It Can't Rain All the Time

and other bummers

Photo by Max Bender on Unsplash

Hi everyone! How are we all doing?

I won’t be publishing next week, as I am fucking off to the beach with my husband to celebrate our 20th (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) wedding anniversary. I didn’t expect this to be a long post, but boy howdy, it is!

I will be discussing: the Bullshit Weather, the finale of The Handmaid’s Tale (spoiler free but proceed with caution), the Pee-Wee Herman documentary, and Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie and Lowell. What do these things have in common? THEY ARE ALL STONE COLD BUMMERS (but the art is beautiful and meaningful and good, the weather can blow me).

What the absolute fuck is this weather????

I am not sure what part of the world you are reading this from, but here in NYC, it went from beautiful warm spring to BULLSHIT.

I was supposed to go see Beyonce at MetLife with friends last Thursday, but the weather took a turn. We had the tail end of a Nor’easter. In frickin’ May. It went from 75 and sunny to mid 40s and pouring. To make matters worse, I was going to have to commute in it to the office and then commute to MetLife, and worse, HOME from MetLife. Yes, there is public transportation, but it is also a giant pain. At best, I would have been rolling home at 1 am-ish. The show started at 8 and its 3 hours long¹, so that’s optimistic.

In the end, I had to bow out. I lost a little money and gave myself a sad. But let me tell you something I have learned about myself, and it is a very important thing to know:

There is nothing I hate more than being cold and wet.

If it was just cold, whatever. I could handle a clear 45 degree night (even though, to reiterate, that is bullshit in May). Conversely, I could handle a warm night with some rain. That’s why God made ponchos. But cold AND raining with bullshit wind? No. Nope. The answer to the question “Who I would I stand outside for three hours in the freezing ass rain to see?” is NO ONE, as it turns out. And I think that’s okay. It’s good to know your limits.

Meanwhile, a week later, the weather continues to suck. I am eating hot soup in late May because I am cold. It’s cloudy and drizzly and grey and will be for the next many days. BOOOO.

BRB putting on The Crow soundtrack. Boy, this song takes me right back. This is one of those songs that makes me feel exactly the way I was feeling the first time I heard it. A Beautiful Bummer.

The Handmaid’s Tale Finale (trying not to spoil!)

The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu, a documentary series based on Margaret Atwood’s book of the same name, has sometimes been a frustrating watch. Some of the middle seasons leaned towards the ridiculous and implausible, and for a moment I wasn’t sure that they knew how it could end. Given the constantly shifting state of the political environment in the United States, the writers did not have an easy task. And, with Atwood writing The Testaments (the sequel to THM, which was greenlit to go to series), they had to keep that in mind as well. They may have wanted to wrap certain things up, but are constrained by the sequel.

All that being said, this was one of my favorite seasons so far. It has been impossible to watch it without seeing the parallels between Gilead and the current United States, and even more so now. In this article for the LA Times, the showrunners were interviewed, and a few of their quotes hit the nail on the head:

What we wanted to do this season is have June — and the audience — be confronted with who this person is for real and realize there is no such thing as a good Nazi, even if that Nazi might be adorable and helpful when you need him.

I won’t spoiler the finale for you, but that and the penultimate episode drive home this crucial message. The other message is that even if Gilead falls, the America that will survive is not the same America as before, and it can’t be. It was a sobering reminder that even if we survive this administration, the country isn’t going to be the same. Maybe that’s a good thing, if we’re feeling optimistic, but when more than half the population views this show as an instruction manual and not a cautionary tale, the change has already happened.

Whether or not we can reverse course isn’t the bigger tragedy; it’s that we are on this course at all. But so long as we have the power and a way to speak, we shall use it, and the show demonstrates that in its final episode. If you haven’t watched this season, I encourage you to. While, yes, there is a lot of sadness and terror and tragedy, it offers something I think everyone needs at the moment: hope. Not flowery, unrealistic hope — but the hope that grows from realizing that all may not be lost.

Pee-Wee Herman as Himself

This documentary about Paul Reubens, better known as Pee-Wee Herman, is streaming on HBO Max. It is directed by Matt Wolf, who was a fan of Reubens’ work growing up, as were many of us 40-somethings. Apparently, it was not an easy process, and in watching the documentary, understandably so.

It was weird to watch this, because Pee-Wee was a big part of my childhood. My brother and I watched Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, both of the movies, and of course the completely gonzo Christmas special. If you have never seen this, it is batshit and delightful and very very gay. One commenter on the Vulture article I linked who was a little younger than me said he felt for the millennials who grew up watching Pee-Wee Herman - a person who told us it was okay to be the weird little freaks we were - only to have him virtually disappear from our lives.

When Reubens was arrested for allegedly masturbating in an X-rated theater in 1991², his career never entirely recovered. I had never thought of it much after, save for his insanely well-timed joke at the MTV VMAs, which I watched in real time.

What I didn’t realize (because I never gave it much thought) was that Reubens may have been targeted, in part, for being queer. Reubens was in the closet, and when you watch the documentary, he explains his reasoning for this. It’s fascinating, and also helpful to remember that being an openly gay famous man in the 80s was not common.

Reubens made a bit of a comeback in the early 2000s, until he was arrested again under suspicion of having underage sexual material in his house (it was NOT - it was vintage gay memorabilia). While many people rallied to his defense, the damage was done. There is a lot more to the story, but it was clearly fueled by homophobia. The parallels to the present-day attacks on LGBTQ+ people out of “concern” for children are striking.

Reubens passed away from cancer before the documentary was finished, and Wolf had no idea he was sick. No one did, really, save for his closest friends. In his final days, Reubens pledged to help Wolf finish the film, and he does so, in one of the most haunting and heartbreaking ways possible. I’ll be thinking about the last ten minutes of this film for a very long time. What an amazing life, but my god, it didn’t have to be so fucking sad. For all the joy he gave to the kids of my generation, I think he deserved way better.

The 10th Anniversary of Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie and Lowell

My holy trinity of musicians - at least in the songwriter genre - are Tori Amos, Joanna Newsom, and Sufjan Stevens. All three of them have made records that are fundamental to who I am as a person. I talked a little bit about his brilliant 2005 album Illinois in an earlier post.

All Things Go

Sufjan is also one of the most beautiful people on earth. My husband - who is hopelessly straight - said he is the most beautiful person he has ever seen up close. That’s how much.

Sufjan in 2005 - this photo is 20 years old, but the man is timelessly hot.

While I love the majority of his albums, Carrie and Lowell is the one that maybe saved my life, and I am not being hyperbolic. The record is Sufjan’s response to the death of his mother, Carrie, who suffered from mental health issues and wasn’t able to be the mother he needed. I could write an entire essay just on this record, and may do.

If you’ve never heard it - and even if you didn’t connect with his other work - I think it’s his most accessible record. It came out a little over a year after I stopped speaking to my mother, and I was still grieving, but had enough distance to finally start processing. This record held my hand every single day for months. I would listen to the whole thing and just start it again. It’s devastatingly sad, but at the time, it was revealing spaces of myself I didn’t even know I could inhabit. While his situation and mine are not the same, there are things we share, a language that only card carrying members of the Damaged Kids Club³ can understand.

He doesn’t do interviews often, but recently, he appeared on NPR’s All Songs Considered, as he is releasing a 10th Anniversary Edition of C&L on vinyl (which I pre-ordered immediately). In the past two years, Sufjan lost his partner of 14 years (and, in announcing it, came out as gay, though I’d argue he didn’t need to) and was temporarily disabled by Guillan-Barre Syndrome, which forced him into a long rehabilitation.

In the interview, Sufjan reveals that revisiting this album is painful for him, and also that he is embarrassed by it. My heart broke for him hearing him talk about his enduring grief for his mother, and I hope when he has some more time and space to process everything that he’s been going through, he knows how much it helped people. That he gave a generous gift to the world. He said it frustrated him that he couldn’t fulfill his artistic mission of finding beauty and hope in the chaos, but I’d argue that he did. What is more beautiful and hopeful than giving people a way to process grief, and to make people who are seeking closure but never receive it feel seen and understood?

Sufjan’s work was always genius, but he held his audience at a bit of a distance. For all the intimate and revealing moments on his earlier albums, he would abstract himself with the flourishes and humor and noise he is known for. C&L tore down that wall. When I saw him live in 2015, he was openly crying on stage. I can’t imagine that was a comfortable place to be, especially coming from a man who would come on stage like this:

I suppose, like Paul Reubens, losing your anonymity/privacy comes at a cost. Especially for a queer artist. I imagine feeling exposed when you’ve kept certain things just for yourself for so long is difficult.

No matter what he does next, his work has impacted my life for the better. I know he isn’t reading this, but if I could say anything to him, I would say thank you and we love you.

OKAY WOW THAT WAS LONG. If you read all of that, you are my people.

Any fun bummers you want to gush about? Post them in the comments!! I’ll see you all the week of June 9th!

1. With few exceptions, I never need a concert to be three hours long.

2. Reubens denied he was masturbating, but like, who goes into an X-rated theater to NOT do that?

3. a term used often by one of my dearest friends