i was thinking as i shuffled down east broadway this morning that maybe apocalypse movies (and horror?) are my versions of Soothing Media à la cozy mysteries, or when someone is murdered in a bucolic oxfordshire village and the townsfolk (and a key outsider??) have to jump into their cardigans and figure it all out over digestive biscuits. that is probably a pseudo-insight i unthinkingly took in from an old new yorker piece about how YA readers love disaster books because adolescence is a disaster anyway, i don't know. there's a silver lining in my near-total inability to get through my magazine stack lately: no more wondering if, "maybe she's born with it/ maybe it's david remnick!" anyway we saw the furiosa prequel last night and i thought it was pretty wonderful. having gotten a taste of eco- and psychological australian devastation on my trip to tasmania a few years ago i get george miller a lot more than i did when fury road—which i might in fact have only mostly seen—came out back in 2015. the end of the world almost always boils down to resource wars unless you're emily st. john mandel, but miller really makes that cabbage feel precious, to say nothing of the gasoline. i loved the first chase scene and how each suddenly-available motorcycle got scavanged mid-pursuit—i mean, obviously, but i bet NASCAR pit crews love the mad max family of products. i personally would favor them for the hair and makeup alone, but throw in attacking paragliders and the fact that gender inequality and sexual violence inform the story in a way that doesn't devolve into mere titillation or shock and well done, australia. also i was yesterday years old when i realized tina turner was singing "all we want is life beyond thunderdome" in "we don't need another hero" (i thought it was "all we want is to be young"? listen, i haven't seen that movie).
on cozy mysteries, i just finished both my name is barbra—which kept going so ferociously that i was half-sure gnomes were sneaking to my bedside and writing more of it each night and read like emily dickinson journaling between bong rips, definitely no ghostwriter there—and the hunter, an actual mystery i failed to realize was a sequel to another tana french book about mysterious death in remote small-town ireland. that's fine re: the hunter, one reads tana french for vibes and emotional pointillism rather than for jaw-dropping reveals, and it'll probably be at least a few years before i remember to go back and read the book that came before it.
barbra was more like broadway pointillism, which increased my understanding of show tunes and how one arranges and phrases them by about 5000% (i have never seen funny girl or gypsy, much less i can get it for you wholesale). i read it because i love memoirs, and because i wanted to dig around in barbra's account of the perfectionism that has made her so notorious, and becuase i wanted to know more about why she cloned her dogs and has a personal ice ream shop in her basement. i can't say i know much more about the dogs or the basement, but it does seem like she gets savaged for working practices that would be fairly unremarkable for male directors. she's pretty shameless about being late all the time, which is unfortunate in the context of what she asks of other people, but i am also late all the time and i don't have a presidential medal of freedom.
