Refusing the Clock

An ode to my beloved hero Diane Keaton

I remember an ex of mine expressing confusion over why I was a reading a memoir by Diane Keaton. I think it is the one she wrote about aging. And this was an ongoing aspect of this relationship, always pinpointing something about me to ruminate on to make me feel strange and wrong and this time, it was for loving Diane Keaton which in retrospect just illuminates how dumb this particular dynamic was from the start. And I remember trying to explain what she meant to me - how it was more than her style and the fiddle dee dees & la di das but more about just her way of being, and how she was who she was. Flaws and all, so deeply she reclaimed them over and over in her real and imagined narratives. She committed to telling the full story of what it meant to be a woman in her body, in the time she lived in and her entire film trajectory was exactly that….from the beginning to the very end, a consistent stance of ‘take me as I am’ while refusing any other clock besides her own. The cherry on top of her delivery is the fact that she also did this with the most delicious awkwardness that somehow became less weakness and more an entry point that invited stumbling to be a relevant, if not the most important part of the living experience.

Weirdly, before Annie Hall or Manhattan - I think of Baby Boom as the first movie that made me love Diane. For those unfamiliar with the plot, Keaton is playing an 1980’s career lady Donna Karen wearing pre Girl Boss bs archetype who discovers she has inherited a baby girl from a long lost relative. Obviously, this predicament doesn’t land well in a world of men.

There is even a scene where her boss upon making her an offer to be a partner in their company expresses concern about the possibility of her eventually having children. Her super lame boyfriend leaves her and the partnership offer is rescinded. She runs away to Vermont with the baby and turns her homemade baby apple sauce into a very successful business - it’s all very Hollywood with a lot of painful saxophone soundscape interludes that were very popular in 1987. If you have seen St. Elmo’s Fire, you know what I mean. They are awful but you get used to it after awhile. Somewhere in there, she falls in love with Sam Shepard, who is the town vet ( <3 ) and Cary Grant charming and even though it is so unrealistic in so many ways, but Hollywood magic makes it all work because he is a small town guy and that makes all the difference (lies!) but who cares because their chemistry is amazing and Keaton maintains this perfect balance of vulnerability while also being sensual and present in every scene with Shepard, who is just kind of perfect even while telling her that she reminds him of a bull terrier which he makes weirdly endearing because he is so frigging hot and stoic.

Anyway….you watch a film like that & think about that moment - that zeitgeist of ‘women in the workforce’ etc and then you compare it to the incredible Looking for Mr.Goodbar which was made in 1977 and she is so brilliant and dark in this another version of the ‘Madonna/Whore’ narrative - this time a little more literal- where she plays this angelic schoolteacher who likes to pick up men in bars and take drugs because its the 70’s and that is what sexual liberation looked like. Another kind of zeitgeist.

I honestly could write a book of essays about each of her films as a narrative of womanhood in the late 20th century (and hmm….maybe I will, this is not a terrible idea) but all this to say I admired her ability to be the archetype in whatever phase of the journey she was in while also so determined to live life at her own pace.

So much is made about her refusal to get married to essentially the best trade Hollywood had to offer in her hey day - and she dated them all - but upon reading her memoirs, it becomes clear that this stance wasn’t some empty second wave feminist stance but really more about her dedication to self reflection and healing from the mental health issues within her family and her struggles with depression and disordered eating as a result. She inherently knew that playing into the classic hetero narrative wasn’t the way to find actual love so she chose the real thing, herself, and ended up being an amazing adoptive mother to two children at 50 which is something else I have always admired about her.

I write this in the window of my birthday week, and of course, Diane was a great Capricorn so its hard for me to not be sentimental and just think about how much she taught me just in that refusing the prescribed clock of important life events is possible.

As I teeter on the end of my 40’s and notice how much of my life is not how I expected it to be while simultaneously knowing it is exactly how I always wanted it to be, there is a lot to be said about the lens of expectation and more importantly, who’s lens? But I have to credit Diane, to a point, because I have always gone towards what interests me despite what anyone else thinks about that and yeah, sometimes that’s been messy but I have learned it gets easier to negotiate how to have less drama the more you learn to live your life and its just so strange to me, how you keep doing that, and you wake up and realize ‘whoa, I made a whole life out of this……’ and it’s just the wildest thing, it really is.

RIP Diane Keaton. So grateful you existed from the bottom of my heart.

promote

I have been sitting on this for a few months but am excited to announce that I am releasing my poetry book XO on Metalabel.

If you have seen me read poetry over the past few years, this is what I was reading. If you have read a poem of mine of online, it’s from here. Here is one.

There are print or digital versions. You can order here.

pay attention

Last fall, I saw this wonderful documentary called Monk In Pieces about the extraordinary Meredith Monk and besides being a narrative about her early days, there is a great deal of attention to what it means to be an artist in their later years and what it means to ensure one’s legacy once we are gone.

One scene that has stayed with me is in a rehearsal space. Monk is sitting next to the director of a re-staging of her seminal work, ATLAS, and the performer who will be singing Monk’s part is singing the piece above “Choosing Companions” and its hard for me to watch it and not think about how intimidating that must be for this woman stepping into Monk’s shoes.

One moment I particularly like is when Monk stops her because she wants her to be more attention to the bird call moments throughout the piece because as she says in her own words, “I did that rather well and I would hate for it to get lost.”

orgs to donate to

At a loss for words these days regarding the state of the world except yeah, the world is on fire, let’s love each other anyway.

the world is on fire, let's just love one another