Perfection Paralysis

Elaine & Tony, Dave Grohl, and Ziggy Stardust walk into a bar...

I was standing in front of my house a few weeks ago, watering some new plants, when my neighbor Mary approached me from across the street.

“Gee, Dan, I’ve never seen you water before,” she said. I detected a hint of unintentional judgment in her voice.

Unfortunately, she was right.

I spent most of the first two years living in my house intimidated by my yard. It’s not big, but it was designed by one of the previous owners, a woman named Deb. In a lot of ways, I still felt like it was Deb’s yard.

With limited experience in maintaining plants, I didn’t know where to begin. Even the simple idea of watering led to intellectual paralysis.

Exactly how much do I water each plant? How much water is too much? How much is too little? Do I need to set up a sprinkler? What if I completely screw everything up?

These questions were all probably answered easily enough, but I dealt with them by doing absolutely nothing.

Needless to say, after our scorchingly dry summer of 2022, a few plants didn’t make it. Specifically, two hydrangeas got fried (surprising that plants with the Greek word for WATER in their name died in these neglectful circumstances).

Once I replaced the dead plants, something immediately changed inside me. I suddenly had a personal connection to these new members of the family, and their survival required me to get over my self-doubt and get out there.

So I’ve been learning the basics. I’m firing up the hose, I’m spooning out fertilizer, I’m deadheading flowers.

So far, so good.

More important, though, is the renewed recognition that I can’t let my fear of imperfection paralyze me.

As such, this past week, I installed and filled four new planters on my front porch. I did so with some insecurity, but with the advice of friends and experts, I got soil, some perennials, some annuals, and I let ’er rip.

Embracing imperfection on the front porch.

When I was done, Neighbor Mary came out from across the street again.

“Dan, you are really developing your green thumb!” she said admiringly. “Deb would be so proud to see you doing such a good job.”

After almost two years, I finally feel like it’s no longer Deb’s yard. Now it’s mine.

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The Best…

…Movie I Saw This Week

Enough Said (2013) — Directed by Nicole Holofcener
Available for rent on various streaming services

I really wanted to embrace artists’ new work this week but found myself retreating to more familiar territory.

For example, I went to the movies to see Nicole Holofcener’s latest film, You Hurt My Feelings, starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus. I enjoyed it well enough but not to the degree that I wanted to write about it.

Watching it, though, inspired me to go back to Holofcener’s 2013 film Enough Said, in which Louis-Dreyfus teamed with James Gandolfini in a bittersweet rom-com for the middle-aged set.

The premise is a bit like a sitcom setup. Divorced mother-of-one Eva (Louis-Dreyfus) goes to a party and meets divorced father-of-one Albert (Gandolfini). She also meets Marianne (Catherine Keener), who becomes a client and friend. As these relationships deepen, Eva realizes that Albert and Marianne used to be married, and hijinks ensue.

Watching Julia Louis-Dreyfus do Julia Louis-Dreyfus things is always a pleasure, as is seeing Gandolfini (who died shortly before the film was released) play against type. Their unlikely romance is prickly and tentative yet warm and affecting.

The film resonated more with me today than it did a decade ago because I’ve aged into it and can relate better to their lives. I also appreciated seeing my old LA neighborhood in Venice depicted at the time when I left — including a cameo from the dearly departed Brickhouse Kitchen down the street from my old apartment on Brooks Ave.

Holofcener’s keen sense of the characters in this milieu, as well as the wonderful performances of two actors largely known for their TV work, make this a fun and heartfelt world to visit or revisit.

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…Album I Listened To This Week

Wasting Light (2011) — Foo Fighters

Just as Nicole Holofcener’s new movie had me going back into the archives, so too did the Foo Fighters’ new album.

Released earlier this month, But Here We Are is the band’s 11th studio album and first since the death of beloved drummer Taylor Hawkins. It has received almost universal praise and is very much about Dave Grohl’s struggle to reckon with his friend and collaborator’s untimely death.

I listened through it a few times and enjoyed it, but I didn’t become obsessed with it the way I do with music that really grabs me. Maybe I don’t have room in my brain for another batch of Foo Fighters songs or maybe arena rock is not my preferred delivery system for engaging with someone’s grief right now.

So I found myself returning to the band’s 2011 album Wasting Light, preferring to celebrate Hawkins’s life by listening to music he contributed to rather than music he inspired in death.

The album isn’t considered an “essential” one in the Grohl canon. But it came out at a time when I was reckoning with heartbreak, and its punk-infused hard rock with a slick pop sheen helped lift me up when I was down.

The song “Walk” in particular became a personal anthem, and the album as a whole grew into one I could listen to over and over again for days, weeks, even months on end.

More than a decade later, it still is.

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…Documentary I Watched This Week

Moonage Daydream (2022) — Directed by Brett Morgen
Streaming on Max

Growing up in the ’90s, my relationship with David Bowie was primarily through classic rock radio. To my ears, listening to WPLR in New Haven, Bowie was an artist from a bygone era, like Led Zeppelin or the Doors. I knew he was still alive but he wasn’t vital to me. And glam wasn’t my thing.

Having now watched Moonage Daydream, Brett Morgen’s 2022 documentary about Bowie, I have a greater appreciation for the experimental and conceptual artist that he was. He was way more interesting than just a guy in radio rotation alongside Thin Lizzy and Bad Company.

Morgen, who has chronicled the lives and careers of such creative people as Kurt Cobain, the Rolling Stones, and Robert Evans, and also made the seminal ESPN 30 for 30 film June 17th, 1994, works in montage rather than classic documentary form.

Through the use of live performance video, archival interviews, and clips from a century’s worth of avant-garde films (everything from A Trip to the Moon to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to Run, Lola, Run), Morgen presents an engrossing portrait of what it was like to be Bowie without exactly telling the artist’s story.

The result is a kaleidoscopic mix of music, colors, shapes, and cultural references, a fascinating and immersive trip into a one-of-a-kind world. I now only know Bowie’s story marginally better than I did before, but I feel like I understand him and his work a lot better.

(As an aside, my favorite Bowie performance of any kind is his satirical turn mocking Ricky Gervais on Extras.)