Nick Flynn on The Rumpus.

I’m really curious about what will happen with the imminent film version, set to star Paul Dano* (who has been too wussy in too many crappy indies like the terrible Gigantic and the awful The Extra Man, although he can go head to head with Great Actors, so we will see, and I wish it could be an Andrew Garfield, or probably some young UK/Australian actor, since, frankly, they seem like men as opposed to Jesse Eisenberg/Dano/or that Canadian wimp Michael Cera) and Robert DeNiro. Having watched The Wire Season 5 this weekend, I’d be interested in what a David Simon would do with the source material, but Paul Weitz is doing it. We will see! I wonder where it’s going to be filmed; in particular, the Boston in the book is not the Boston of today, I find. But get out of the greater Boston area and there are so many dilapidated mill towns with empty, falling down buildings that could be a fair approximation.

(I haven’t seen this cover of the book and I love it. UK version, maybe? It is so much better than the US cover, which looks like bad 70s art. The cover for his new book of poetry is so creepy and gorgeous, and I first encountered that photo on a Shearwater album about birds. Because every Shearwater album is about birds.)

*Dano is a total upgrade from Casey Affleck, who - ever since I’m Still Here - I feel visceral hate towards, even if there’s just a photo of him in a magazine.

Exhibit A: Fish Tank (2009)

Exhibit B: 300 (2006)

Exhibit C: Hunger (2008)

Exhibit D: Centurion (2010)

Is it written in his contract? Why did Tarantino make him wear a shirt in Inglourious Basterds, thus, TAMING the Fassbender charm? The secret Fassbender weapon? His next film’s going to be Jane Eyre (obviously, Mr. Rochester’s manliness and animalistic sexual charm is linked to a desire to go topless) and then Shame, which is a film about a SEX ADDICT. How many sex addicts wear shirts?

Conclusion: Michael Fassbender’s career is a concerted attempt in playing roles where he doesn’t have to wear a shirt. Want him in your movie? Cast him as “the guy with no shirt.” Because that chest has to run free:

A great film director who never, ever pigeonholed himself. The same guy made Bullitt, Breaking Away, and The Friends of Eddie Coyle. You should watch these films! Breaking Away is one of my favorite films ever, and The Friends of Eddie Coyle is arguably the best Boston film ever. I’m not exaggerating!!

I wrote a tribute to Eddie Coyle a couple of years ago, before it was reissued on a pretty Criterion DVD. It’s one of the better pieces I’ve written, although I’ve since revised my opinion on The Departed. “Eddie Coyle, on the other hand, has the nuance and, for lack of a better word, the dig-your-heels-in authenticity of a troubled city breathing a wheezy sigh. Perhaps that’s due to the fact that you believe these characters are poor and desperate and Yates is willing to let their status color the frame—the stillness of Eddie Coyle lingers long after the final shot.”

Here’s another really good piece on Eddie Coyle’s Boston authenticity. The Departed screenwriter William Monahan has some choice words about Eddie Coyle, but mostly due to George V. Higgins: “The Departed is the first time Boston was ever put accurately on screen, and I’m intentionally excluding the Friends of Eddie Coyle, which incidentally had an English director, because Higgins did a sort of Amos and Andy dialect comedy about his own people to entertain an audience of wannabe WASPS. Higgins had an investment in trashing his own people to entertain cunts who thought the Irish were fucking animals, with the possible exception of George V. Higgins.”

I just started watching The Wire recently, as a reward for finishing a big project. (I am currently on s04, e09, dreading the heartbreak that’s surely ahead. To quote Lorrie Moore: “On the other hand, so engrossing, heart-tugging, and uncertain are the various story arcs that watching in this manner one becomes filled with a kind of mesmerized dread.” Yup.) In an age of police-drama crap from Law & Order: Your Mom to CSI: David Caruso as Christian Bale in Batman, it’s easy to see why The Wire gets the hosannahs it does, did, and wholly deserved - save for its shallow female characters, although can you argue that’s part of the point? - as a show that reinvents the cop show formula, turning it inside out into a portrait of a dying American city. It’s easy, too, to see David Simon’s Baltimore in other dying American cities - even in miniature when you drive around upstate New York. Abandoned buildings, abandoned people. No commerce.

Detective James McNulty’s the one that gets me, sometimes. Watching him work the first season, annoying his superiors with his drive to be good police - and then, at the end, confessing that he went after the Barksdale case because he wanted to be acknowledged as “the smartest guy in the room”… it was hard not to relate. A small lesson that’s easy to take away from the show is Don’t Be Like McNulty. Because even though he’s good at his job, and has the smart-assitude and forthrightness to go after corruption even if it’s not careerist, it’s not the sort of thing that fortifies a healthy life. He drinks too much, he’s singlemindedly obsessed with his job, having it sum up who he is, and ultimately, he’s alienating everyone who can guarantee his future.

There’s a certain petulant streak of Irish smart-assedness that runs in my family, I believe. My dad has it, I’ve heard loads of stories about it, sometimes I have it to a degree. The sort of thing where you want to outsmart an adversary as opposed to figuring out the most straight way through the problem. Being acknowledged as the smartest guy in the room isn’t the most fulfilling compliment, ultimately. It mostly just means you’re not that good at getting along with people, keeping your head down. I have a tendency to probably come off as more of a smart-aleck than I mean to, sometimes, simply because I have a good memory. It’s not the most socially fluent skill and it probably looks a little bit worse on a woman, I must admit. It’s my inner McNulty, and if I want to get along in life, have money in the bank for retirement, and also have the time to do work that helps people, I have to quiet that little voice, that tendency. I have to be aware of it, too. The first step probably requires acquiring some form of poker face, where there is currently none.

So, as a resolution, I want to make my inner McNulty into my inner Detective Lester Freeman. He got burned as a young McNulty, but years later, he learned how to play the game. How to pursue good work without burning the house down in punk defiance. It’s a tricky thing to figure out - clearly, David Simon, with his burning anger over the death of newsprint, etc., is still rather McNultyish in some ways - but I think it would be helpful.

Other, actual sayings of wisdom and resolution that will surely resonate through 2011? Be more curious, for one. And, most importantly - you have to be purposefully naive if you decide to pursue anything. Someone great said that to me and it’s been banging around my head like a ping pong ball. I’ve been approaching hopes, wishes, and dreams with this attitude of “I’ll do it, it’ll be good and maybe it’ll work out but it’s likely that the world will go pear-shaped or something so I should prepare for the worst and not be disappointed.” Nope, that’s not the right attitude for life. That’s just being scared. I am going to be purposefully naive.