We turn the calendar page and welcome 2016, also known as the year of the release of "Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie!"
We can think of no better gift to our readers than to share the advance publicity on "Ab Fab: The Movie," coming to theaters this July 1, directed by Mandie Fletcher; screenplay by Jennifer Saunders; produced by Jon Plowman and Damian Jones; and starring Jennifer Saunders, Joanna Lumley, Julia Sawalha, Jane Horrocks, and June Whitfield. Five ultra-talented ladies named J! Here's all the buzz, sweetie darlings.
"Appropriate for their big-screen debut, Edina and Patsy are still oozing glitz and glamour, living the high life they are accustomed to: Shopping, drinking and clubbing their way around London's trendiest hotspots. Blamed for a major incident at an uber-fashionable launch party, they become entangled in a media storm and are relentlessly pursued by the paparazzi. Fleeing penniless to the glamorous playground of the super-rich, the French Riviera, they hatch a plan to make their escape permanent and live the high life forever more!"
Comic Margaret Cho has recently fussed on Twitter about the AbFab movie casting a non-Asian actor in an Asian role. We understand her pique. But there's a thing known as color-blind casting in operatic roles, i.e., you don't have to be an Ethiopian princess to play Aida. And AbFab is nothing if not operatic. So Out There withholds judgment until the film's release.
Book Him, Danno
Every week The New York Times Book Review interviews a writer about her reading and writing habits in its regular feature "By the Book." Recent installments have included such immortal literary figures as Margaret Atwood and such unlikely subjects as terminally confused right-wing pundit Peggy Noonan. This week TNYTBR would like to interview Out There. In our wildest dreams!
What books are currently on your nightstand?
"After Alice," a novel by Gregory Maguire (HarperCollins), in which he reimagines Wonderland when Alice tumbles down that rabbit hole; "Francis Bacon in Your Blood," a memoir by Michael Peppiatt (Bloomsbury) about his friendship with the artistic enfant terrible; "The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone" by Olivia Laing (Picador), in galleys; "Martin Boyce: When Now Is Night" by Dominic Molon (Princeton Architectural Press), an aesthetic we relate to; "The Completely Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green" by Eric Orner (Northwest Press), a world we know; "The Manly Pursuit of Desire and Love" by Perry Brass (Bellhue Press), which never ends.
What's the best book you've read so far this year?
"The Paying Guests" by Sarah Waters (Riverhead), which made us go back to her "The Little Stranger." Such timeless Gothic fiction from a contemporary lesbian author is all-too-rare.
Favorite lines of poetry?
"Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/the ceremony of innocence is drowned;/The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity." - William Butler Yeats. That's 2015 in a nutshell.
"Resolv'd to sing no songs to-day but those of manly attachment,/Projecting them along that substantial life,/Bequeathing hence types of athletic love,/Afternoon this delicious Ninth-month in my forty-first year,/I proceed for all who are or have been young men,/To tell the secret of my nights and days,/To celebrate the need of comrades." - Walt Whitman. What a stud.
"If you're so very entertaining, why do you sleep alone tonight?" - Morrissey . QED.
Can you name any one book that made you who you are today?
Provincetown, summer of 1982: We carried around a paperback copy of "Notre-Dame des Fleurs" by Jean Genet everywhere we went. It got us the most beautiful French-Canadian boy in P'town that season: Golden curls, baby blues. Well, that most splendid volume, plus we had a full head of hair and a flat stomach.
Favorite writers?
At various times in our life: Genet, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, Henry James, P.G. Wodehouse, Thomas Mann, Alan Hollinghurst, Edmund White, Agatha Chrtistie, Tom Stoppard, John Barth, James Joyce, Colm Toibin, Gary Indiana, Gary Shteyngart, and a whole host of contemporary authors we can't possibly begin to list because we'd never cover them all. As you can see, we've led a stimulated and multifarious inner life. "There's more to life than books, you know, but not much more." - the Moz.