Dat Ass

 Due to a confluence of auspicious cancellations, being in a period of waiting for notes from my agent, and, miracle of miracles, children with childcare, I recently found myself in my favorite place on planet Earth: a movie matinee on a Monday. My drag name is Monday Matinee. Please dump my ashes into a bag of popcorn with M&Ms and throw me about a movie theater on a Monday afternoon.
 
Have you heard about this Oscar-nominated EO? Were I to describe it as a nearly diagloue-less poetic Polish polemic (sorry, that alliteration sadly happens to be the most accurate descrip!) on behalf of our animal friends I doubt you’d be running to the box office. In achingly poignant imagery, with whispers of Chloe Zhao’s up-close cinematography that squeezes the sublime from the ordinary, it shows us the obvious: Martha Nussbaum is right, plain and simple. The film is about the humanity of animals as told through a donkey.

I wish the film's Oscar nom were for Best Actor(s) for the six donkeys who portray the titular character, they deserve. The film is a balletic 90-minute-long gaze into the liquid dark eyes of a beast of burden, and his journey through all manner of human-wrought destruction and natural beauty. It is a donkey’s-eye view on all that is majestic and bizarre about people and their rituals. Soccer? Death metal??? Municipal pomp and circumstance? Italian estates??? All equally alien to our hero.
 
What really stuck out to me about the film is this: a donkey is a donkey and it is perfect because it is a donkey. There are some scenes where our sweet EO finds his way into the company of horses, big, majestic beasts of sheen and gravitas. What is so apparent in these moments is how very much a donkey is not a horse. Where those animals glimmer and inspire awe, the donkey is coarse and awkward. The horses run free like a fever dream, while the donkey lumbers along.
 
But what is striking in these moments is how much you would never want a donkey to be a horse. A donkey is so perfect in its donkeyness. I know, metaphor metaphor metaphor!!! On the nose, fair, but I’m trying to appreciate the donkeyness of these ass end days of winter, in the donkeyness of my years.
 
Another thing I’ve been thinking about: as a kid, did you ever have the experience of being awoken in the middle of the night and getting ready for school at 1 in the morning because you thought it was actually 6:30 a.m.? And then you’d get to tell everyone about it the next day and they would laugh in recognition and/or call you an idiot? I wager that due to iPhones this happens far less frequently these days. This loss feels particularly poignant.
 
Some random things:
 
I really enjoyed the novel Funny You Should Ask
 
If you are in NYC you must stop everything you are doing and see Asi Wind. Sell your body if you have to.
 
Upon the recommendation of my friend Anna, who is the source of so many good recommendations, I’m dabbling in some PHILOSOPHY about disappointment and feeling my existential crises that you could set your watch to dismissed as a mere function of being alive, which seems right.
 
This episode of On Being about awe
 
Send me your favorite veggie recipes :/