Letter #30
Sell my soul for total control
Good evening angels! Delighter Express is running a little late today, but never fear. I come bearing gifts to carry you around to your weekend parties and feasts.
It’s that time: when the sky glowers briefly gray before settling into its murky charcoal bath, and hardened petals of clementine skin mark the path of the day, and the animated hiss and hammer of the old pre-war heat echoes through the house with a purpose of its own. There is something wild and forgiving about this season of early darkness — hard edges are softened at night, and certain flaws settle into the shadows, leaving some room for mischief lit by flattering warm bulbs. The cold speeds up your walk a bit: you’re on a mission, and that mission is to get inside and drink a whiskey cocktail and eat cheese and bread with beautiful people while wearing a turtleneck. It’s maybe the only kind of mission I can unequivocally get behind.
Hang on … am I advocating for winter? This, and other revelations just keep on coming now that I’m freshly medicated and wide-eyed with wonder. That’s right, I’m medicated and I love like Christmas. Should I go to grad school to be a math teacher or something? Bc this is starting to sounding like a portrait of utter competence.
As an adult child with a dead parent (phew! found myself), the holidays have a tendency to carry with them a sense of dread and unease. There’s always a moment I find myself staring into the candy-colored abyss, rooting around for the feelings I’m supposed to have and coming up short. That said, one thing that righting my chemically imbalanced brain (along with massive amounts of therapy!) has helped me to do is feel more at peace with the present. Less of an urge to spiral into the depths of my psyche and visions of what could be, what has been, how I should act but don’t, how the world should be but isn’t.
Ultimately I cannot control many things, including my lot in life, the current sociopolitical climate, the widening wealth gap, whether or not someone is in love with me, whether or not people listen to me about Spencer being good…
If you’re anything like me, maintaining the illusion of control is a way you’ve learned to cope through the incomprehensible. You get good at it, you build your life with it. And then one thing throws you off course and you’re dissociating at the kid’s table, eating fistfuls of those dry Italian cookies and wondering if your uncles think you’re strange and annoying. Another thing I can’t control — the fact that my family has known me since birth. That is actually obscene.
So I’ll be your friend and remind you that the futility of it all is actually what makes life gorgeous and harrowing and surprising and wild and forgiving. Fortunately and unfortunately, there is no one perfect thing.
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There have been a million articles already explaining that this film is, as constructed in the very first frame, “a fable based on a true tragedy,” rather than a historically accurate recording of events, so I won’t belabor that point … just to say that the director Pablo Larraín went for emotional accuracy, an attempt to capture the specific allure and sympathy of the people’s princess, and in that aim I think he succeeded.
Christmastime at the palace is the perfect music box in which to lock the forlorn Diana, who deteriorates as she spins around in her prescribed positions. The symbolism allows for so many lush visuals: the ominous barren countryside, the too-tight string of pearls, the racks of impeccably tailored clothing, the room-sized fridge filled with a ten course meal, the most beautiful bathroom in which to have a breakdown. But the most affecting part was the respect for and honoring of Diana as a mother: her rare moments of happiness and energy are when she can be alone with her kids.
The thing is, gang, I know we’ve all discounted K Stew. We’ve taken her for granted; giggled and rolled our eyes whenever her name came up — and sure, the phrase “Kristen Stewart playing a guard at Guantanamo” never fails to make me laugh out loud — but the point is, we’ve doubted our girl even when she’s given us so much. And I have to say, as I announced to the lesbian-filled theater as the credits rolled, she did that shit. She killed it.
Now if you’ll excuse me I’ll be searching “kristen stewart dakota fanning runaways interviews” for my private time. Good day!
The hardest thing — you are not addicted to me.
Devin Troy Strother, “i’m really feeling your energy right now, can we run that back and forth for a lil bit (i feel u)” (2021)
Devin Troy Strother’s paintings and sculpture are exploding with life — thick globs of paint, playful flames and smoke and brains drenched in rainbows. Warped cartoons nestle together in the orb of someone’s memory, then spill out in conversation as naturally as falling stars. Their oblong figures carry so much expression despite their simplicity, a single roving eye in side profile, at once agog and unfazed — an edge to their playfulness that evokes a specific urgency, that buzz around someone with an innate kinetic urge. I particularly like the paintings of hands sticking out from the left or right of the frame, fingers balancing paintbrushes, cigarettes, matches, sometimes all at once, like they’re hitchhiking their way through a Möbius strip. In a room, the accumulation of dynamic figures against pitch-black backgrounds have the effect of a hidden galaxy — perhaps the undercurrent of an already-cartoonish art world, an unacknowledged counter-orbit that maintains the stillness of those bright white walls.
The treasures in this poem with a grief-stricken narrator start off strong with the first line, “When the puppy snarfles for breakfast.” The stanzas continue to make noise, the “gurgling” and “crunching” a soundtrack to sifting flour and lost ashes. During a lonely white winter objects start taking on human qualities: “supine roof,” “circumspect mothballs.” The window, alternately “savvy” and “apoplectic.” And nature has been defeated, too, the “dejected nest” and “browbeaten trees” are a reminder that you must endure time as it passes. The pain of it dense and elusive as accumulating snow.
In 1959, demure literature professor Vivian Bell gets off a sleeper train and arrives in Reno, where she’ll stay at a ranch populated by fellow pending divorcees. There she encounters the young, ebullient Cay Rivers, a known gay menace who makes ceramics when she’s not sleeping with showgirls. Voluminous pants, chaparral walks, heart eyes and rain-encrusted kisses ensue. Any questions?
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Maybe you,
maybe you,
maybe even you,
Delighter