Incredibly Stupid Bliss

  Zola is a true story that questions both the validity and necessity of "truth" and "story," and its nascent gorgeous sense of style supersedes all nitpicking.  It moves like a bullet in a dream, with intention but without trajectory, and yet you still are compelled to follow along its twisty path.   Directed and co-written by Janicza Bravo it is effortlessly nasty but also innocent in its associations and travesties.  Based on a series of tweets by a Detroit waitress tricked into tricking, it feels exploitative but also aware of exploitation, fun and dangerously not fun.  In other words, it gets the joke the whole way through without losing its heart to gallantry or bullshit.  It also is a devastating evisceration of social media without trying too hard, without shrillness. The performances help.  Taylour Paige is perfect in personifying disgust and exhaustion in a world she does not belong in, and Riley Keough (Elvis's granddaughter for Christ's sake) br

  My mom is in a nursing home in Tennessee, and I went to visit her this weekend, along with Bill and my sister Robbin.  They're all in the picture I took above.  I don't normally like to write about personal stuff, but this trip to Tennessee has been a beautiful and heartbreaking thing, so I wanted to share the meaning with whomever reads this.   My mom has always been an enigma to me, and probably me to her.  As I grew up, she was over-the-top religious, stubborn to the point of making you lose it, sometimes selfish and vicious, but also fun-loving, sweet, kind, generous.  Short and round and energetic.  Nervously trying to make a life, and trying to recover from what life does to you.  She was always scratching her way toward some kind of purpose I don't think I ever understood.  Sometimes I felt so estranged from her I wondered what I was actually supposed to feel for her, what "love" actually is.  She was always desperately asking me to visit her, but then wh