Doing Laundry
Roberta Cantow's "Clotheslines" (1981)
I have been working on a piece about laundry, intermittently, for a few months, gathering quotations and writing stray paragraphs. Everything is on hold now. I need to finish another, larger project, which will take most of this year. Since I do not believe in sending out unfinished work, nor in passing off such work as “notes toward” X, the laundry piece will have to wait. But the plain images from Clotheslines seem autonomous enough to share on their own. The documentary, suffice it to say, is short, feminist, and very pretty. It is political in the best way, not dulled by ideology. What the women in the film say continually surprised me.
In other news: I wrote a short review of Jacob Eigen’s poetry collection for The Drift. Eigen has some nice similes: “. . . And the Russian man / in a red swimsuit holds his head / in the outdoor shower, like a child holding a globe.” In Gulf Coast, I have an interview with Jack Pierson. Our conversation took place in 2021, which seems like a long time ago. “I wanted you to be able to draw circles around little things in life that seem like art,” Pierson said about his early photographs.
Do you have ideas about laundry? Have you seen any fine movies lately? What is your favorite Hong Sang-soo film? Share your thoughts, please, all and sundry. — Matthew
