• Cinephilia

    2021 [in film]

    As the world (sort of) opened back up again this year, my film viewing responded accordingly; in January, I “attended” a virtual Sundance Film Festival, and by September I was logging a negative PCR test to make my way to Canada for an in-person Toronto Film Festival. Vaccinated and masked, I returned to movie theaters quite a bit over the summer and fall, enjoying amazing (and less so amazing) films back on the big screen—finally. And as the year came to an end this week and another bad wave of the virus wreaked its havoc on us all, I hunkered down at home and knocked out a bunch of films…

  • Just This

    The Era of Audrey

    In October of 2003, I was a senior in college and already thinking about what life might be like once I headed out on my own after graduation. I had grown up with a family cat, and I was thinking it might be nice to have another with me for whatever adventures awaited. So when a friend mentioned their outdoor cat came home pregnant and one of the kittens remained unclaimed, I jumped at the chance to bring her home. She was tiny enough to fit in my two hands, and as my roommate and I drove the few blocks home, Joselyn asked me what I wanted to name her.…

  • Cinephilia

    Review: Eric Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons

    I regret to say I have not spent the last year getting into the best shape of my life or launching a new side-hustle or doing any other monumental work some have managed to make happen in the midst of a pandemic. That’s not to say I haven’t picked up a new hobby or two. I’ve certainly cooked at home more than ever, and I’ve upgraded many kitchen gadgets and tools to make that work both easier and more enjoyable. And I also started a program I’ve wanted to prioritize for quite some time: I’ve begun taking French lessons in earnest. Through the Chicago branch of Alliance Français, a cultural…

  • Pretending to Cook

    Recipe: Spicy Peanut Chicken

    First things first: this is not becoming a cooking blog. Nevertheless, the longer the pandemic lasts, the better I get at feeding myself. It’s gotten to the point that I repeat a recipe enough that I essentially know it by heart and start to play with the ingredients and flavors. Several months ago, I had a craving for an Asian-style peanut chicken dish, so I went looking for a good option. Once I found one I liked, I wrote it down on my own recipe card…and promptly forgot where I originally found it. (So, if this looks like your recipe, please let me know!) I’m a big fan of extra…

  • Cinephilia

    Review: Some Kind of Heaven

    On a recent episode of the New York Times podcast “The Daily,” the show that focuses on one timely news story each morning, reporters descended on The Villages, the massive, pre-fab retirement community in central Florida. Boasting over 120,000 residents, the community is reliably conservative and, according to some reports, is singlehandedly responsible for keeping Florida red in recent elections. The focus of the episode, however, was the burgeoning liberal voices inside the manicured landscapes of The Villages, revealing a divergent narrative from the one so heavily managed by the community with fake town squares and more special interest clubs than the best-funded high schools. Now comes Some Kind of Heaven,…

  • Cinephilia

    Review: The Reason I Jump

    For those with a distant relationship to autism—they aren’t raising a child diagnosed with it, they don’t work in a capacity to serve someone with it—the condition can be a mysterious one. So much misinformation has swirled through media and popular culture over the years that it can be confusing to know exactly what it is, where it comes from or how it presents in an individual. The general awareness of the condition typically centralizes around its external, observable factors; we busy ourselves with how to “normalize” someone’s inability to communicate or socialize, how to integrate them into an abled society as smoothly as possible. How often, though, do we…