Bits #2
Things to read, watch and listen to
This week I gave in to my yearnings and bought a Stanley cup, aka an adult sippy cup. Being aggressively hydrated reminded me of this Smack the Pony sketch:
Of all the late 90s/ early 00s cultural oddities, I miss Smack The Pony the very most. (Almost as much as I miss Wotsit Wafflers). Rarely a day goes by when I do not hum “we are the Corrs, we’re multiplying”, or look down at my nether regions and murmur, “I don’t think anyone’s going to notice a few little wisps”. Good times.
Mind blown this week by the psychoanalyst Mark Solms who suggests that Freud was not nearly as freaky as we’ve always thought. In fact, says Solms, Freud was a “rather conservative gentleman” who had…
“A very broad understanding of sexuality. For him, any activity that was pleasure seeking in its own right – anything that one does for the purposes of pleasure alone, as opposed to practical purposes – was ‘sexual’.”
Does that make my relationship with reading… sexual? And does that mean we’ve misunderstood the Oedipus complex, too? Might be more confused than I was before, tbh.
My interview with Eve Hewson for Porter magazine came out this week. I found the Irish actor a riot: fun and curious and a great conversationalist. She sent me a kind message afterwards - do you now how rare that is? (Thinking about the one that e-mailed me to say she didn’t like the headline - which journalists don’t choose, editors do - and how could I bring in stuff from past interviews that she’d said?)
I’ve been thinking about this passage, which I’ve seen picked up in quite a few tabloid outlets. I’m glad that she didn’t offer some utopian vision of a post MeToo Hollywood.
“Being young and female in Hollywood has improved in the past few years, she reflects – but only sort of. Has she been treated in an inappropriate way? “Absolutely.” Is that still common? “Yep.” She pauses. “What has changed is that you’re allowed to now say that you had a bad experience. Before it was, ‘Be grateful, don’t complain, this is what it’s like if you want to be a star.’ At least now, even if people want to or not, they kind of have to respond, or they get cancelled. It gives us power.”
I am so insanely excited for the second season of Bad Sisters, and loved what she said about whether or not the next series could hit the way the first did:
“A lot of people wondered how [Sharon Horgan] would do [another series]. And I was like, ‘Didn’t The Sopranos do it? Didn’t Breaking Bad do it? Why are you questioning her skill? Her skill is off the charts!” Hewson adores working with Horgan. “Everything she does turns to gold.”
I finally watched the movie adaptation of Kristin Roupenian’s 2017 short story, Cat Person and found it reminded me a lot of Fresh. Yes, the horror movie about cannibalism.