Through awe, we once again regain spiritual humility. The current vampire pandemic serves to remind us that we have no true jurisdiction over our bodies, our climate or our very souls. Monsters will always provide the possibility of mystery in our mundane “reality show” lives, hinting at a larger spiritual world; for if there are demons in our midst, there surely must be angels lurking nearby as well. In the vampire we find Eros and Thanatos fused together in archetypal embrace, spiraling through the ages, undying. Forever.
Okay, the Vampires Can Stick Around
This piece by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, about the social conditions that produced the vampire myth, and how it has evolved to meet our current, protean needs, is phenomenal. I need to write a piece at some point about why cultural criticism matters to our understanding of the world around us, but some days I feel like there's precisely no need to do it when you can go read stuff like this:
A Scolding
Dear Aaron Eckhart,
Yup. That's right. That's exactly how you should look right now. And you know why? This is a warning. A significant one. Do you realize you are appearing in a seriously terrible-looking redemptive romantic dramedy with Jennifer Anniston (We're leaving Ms. Anniston out of this, because I cannot be bothered with her career. You should be lucky I'm still concerning myself with you. I get perturbed because I care.)? Where you play a motivational speaker? With a lot of a guilt? That you should be able to handle, because Martin Sheen plays your father and ought to help you through anything?
I understand your dilemma. You and James Marsden should form a club for seemingly-smart guys who also happen to look like they were put on earth to make women go cross-eyed with desire. With faces like yours, you two were always going to be able to waltz into roles and studios were always going to be able to make bank on you. Whether they were good roles or not was always going to be a matter of supreme indifference to those same studios. The two of you started out in different places: Marsden did a lot of the teen-poppy stuff before falling into the dopey-but-body-hugging uniform of Cyclops in the X-Men franchise, while you made your first big splash in nasty indie In the Company of Men. But lately, he's been handling things a little bit better than you, Aaron. He made a smart transition, playing heartthrobs with an undercurrent of dementedness in Enchanted and Hairspray. And he's now he's starring in the new Richard Kelly period thriller, The Box, which will be terrible, or awesome, or both, but will certainly get him a whole bunch of attention and indie cred.
Aaron, you had him smoked last summer. You got your face burned half off, and you went crazy, and you killed people, and you revealed hidden depths acting against Heath Ledger at his most incandescent and crazy and terrifying. Hell, people noticed you were in the same damn frame as Heath Ledger. You built on all this good will you had built up with women on the basis of type-transcending performances in movies like Erin Brockovich and Possession, so that you could get hideously deformed and we'd still want you: the man stayed on once the face was gone. You were a lot of fun in Thank You For Smoking, in part because you weren't afraid to pack a lot of weakness into your cocky lobbyist's chest cavity in the space where his heart used to be. It was easy to forget that you'd spent time doing bland trash like No Reservations because it seemed like the dues you paid to get cast in the other stuff.
So why are you reminding us of these dark blips in your history? I am not encouraged or comforted by the fact that you, and apparently Bridget Moynahan are going to fight aliens in a bombed-out Los Angeles at some point soon. You're going to be in Johnny Depp's next non-Tim Burton project, for the love of all that is holy in acting. You do not need this. I understand that all actors have a director they can't turn down, or a genre they fall into when they need something to do, or think they need something to do. But you had, at least for a while, Neil LaBute, who if not consistently amazing, is serious about his movies. James Marsden is in LaBute's next movie, the probably unnecessary Death at a Funeral. He is moving in on your territory, Aaron. You don't actually need to be in a romance with Jennifer Anniston to pass the time. You like photography? Take some of that hard-earned Batman money and go someplace with really pretty scenery.
I love you, Aaron Eckhart, I really do. And it grieves me to say this, but you are on notice. I expect better.
xo,
Alyssa
Howling at the Moon
Well, Shakira's waxer and trainer deserve themselves some hefty bonuses now that the video for her new single, She Wolf, is done. But I'm not sure whoever choreographed her herky-jerky stripper moves does. And most disappointingly, for a song that uses "lycanthropy" for a rhyme, I'm pretty sure "She Wolf" is going to do precisely nothing to advance a wave of werewolf movies to give us a break from vampires. Not that I have anything against vampires, but if they're going to be whiny for a while, I'm all for them going off, sulking, and coming back with some style. This is how it's done, folks:
Faaaantastic
The trailer for Wes Anderson's The Fantastic Mr. Fox looks bright and engaging, and the array of voice talent in it is pretty impressive. But it leaves me with one question: will the movie focus, as it should, on the food? I don't know if any of my foodie friends remember this, but The Fantastic Mr. Fox is an amazing book about the joy of eating. The three evil farmers in the book are characterized in part by what they live on: donuts stuffed with mashed goose-livers, extremely strong home-brewed apple cider, and three chickens a day--they're defined, in part, by their culinary limitations. The animals who live near the farmers are threatened by starvation when the farmers retaliate against Mr. Fox for stealing from them, and he forms an ingenious scheme to create a cross-species underground community that tunnels into the farmer's storehouses. The descriptions of the food are beautiful, and Roald Dahl really captures what it's like to be able to eat well when you haven't been able to for a while. I imagine it'll be somewhat hard to capture that sensation in the movie--visuals can do only so much, and food appreciation isn't as dramatic as evading maurading steam shovels, unless you're Brad Bird and you're amazing. But whether Wes Anderson intended it or not, I think it's highly appropriate that The Fantastic Mr. Fox should get its movie adaptation in the middle of a reinvigorated national conversation about what we eat, why we eat it, and what we get out of it.
Humor in Black and White
After several weeks of observing, and largely holding back from, infuriating debates about race and gender, I'm totally burned out on the subject. But Josh Eidelson, who I am not particularly capable of saying no to on anything, called me out on the subject of 30 Rock and racial humor, and so I wade, irritable and exhausted, back into the breach. Josh writes:
Let's take this contention: "a lot of the jokes just come down to him being stupid or clowning around, him getting away with what others can’t, and more sympathetic characters having to put up with it." First, Tracy isn't stupid, and I don't think the show portrays him that way. He believes a lot of crazy things, and his knowledge is certainly selective. But he's incredibly clever, whether he's commandeering a boat that isn't his to make it up to his coworkers after he joins the show against their will, designing a pornographic videogame that defeats the whole problem of the Uncanny Valley, or parsing the racial dynamics of the Little League team he's coaching. The scene where he delivers a monologue (around 1:05 in the video) after Liz, assuming he's illiterate, says he can skip work to take reading classes in "Jack-Tor," the fifth episode in the first season is a brilliant and self-aware mockery of Liz's assumptions: ""I can't read! I sign my name with an X! I once tried to make mashed potatoes with laundry detergent! I think I voted for Nader! NADER!" People who tend to assume that Tracy is stupid usually end up looking foolish.
Second, the show has gradually debunked the idea that Tracy gets away with more things than other people do. Whether it's in "Secrets and Lies," where Jenna acts out to get special treatment from Liz, only to find out that she's been getting it all along, or in "Believe In The Stars," where Tracy and Jenna switch racial roles, and require mediation from a teenager a drugged Liz mistakes for Oprah on a plane, they play exactly equal roles in making Liz's life hell. In "Flu Shot," Jenna and Tracy similarly create havoc when they team up to try to help out the ailing crew and end up being horribly condescending, and in "Cutbacks," they cause all sorts of trouble when they become convinced Kenneth is a serial killer. If anything, the show has moved towards treating Jenna and Tracy sort of like they're equally crazy sidekicks, and the third season had a whole bunch of episodes where Tracy is actually a helpful figure, particularly to Kenneth. To the extent that Tracy gets away with stuff like threatening to stab Conan O'Brien in the face, he gets away with it because he's famous, and the way the show satirizes corporate complicity in the absurd behavior of stars is pretty hilarious. I actually can't think of a single episode other than "The Natural Order" in the third season where Tracy inconveniencing someone else is the major subject of a show. In other words, I think Josh's description of the depiction of Tracy just isn't an accurate portrayal of the character's comedic arc, and I'm pretty hard-pressed to understand how someone could come to that reading. And I don't actually think that Tracy's character is the only path into racial humor in the show.
But before I get there, let's take Josh's other big contention, that the episode "The Natural Order" isn't funny. He writes:
"The Natural Order" isn't necessarily the best example of 30 Rock's consistent send-ups of the way we use our identities to get things out of other people. How about the utterly brilliant "Source Awards" episode, which features Wayne Brady as Tracy's business manager exploiting Liz's fear of being perceived as racist to keep him dating her, even though he's incredibly boring? Or "Generalissimo," where Jack tries to make his girlfriend's Puerto Rican grandmother like him by manipulating her favorite telenovela to fulfill her wildest dreams? Or "Cleveland," where Liz's then-boyfriend Floyd loses a promotion to an African-American guy in a wheelchair, which Jack later implies that he is only using to make himself unfireablely diverse?
The internal satires of African-American culture have always struck me as effective, too. The Black Crusaders arc, about a group of powerful black celebrities who enforce conformity among African-American media stars, gets at the self-consciousness both of somewhat sanctimonious stars like Bill Cosby, and ones like Tracy Morgan himself, who don't particularly want to live their lives as exemplars. The "Source Awards," with its send-up of the commercialization of hip-hop culture (Jack tries get an African-American entrepenuer, played by L.L. Cool J., to market a brand of poisonously disgusting champagne) and of beefs within the entertainment community, works well, too:
Then, there are the satires of how white people treat black people, and people of color period. Whether it's Liz turning her neighbor as a terrorist, mispronouncing an Indian-American intern's name, assuming that a black family to whom she gives toys at Christmas is scamming her, irrationally worshiping Oprah, assuming Tracy can't read, dating a guy she can't stand to avoid being thought of as racist, or insulting Tracy's wife's nails to provoke a fight, everything Liz does about race is wrong, no matter how sensitive she tries to seem. Ditto with Jack, who ends up fighting with Condi Rice during their relationship over her behavior at the movies, mismanaging a Little League team because he can't understand the racial and ethnic dynamics between the black and multi-facetedly-Latino players, and misguidedly trying to recruit Tracy as a Republican spokesman.
Not all humor is revolutionary. Not all jokes are going to change the world. But what I think 30 Rock does that is subversive and extremely effective is to puncture the idea that when it comes to race, good intentions will save us, that we can really understand what other people experience, and that race and sex can only be disadvantaging factors for people who are black or female. Is the show universally applicable? Of course not. This is a series about relatively wealthy, privileged people who work in an extraordinarily strange, distorting industry. But in 2009, are those truths that people have a hard time accepting? If the last couple of weeks have taught us anything, I think they've demonstrated that the answer to that question is an emphatic yes.
A lot of 30 Rock’s humor about race (Irish jokes excepted) seem to fall into that category. Edgy, but not really subversive. Based in stereotypes without really upending them. I agree with Alyssa that some of the jokes revolve around Tracy Morgan’s character (Tracy Jordan) trying to maintain a certain Black male image that’s not really him (pretending to be adulterous, or illiterate). But a lot of the jokes just come down to him being stupid or clowning around, him getting away with what others can’t, and more sympathetic characters having to put up with it.I think this is a really crabbed reading of Tracy's character, and a really limited reading of racial humor as a whole on 30 Rock. Tracy is black, sure, and the show is partially about that. But he's also a celebrity, and, as he explains in the pilot, and as demonstrated pretty consistently through the show, he's "straight-up mentally ill!" As a result, the show's racial humor tends to operate on a whole bunch of levels: it's a show about a racial minority in a majority-white workplace, it's a show about black celebrity and the media, it's a show about a guy who is crazy and unreliable but extremely talented, it's a show about white and black people's expectations of each other.
Let's take this contention: "a lot of the jokes just come down to him being stupid or clowning around, him getting away with what others can’t, and more sympathetic characters having to put up with it." First, Tracy isn't stupid, and I don't think the show portrays him that way. He believes a lot of crazy things, and his knowledge is certainly selective. But he's incredibly clever, whether he's commandeering a boat that isn't his to make it up to his coworkers after he joins the show against their will, designing a pornographic videogame that defeats the whole problem of the Uncanny Valley, or parsing the racial dynamics of the Little League team he's coaching. The scene where he delivers a monologue (around 1:05 in the video) after Liz, assuming he's illiterate, says he can skip work to take reading classes in "Jack-Tor," the fifth episode in the first season is a brilliant and self-aware mockery of Liz's assumptions: ""I can't read! I sign my name with an X! I once tried to make mashed potatoes with laundry detergent! I think I voted for Nader! NADER!" People who tend to assume that Tracy is stupid usually end up looking foolish.
Second, the show has gradually debunked the idea that Tracy gets away with more things than other people do. Whether it's in "Secrets and Lies," where Jenna acts out to get special treatment from Liz, only to find out that she's been getting it all along, or in "Believe In The Stars," where Tracy and Jenna switch racial roles, and require mediation from a teenager a drugged Liz mistakes for Oprah on a plane, they play exactly equal roles in making Liz's life hell. In "Flu Shot," Jenna and Tracy similarly create havoc when they team up to try to help out the ailing crew and end up being horribly condescending, and in "Cutbacks," they cause all sorts of trouble when they become convinced Kenneth is a serial killer. If anything, the show has moved towards treating Jenna and Tracy sort of like they're equally crazy sidekicks, and the third season had a whole bunch of episodes where Tracy is actually a helpful figure, particularly to Kenneth. To the extent that Tracy gets away with stuff like threatening to stab Conan O'Brien in the face, he gets away with it because he's famous, and the way the show satirizes corporate complicity in the absurd behavior of stars is pretty hilarious. I actually can't think of a single episode other than "The Natural Order" in the third season where Tracy inconveniencing someone else is the major subject of a show. In other words, I think Josh's description of the depiction of Tracy just isn't an accurate portrayal of the character's comedic arc, and I'm pretty hard-pressed to understand how someone could come to that reading. And I don't actually think that Tracy's character is the only path into racial humor in the show.
But before I get there, let's take Josh's other big contention, that the episode "The Natural Order" isn't funny. He writes:
What are they sending up in this episode? This is not a rhetorical question. Who or what is being satirized here? Is it satirizing people who believe that African-Americans are undisciplined? If so, why contrast that with the belief that hetero women object to being forced to strip clubs? Is it satirizing ostensible liberals who are willing to believe uncomplimentary things about Black people? Satirizing people who push for equal standards for everyone? People who push for special treatment for some people? Black people who “play the race card” to get out of showing up the work? Women who say they want to be treated equally but expect men to do the heavy lifting?Seriously, dude? There is a serious and substantial debate over business functions held at strip clubs (tax-deductable according to the IRS, at least as of 2006. Woo!), whether women should feel obligated to attend, whether it's sexual harrassment, and whether it's a sign of empowerment (or of a pragmatic sucking it up) to be able to go on a guy's-night-out events in order to ingratiate yourself in the workplace. I think mocking the self-deception of that latter motivation is pretty funny. There's a huge difference between equal standards for work performance and rigid equal treatment-and-experience feminism that refuses to acknowledge sexism and different styles, and it's pretty entertaining to watch that carried to slightly absurdist ends. But most importantly, the episode isn't really about race! It's about a famous person doing a non-famous person's work, about someone who's pretty quiet taking on the hard-partying identity that another person works to maintain. And ultimately, it's about the fact that everyone relies on certain kinds of privilege, no matter how vociferously we cast ourselves as disadvantaged.
"The Natural Order" isn't necessarily the best example of 30 Rock's consistent send-ups of the way we use our identities to get things out of other people. How about the utterly brilliant "Source Awards" episode, which features Wayne Brady as Tracy's business manager exploiting Liz's fear of being perceived as racist to keep him dating her, even though he's incredibly boring? Or "Generalissimo," where Jack tries to make his girlfriend's Puerto Rican grandmother like him by manipulating her favorite telenovela to fulfill her wildest dreams? Or "Cleveland," where Liz's then-boyfriend Floyd loses a promotion to an African-American guy in a wheelchair, which Jack later implies that he is only using to make himself unfireablely diverse?
The internal satires of African-American culture have always struck me as effective, too. The Black Crusaders arc, about a group of powerful black celebrities who enforce conformity among African-American media stars, gets at the self-consciousness both of somewhat sanctimonious stars like Bill Cosby, and ones like Tracy Morgan himself, who don't particularly want to live their lives as exemplars. The "Source Awards," with its send-up of the commercialization of hip-hop culture (Jack tries get an African-American entrepenuer, played by L.L. Cool J., to market a brand of poisonously disgusting champagne) and of beefs within the entertainment community, works well, too:
Then, there are the satires of how white people treat black people, and people of color period. Whether it's Liz turning her neighbor as a terrorist, mispronouncing an Indian-American intern's name, assuming that a black family to whom she gives toys at Christmas is scamming her, irrationally worshiping Oprah, assuming Tracy can't read, dating a guy she can't stand to avoid being thought of as racist, or insulting Tracy's wife's nails to provoke a fight, everything Liz does about race is wrong, no matter how sensitive she tries to seem. Ditto with Jack, who ends up fighting with Condi Rice during their relationship over her behavior at the movies, mismanaging a Little League team because he can't understand the racial and ethnic dynamics between the black and multi-facetedly-Latino players, and misguidedly trying to recruit Tracy as a Republican spokesman.
Not all humor is revolutionary. Not all jokes are going to change the world. But what I think 30 Rock does that is subversive and extremely effective is to puncture the idea that when it comes to race, good intentions will save us, that we can really understand what other people experience, and that race and sex can only be disadvantaging factors for people who are black or female. Is the show universally applicable? Of course not. This is a series about relatively wealthy, privileged people who work in an extraordinarily strange, distorting industry. But in 2009, are those truths that people have a hard time accepting? If the last couple of weeks have taught us anything, I think they've demonstrated that the answer to that question is an emphatic yes.
Interpreting England
I like Michael Sheen, a lot, ill-advised misadventures into vampire v. werewolf franchises entirely aside, and I am VERY excited for his latest exercise in explaining Britain to Americans, the sports flick The Damned United:
Anything with Sheen, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Spall, and lots of sarcasm sounds good to me. But I'm also glad that Sheen is, to a certain extent, taking over for Hugh Grant as the Dude With An Accent, and that he's actually making movies about the Country From Whence His Accent Came, instead of simply deploying it, along with dimples and hair gel as another weapon in his arsenal. Don't get me wrong--I do like Hugh Grant, and I think he's only become more appealing as an actor as he's settled into his age a bit. But I also really like England, the result of a long-term pen pal from just outside of Manchester who taught me a lot about attitudes towards royalty, holidays overseas, and how to drink beer on New Year's Eve, and I don't actually think Grant's much of an ambassador for the country, dorky-booty-dancing Prime Minister role and all. That role was an American dream of Englishness: hot, and sensitive, and a little bit more assertive than stereotypes suggest the Brits actually are.
Sheen's pugnacious rather than really smooth, and much like John Simm (be still my heart) he looks like a real human being. The Damned United looks like a classic, fun coach-centered sports movie, but with all the great weird touches about class, and money, and hell, Ali calling out Brian Clough for a touch of cross-the-pond bravado that make it English (the movie is a heavily fictionalized account of real events). The more movies like this, or The Queen make it over here, the happier I am. It can only be good for the Special Relationship for us to watch and enjoy movies about, and containing, actual Britons (okay, and Welshmen). Whether it's the travails of coal miners under Margaret Thatcher, gay teenagers in love, or newsmen on the brink, the Brits manage to do a lot of things sincerely and well that we manage to phony up in our attempts or reinterpretations. It's great to see Sheen part of that latest charge, and I can only hope that folks like Simm and Philip Glenister will follow him over.
And All the Pieces Matter
I just finished reading Mystic River, and it turns out, I was wrong about who the murderer is. Totally wrong. I handed my nose over to Dennis Lehane and he lead me all over the place by it. Doesn't mean I didn't enjoy the experience. But it reinforced a feeling I've had over the past couple of days, as the tape of Lucia Whelan's 911 call has been released, and as she had her press conference today: we never know the whole truth about anything.
Consider the facts. Whelan made the call on behalf of an elderly neighbor. She did not mention race in the call. She was clear and explicit about what she observed, as well as the possible ambiguities in this situation. Not only did a huge number of commentators, many of them with very prominent platforms, not know any of these facts before they used those platforms to vilify Whelan a racist, but they did not know, and did not consider, the possibility that any of these facts existed.
It's easy to go with the convenient story, in literature and in life. It's easy for Jimmy Marcus to decide, that because Dave Boyle had blood on his clothes, and because he lied about why he had blood on his clothes, that Dave killed Jimmy's daughter Katie. It doesn't seem logical that he would be wrong, it seems totally illogical that there would be another murder in that same area, in that same night. But just because it's hard to fathom doesn't make it untrue. It's easy for people who know nothing about the situation, and know nothing about Lucia Whelan, and assume the worst about people, to assume that the part of the story that involves her is about racial profiling. But just because it an easy narrative doesn't make it true. There is always more to be known. And people suffer when we decide we don't need to know it, or forget that there is more.
Consider the facts. Whelan made the call on behalf of an elderly neighbor. She did not mention race in the call. She was clear and explicit about what she observed, as well as the possible ambiguities in this situation. Not only did a huge number of commentators, many of them with very prominent platforms, not know any of these facts before they used those platforms to vilify Whelan a racist, but they did not know, and did not consider, the possibility that any of these facts existed.
It's easy to go with the convenient story, in literature and in life.
Hooked
It's too bad, because I think this is a really interesting technical question. After finishing Emma on Monday and being disappointed, I dived into Dennis Lehane's Mystic River, in part because with Martin Scorcese pursuing his obsession with Leonardo DiCaprio as a Boston cop to the point of making a mental-institutions-with-ghosts-and-bad-accents horror movie I figured I should read the Lehane stuff that got made into good movies first; in part because I spent a bunch of my childhood living outside of Boston and had to make up for this gap in my knowledge; and in part because I wanted to read about something that is as far as possible from marriage rituals and the British class system. I'm zipping through the book, and a short list of things is making it work for me. First the plot is economical, and ruthlessly efficient. I'm pretty sure I know who did the murder, but I am absolutely desperate to get there and see for sure. Second, Lehane is not necessarily the Greatest Prose Stylist of our, or his, or anybody's generation, but he manages to get in a very good paragraph, sentence, or image often enough, that I'm picking through the text for those moments like a magpie. Third, the character sketches are deft, and the characters and plot are serving each other extremely well right now.
Each of those elements opens up a range of possible questions about how we read, and what we want out of reading, and what makes us finish books. Do women really read romance novels because they like to be narcotized by the formulas of romance? Can you write a good mystery novel if you know who the killer is essentially from the beginning? How much can a novel hinge on a character without growth or substantial plot? What makes Don Delillo's descriptions of what a nun sees when she looks at graffiti in Underworld so compelling and strange? Can plot conquer frequent use of cliche so that a book emerges triumphant? Whatever your questions are, the point is that it is possible to analyze what makes a book something readers can't leave alone, and Bachner doesn't do it!
Instead, she complains a lot about why publishers pick things she doesn't think are very wonderful for publication, and why authors whose voices she likes a lot have more trouble getting published. And in doing so, she ends up sounding like a snob. She writes about people knuckling under to "doctrinal pressure," and about gorgeous and unique voices, and about sketches and various characters, and "undeniable, electric-orange additive[s]." But mostly what her essay is about is the fact that she seems annoyed that publishers don't share her tastes:
A writer friend, whose brilliant first novel was rejected by 68 agents before she learned that sending a brilliant novel to American agents is not a good way to get published, told me she is certain that if Jean Genet or Julio Cortazar were debut authors in America today, they would never get published. Fine, I can understand how those of us who like edgy, explosive, poetic, radical, plotless work are in the minority of the market...Sometimes, I wish it was all predictable. I wish that I could reliably pick out books that would be impossible to put down, but that weren't as trashy and gross as nacho cheese-flavored Doritos. And I wish that I could also reliably pick out books that could be dipped into and dipped out of, like Drift, to carry me through summer days lying around on the High Line or sleeping in the grass along the Hudson. Then again, maybe wanting that predictability is exactly the problem. Maybe some horrible, Upper East Side dwelling literary agent who tries too hard to look like Joyce Carol Oates is not the reason that Victoria Patterson had to endure "endless rejections." Maybe I'm the reason!
Perhaps! There is an interesting argument to be made here, about the conflict between plot and voice (the word "plot" appears not once in Bachner's essay, nor does "pace". "Voice" shows up 4 times. "Addictive" in various forms 4 times. Same with "Dorito" in the singular and plural.) Bachner does not make it. Instead, it seems, she likes short stories that she feels compelled to mull over, rich characterizations, stuff that's "trippy" and complex. And all of that's dandy! But maybe she has a hard time finding books she can really rip through because she prefers books that are elliptical and invite revisiting. Again, dandy! I read a lot of stuff that's just gorgeous prose, and revisit a lot of passages, because I need the palate-cleansing when I write. But none of this is an argument about what makes a book compelling, or why compelling books with certain qualities don't get published, both of which are worthy subjects for an essay. Instead, Elizabeth Bachner is annoyed because she likes books that aren't necessarily conducive to fast reading, but she wishes she could find more books that were, but she doesn't want to read trash, and she's annoyed that more publishers aren't publishing the books she likes in the first place. Which are the ones that invite contemplative reading.
Ben Yagoda wrote an entire, fantastic, book about the intangibles that make up an author's voice and make writing worth reading. It's called The Sound on the Page, and it works partly because it concludes that voice is hard to develop in a systematic way because it's nearly impossible to define and explain. I think an essay by Elizabeth Bachner on why publishers should focus more on voice than plot, maybe, would be fascinating. But this essay isn't. To swipe her metaphors, it's not Doritos, and it's not fresh bread with pecornio, or whatever. It's a very complicated, very fancy meal, that took hours to make, and a long time to eat, and ends up not tasting like anything.
Soundtracks to the Day
So, I'm a little obsessed with James Gandolfini right now. I really loved him in In The Loop (that piece is coming out, I swear, next week), and I'm even tempted to watch Lonely Hearts if only to see how Tony Soprano looks in a detective's suit. For most people, the Gandolfini love begins with the man, the bathrobe, the driveway, the newspaper. For me, the affair began with Romance & Cigarettes, the completely insane 2005 musical written and directed by John Turturro. Gandolfini plays a working-class dude named Nick Murder (NICK MURDER!), who, despite the fact that he is married to Susan Sarandon, is sneaking around with Kate Winslet. All of this, while awesome is entirely beside the point, which is this: when moved by strong emotion, the characters burst into pop songs:
It's really great. All the singing provides a tender and rough vision of masculinity. Mary Louise Parker looks seriously badass playing an electric guitar. The scene with Sarandon singing "Piece of My Heart" in her church choir, with Eddie Izzard as the choir director, and coming full circle on her Rocky Horror performance, is worth the price of a rental, or your monthly Netflix fee.
And it brings me, in a roundabout way, to Glee. As someone who can't sing a lick, but spent all four years of high school immersed in a competitive activity that was obsessive, cult-like, and sort of incomprehensible to the outside world, I was perfectly primed to fall all over the pilot, which aired this spring, and includes all sort of marvelously surreal details, including Jane Lynch as a maniacal cheerleading coach hollering "You think this is hard? I'm living with Hepatitis, that's hard!" at her squad; the delightfully alien-eyed Jayma Mays, badly used in Ugly Betty, as a charming germophobe; a mercenary principal; and of course, white-bread Ohio teenagers mugging in fifties outfits as they sing a choral arrangement of Amy Winehouse's "Rehab." Even if you haven't seen the Glee pilot, or even weren't aware of its existence, you must have noticed the resurgence of "Don't Stop Believing" as a summer song, driven by the infectious rendition that closes that episode.
And now, it appears that they're going the Romance & Cigarettes route:
I think this will make the show or ruin it. One of the reasons the singing worked in Romance & Cigarettes was that the characters weren't singers, and so the singing added a depth of emotion to their performances. James Gandolfini seems genuinely melancholy singing "A Man Without Love" or wearied doing "Red-Headed Woman." Glee's already got the choir's performances as a proxy for the characters' emotions, so it might be overkill. It would be too bad if the songs traded off with some of the other, loopier characters and plot developments that the pilot started to develop, since I think it would be good for Fox to do a show with a sense of irony and humor about itself. And I do worry that the vocal styles they'll choose will enhance, rather than play against the high-school archetypes they've chosen: the overachieving smart girl, the soulful football player, the Marc Jacobs-wearing coded-gay kid, the guy in the wheelchair...well, actually, other than being bullied, he's not much of stereotype, and he plays a mean electric guitar. But you get the point.
Starting out by releasing a video of the black female student singing a Mary-J-Blige-inflected he-done-me-wrong number furthers my concern. But I do like the fact that her heartbreak is inspired by the (white) kid the first episode implies is gay, and that she gets to turn the annoying and anemic cheerleaders who are washing cars into her backup dancers. And also, her performance is terrific: great voice, lived in, mature without seeming too old for high school. I think there's no denying that Glee's got the makings of great fun in it. If it manages to mix up high-school types in some new and fresh ways, that'll be a side bonus.
Cherish Is the Word
Emily Nussbaum's meditation on Madonna in New York is amazing. Especially the lists:
She seemed to shoot out new selves every six months—from Jellybean Benitez Madonna to Madonna of the Boy Toy Belt, Unshaved Leaked Photos Madonna, Madonna masturbating on a wedding cake, bouncing beside the waves in “Cherish,” dancing with the little boy in “Open Your Heart,” Who’s That Girl Eyebrows Madonna, Ideal Brunette Madonna (my favorite) saving Black Jesus in that incredible slip, Banned by the Pope! Madonna, “Vogue” Madonna, Fritz Lang Madonna, Wrapped-Plastic Sex-Book Madonna, Shame-Free BDSM Madonna, Sandra Bernhard–BFF Madonna, Bratty Letterman-Taunting Madonna, Self-Mocking Wayne’s World Madonna, the Madonna Who Ate Your Exotic Culture (“Vogue,” “Rain,” “La Isla Bonita”), Abused Sean Penn Madonna of the Helicopters, Contrarian I’m Gonna Keep My Baby Teen-Slut Madonna, Secretly Pregnant While Filming Evita Madonna, Underappreciated Dick Tracy/Sondheim Madonna, Water-Bottle-Fellating Truth or Dare Madonna (with Warren Beatty accessory), Bad Actress Madonna (Wax-Coated/Mamet), Momma Madonna, Kabbalah Esther, British Madge, and on and on. For years, Madonna felt like a slippery, elegant key to all feminine mythologies, a shape-shifter inspiring to any young girl (or anyone) who felt her shape shifting.Talk about empathy and art! Nussbaum thinks her discomfort with Madonna comes in part from the evolution of the artist's body, her seemingly iron will to hold back time no matter the physical cost. It doesn't matter if you look terrifying as long as you don't look old.
My disenchantment with Madonna springs from a similar well, but flows in a very different direction. I remember my senior year of college, I was driving up to Northern Connecticut to interview a famous gay rights activist who I was very intimidated by. I'd rented a car for the first time under slightly shady circumstances, and I was terrified that I was going to crash it. I was afraid I was going to get lost and be late. And because of all of these things, I left New Haven in a nervous sweat, sticking the Immaculate Collection in the CD player to keep me company. It took a long time, but by the time I reached the top of a very steep, very bare hill overlooking a very cold New England lake with "Cherish" turned up very loud, I felt like I was going to be okay. How can you not listen to a declaration like "Give me faith / Give me joy / My boy / I will always cherish you" and not end up happy?
I feel like that optimism, or not just optimism, blazing joy is missing from Madonna's later work. Maybe that's inevitable. I've been told we don't love the same way once we get older. It's hard to believe the world has vastly more to offer when you're on the cover of Vanity Fair holding the entire world. There's a huge difference between holding onto your spot on the pinnacle of the entertainment industry and struggling to make it up there. The former task is a grim one. The latter might be hard, and scary, and mean there are, you know, choices and privations and risks. But I imagine it's a lot more fun. And it's certainly more fun to listen to.
Staying Alive
Ezra points out that the failure to learn from your art is particularly tragic when life and death are on the line, as they are with David Foster Wallace. I feel somewhat uncomfortable with the claim that folks who act, make music, or write, or who otherwise create beautiful things for the benefit for the rest of us should become better people because they create those things. Who am I to lecture someone who can do something that seems impossibly hard to me--hell, I can't even read music--about how their work should interact with their efforts at self-improvement, or even to determine that they need to self-improve at all?
But I've always thought that sympathy was one of the gifts of art, and it's certainly one of the reasons I struggle forward with fiction, even though I'm not very good at that. It's a chance to absorb yourself in what you imagine someone else's life is like, to disappear from your own for a while and emerge a little disoriented and refreshed. Certainly, the process of immersing yourself in someone else's character isn't inherently good for you: it doesn't sound like Heath Ledger's experience as the Joker was particularly beneficial to his mental health at what sounds like a very difficult time. David Foster Wallace seems to have spent his career struggling with a contention that he wasn't entirely convinced is true, that life is worth living. But he could create the art he did because he understood both sides of that particular debate.
I don't understandhow you can create a good performance or good art in general without at least some level of understanding the person you're willing into being or becoming. Someone like Meryl Streep has always seemed serene and at peace to me, she's been married for more than 30 years, has four children, and is never in the news for anything related to her personal life. I've always suspected that serenity comes from the same core understanding that makes her an astonishing actress. She understands other people in a way that few of us will ever be able to, even if the people she understands aren't actually real.
Great Expectations
Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Perhaps the best single scene in Pride and Prejudice is when Lizzy smacks down Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who has showed up at the Bennet family to declare that it will be entirely unacceptable for Lizzy to marry her nephew (Mr. Darcy). Being the drama queen that she is, Lady Catherine moans about pollution of the shades of Pemberley (Darcy's estate), and Lizzy mounts up and declares "He is a gentleman; I am a gentleman's daughter; so far we are equal." It feels like a uniquely modern moment: Darcy is related to nobility, Lizzy's family is in danger of losing their home, and she's asserting their right to love each other, if they like. But the truth is, it's not revolutionary: Lizzy's argument ultimately rests on a somewhat more flexible definition of societal rank than Lady Catherine's, but it rests on the idea that people of the same social rank are a match in marriage all the same.
That idea is expressed much more aggressively in Emma. (SPOILERS, BUT ONLY IF YOU'VE NEVER SEEN CLUELESS.) Despite Emma's devotion to her friend, Harriet Smith, throughout the novel, she ends up extremely relieved that none of her efforts to set up Harriet with various men work out when she learns that Harriet is illegitimate, because of course such illegitimacy would ruin a man who might be more appropriately paired with someone else. Mr. Elton, who behaves poorly, ends up punished by marriage to a woman who is as precisely boorish as he once acted. Emma doesn't particularly do anything to win over Mr. Knightley except listen to his criticism without arguing and have an appropriate social status.
Ultimately, I can't fault Jane Austen for writing social scenarios that essentially accord to the prejudices and norms of her time. The levels of education, the social situations, the chances for travel and study available to people of different social classes were different when she was growing up and writing. Those things do contribute to the success or failure of a marriage; they aren't irrelevant, even today. But fortunately, we have progressed to a point where we think it's a problem if folks don't get at least the same initial educational opportunities, and where we can see things like the marital status of people's parents as precisely as arbitrary as such factors are in determining someone's intelligence and moral character. Still, though, I miss the flash and the fire of Elizabeth Bennet declaring her independence and willingness to marry in the face of hilariously exaggerated disapproval. A girl who ends moving her husband into her house, and letting chance take care of the social and moral messes she's made behind her is no real substitute.
At Ease
Bunmi Oloruntoba is correct that io9's District 9 review has quieted the concerns I had for the movie, and made me even more excited to see it. Also, Bunmi's blog, A Bombastic Element, is great, touching on everything from teaching self-defense to elderly Kenyan women to photography in South Africa. Check it out.
Yes, Please
Dennis Leary:
"I don't want to see a 'Sopranos' movie," he said. "If we're going to do a 'Rescue Me' movie, and I joked about this a couple of years ago when they brought it up … and I said, 'What if we do a "Rescue Me"movie, so it's the "Rescue Me" cast, but they're not firefighters and it's a zombie movie.' And they were like, 'What?' And I was like: 'How cool would that be? It's the 'Rescue Me' cast, but it's a zombie movie.' And they were like, 'No.' And I was like, 'Well, that's the only way I'm doing it.' Like 'Shaun of the Dead,' like a funny, real scary zombie movie. … They didn't go for it."
Bad Girls
Leee asked a question a couple of days ago that I've been turning over in my mind over the weekend. I'm not sure I entirely have an answer, but I want to try to it on, because I have to admit that it floored me a bit, and I think being brought up short like that is a good thing. Leee asked:
Alyssa, since you're bringing up Jane Tennison, I was wondering if feel that "complex" characters, female and otherwise, are really kind of reductive vehicles that are driven by pop-psychology traumas, manifested in boozing and sleeping around, and if so, if there's a misogynistic element to such female characters? Or is this just a deficit in creative imagination?See my dilemma? I think there are a couple of categories of "complex" female characters who drink or have a lot of sex.
There is, undoubtedly, a classic collection of bad girl performances, where writers, directors, and actresses treat damage, or even simple female anger (an emotion the movies seem terrified of, and thus intrigued by) as if it's inherently interesting. Teen movies tend to be particularly big sinners on this score. I think it's deeply uncreative when directors use alcohol abuse as a way to signal that a character is a bad person, as they do with the evil art-class girls (a badly abused Clea Duvall) in She's All That, or as a sign of privileged discontent, as in Crazy/Beautiful. I've always found Pretty Woman deeply annoying both for its wholly inadequate explorations of the factors that get women into prostitution and its quick-fix approach to getting them out. And it's extremely frustrating that a career-enhancing move for women is frequently to ship them off to play either a hooker, like Maggie Gyllenhaal in Sherrybaby, or a drunk, like Sandra Bullock in 28 Days. I also think it's incredibly annoying when women's alcoholism or promiscuity is used for cheap laughs: the parade of drunk sluts in The 40-Year-Old Virgin is an incredibly weak note in an otherwise sensitively drawn, if raunchy, comedy, and I particularly found the treatment of Elizabeth Banks' character as a sexually terrifying freak who must have something wrong with her offensive. In other words, I think portrayals of complicated women who abuse alcohol, or engage in prostitution, or who have a lot of sex the movies say they'll surely regret later are sexist and uncreative when "acting out" is the simplest way the filmmakers can find to convey inner turmoil, or as lazy humor in the place of actual jokes, when real problems become mere devices.
On the other hand, there are women who drink, who use drugs, who have sex without emotional attachment, and excluding portrayals of those things from the movies would further dehydrate an already arid selection of roles for accomplished female actresses.
Jane Tennison is a great character because primary to the facts that she drinks too much, is not always respectful of her sexual partners' and boyfriends' emotions, and has an abortion, is that she is navigating a minefield of workplace sexism, racism in London, and the conflicts between emotion and rationality that are the hallmark of good police procedurals. Even simple things like what she'll be called by the cops she's overseeing is something the writers of Prime Suspect handle in a deft and pointed way. "My voice suddenly got lower, has it?" Tennison snaps at a cop (later to become an ally), who persists in calling her "sir" or "ma'am" against her wishes. "Maybe my knickers are too tight. Listen, I like to be called Governor or The Boss. I don't like Ma'am - I'm not the bloody Queen. So take your pick." Her alcoholism and her sex life are part of this tapestry, and the show deals with them that way: Jane Tennison is a talented and emotional detective who happens to drink too much, and who has an abortion at one point, not an exploration of abortion or alcoholism with police work as the Lifetime Movie Device of the Week. And that's the way life usually is: the hard stuff is part of life, not the sum total of it.
And then, sometimes it is. I have an incredibly hard time watching the Battlestar Galactica episode "Scar," because I find the image of Starbuck falling apart and becoming not just a pilot who drinks too much, but a simple drunk almost unbearable. But I think it's a brilliant episode because it illustrates the factors that have contributed to her downward spiral, without wrapping them up in a neat redemption narrative. Not everyone gets effectively rehabbed, or, um, gets to have a destiny involving the salvation of humanity and reincarnation, and it's useful to demonstrate consequences, even if they come in the form of surrendering a flight ace title rather than passing out in an alley. And alcoholism, drug abuse, and sex can be interesting and redemptive even if they're not a manifestation of a larger trauma, or part of a larger character sketch. I haven't watched The People v. Larry Flynt for years, but I remember how gorgeous Courtney Love's portrayal of Althea Flynt was, as a picture of someone just kind of slipping away (incidentally that, and Lindsay Lohan's performance in Mean Girls rank as the two roles I most wish the actresses who took them learned life lessons from.).
I guess in art as in life, I'm not much interested in people who are acting out. I am interested in talented policewomen, dedicated fighter pilots, stubborn businesswomen. I'm interested in who they sleep with, what substances they ingest, and in what amount, because that is part of who they are. I'm not a particularly prissy girl, and I'm not particularly interested in sitting in a movie theater watching get good girls get all the wonderful things they theoretically deserve. Enough with Rachel McAdams being virtuous. I'd rather see a gorgeous, single, determined middle-aged woman, who also happens to be a drunk, surmount racism against African immigrants in London to solve a vicious murder. If Sandra Bullock has to go to rehab a couple of times to get Helen Mirren on screen as Jane Tennison, I can live with that.
Reality-Based Apartment Community
Despite my efforts to stay far away from the cast of latest edition of the Real World, filming here in Washington, DC, at least some of them showed up at the pool at my apartment building today. And I can tell you, dear readers, that if what Americans want is nice-looking tanned girls in bright pink bikinis chatting in the shallow end with non-descript dudes in non-descript swim trunks, a fresh supply of same is under production.
Summerweight
Sadly, I can't embed it, but the Vistoso Bosses' "Delirious" is pretty, catchy summer pop, and the second song I've heard in recent months that caught my attention with a combination of featherweight sung vocals, a rap section, and a 1950's video aesthetic. For the Vistoso Bosses, it's school buses, full skirts, hair bows, saddle shoes and amusement parts. For Lil' Mama, it's a teen version of a club:
"Truly in Love" was released for Valentine's Day, but it's got the air of a summer jam all the way, something that, parenthetically, gives me further cause for concern about how her career is being handled. Girl is seriously talented. Don't believe me? Don't waste your time with the original, but watch her demolish the criminally untalented Avril Lavigne in this remix of "Girlfriend." The "Biggie / Mama / B-R-double-O-klyn drama" line at the end of her first verse is priceless. And yet her first album sank like a stone despite the undeniable likability of "Lip Gloss," maybe because it was poorly promoted, maybe because she ended up doing some more serious stuff about teen pregnancy or a weirdly aggressive collaboration with Chris Brown and T-Pain that doesn't really suit her exuberance. Anyway, I hope something works out for her. I'm really invested in the outcome of the in-song conversation between pop and hip-hop, and I think Lil' Mama could be a really fun part of that.
Thanks, Scott E!
Who for the edification of us all, answers this query:
Not only have I seen the Da Vinci's Inquest, but I voted for the mayor the show was based on!I'll be asking you guys a lot of questions along those lines. As I've said, I'm a late bloomer when it comes to pop culture, and while I've dived in deep and fast since the days when after-school television and Top 40 seemed like portals into a vast new universe, I'm the first to admit there's a lot I don't know. So I need you all, and people like the good folks at Post Bourgie to set me straight and help me along the way.
What should Americans know about the show? It took a while--too long--in the first season to find its footing and early on it's kind of bad. But then it gets pretty good. Nicholas Campbell is a pleasure to watch, and if you like shows that try to walk a line between crime procedurals and character-driven dramas, then you'd probably enjoy it.
The Ubiquitous Miffy
I was flipping through the gallery that accompanies this Times article on the whimsical trend in public art, when I came across a sculpture that I'd seen the last time I was in New York of Miffy, the irresistible children's-story rabbit created by Dutch artist Dick Bruna. As a child, a family friend gave me a Miffy stuffed animal, named Nijntje, so I'm something of a partisan. But I'm not alone. In his small rabbit, Bruna seemed to have cracked some sort of mysterious international code for cute, to the extent that I came across this, clearly bootlegged, image during a long walk in Shanghai last year:
I really do love how exceedingly simple graphic design can get lodged somewhere in our brains, or perhaps more accurately, can hit at something that was already there. Hello Kitty may have a wider following, and Bruna himself believes that she's a ripoff of Miffy. But Miffy was there first. And because, while she's popular, Miffy doesn't have quite the obsessive brand power that Hello Kitty does, she's free to pop up everywhere, to represent cuteness and approachability in a huge array of circumstances--and to a large number of ends, commercial and otherwise.
The Art of Storytelling
The last time I blitzed through the archives of a long-running webcomic, it was 2004, I had strep throat and a fever so high I couldn't walk to the drug store for my prescriptions, and there were a lot fewer Questionable Content strips in the archive. I've checked out plenty of strips since then, but nothing else really seemed to stick, until this week when Danielle Corsetto, the creator of Girls With Slingshots, guested on QC (text not entirely SFW) and I moseyed on over to check her out. Now, GWS got me hooked not least because Hazel, the main character, feels slightly like someone downloaded my brain, added two tablespoons of bitterness and a teaspoon of geographical dislocation, flat-ironed me, and stuck me up in pixels (although I look a lot more like another character in the strip, I'll leave that for me to know and you to speculate about, at least until I get an author photo or illustration up here up here). But Corsetto's strip also strikes me as one that illustrates one of the signal strengths of webcomics: having your archive present and free when someone is reading the strip is a huge advantage.
It's the exceedingly rare print comic that can and does, like Doonesbury, have an extremely large, rotating cast of characters, and go deep into very disparate plot threads involving them without losing momentum or audience. In part that's because continuity's a lot easier when you just have to follow around, say, Spiderman, and whatever nefarious/mutated/insane industrialist/scientist/rival journalist is plotting to rob the bank/blow up town/get handsy with Mary Jane at any given moment. Sometimes tracing the adventures of one person is merely convenient, other times, that lead character is the access point for a vast interior world (see Calvin or Jeremy Duncan; as an aside, I can never read Zits without feeling like Jeremy is Calvin grown up). In the strips with larger casts, those casts and strips work because the characters grew over time and so did their universes. Alex Doonesbury would never have worked in the first place if we didn't know Mike so well. Ditto with the less sophisticated For Better or For Worse.
The web makes it much easier to expand a cast much more quickly. When readers can sit down and read through 700-odd strips in a couple of concentrated hours, you can have plots that are much more novelistic, and much bigger sets of characters. Readers can check back in, a cast page is conveniently there to pop open in another tab, etc. I realize saying all of this may seem obvious in an age when we're all used to having everything accessible, all of the time. And even the internet can't change the way we read entirely. Once you've read those archives in a novel-like chunk, we're all still stuck hitting refresh until our favorite artist posts the next day's strip, and get us another four or five panels further in plot development. Sometimes, when you're absolutely desperate to know what's going to happen, you get hit with a talking robot, or an Irish cactus, and that's okay. It teaches us patience, and unless it happens too often, it keeps us coming back. But changing the way we get introduced to comics can get us hooked more quickly, and makes us much more knowledgeable readers. And that can free up the artists to do more sophisticated storylines, and to keep around more characters for longer. So go do your part, people. Or am I going to have be stuck reading yet another strip in which Curtis woos Michelle / comments on ladies' church crowns / avoids Chutney? (I REALLY miss the glory days of The Boondocks.)
Wish Fulfillment
Robert Fulford seems a bit too convinced of the originality of his argument about the lifecycles of television shows, but he's made me very happy simply by conveying the information that there does, in fact, exist a show focused on a righteous coroner, who eventually becomes mayor of his town in a spin-off.
Perhaps this makes me notably morbid, but I do think contemporary television has a striking number of terrific coroners and medical examiners playing supporting roles: Elizabeth Rodgers on Law & Order, Dr. Donald Mallard on NCIS, the team as a whole on Bones, which before it jumped the shark, perhaps fatefully, in last season's finale, was my most substantial guilty pleasure. And I think forensic science is fascinating, the kind of thing I would never in a million years be comfortable doing, but would love to understand in greater detail. I'm less interested in the cops who confront people with the Fateful DNA or the Critical Hair than in the people who discover bacteria in the blood, or a telltale bruise. The idea that our bodies speak after we're gone is sort of remarkable to me. I am the person who would watch shows based on every single one of Mary Roach's sources for her book on cadavers, Stiff (which is completely uproarious and compassionate. I read it on the plane between Tokyo and Beijing last year, and I think I terrified everyone by crying with laughter while reading a book with a dead person on the cover). So has anyone's seen Da Vinci's Inquest? Any thoughts?
Geek Heaven
I've been a huge proponent of a Rogue Squadron movie for years! I deserve this t-shirt! Or this one! Or any of these! (On a side note, the Rebel Alliance is clearly the ragtag military-political movement to be with, morally, but Imperial battle armor does lend itself nicely to apparel design. I can't decide if I think the Galactic Empire or the Rebels' logo is better. I sort of suspect the best graphic designers in the galaxy mostly hung out on Coruscant.)
(H/T: io9)
(H/T: io9)
On Feeling Really Old
One of the reasons I'm as obsessed with pop culture as I am is that I grew up somewhat isolated from it. My didn't have a television for much of my childhood, so I missed things like Saved by the Bell and The Simpsons almost entirely (It made Turn Off the TV Week sooooo much easier. My sister and I smoked that contest like it wasn't no thang [query: is there a past form of "ain't"? plural?]. ) I was only vaguely aware of who Kurt Cobain was when he died, thanks to the ministrations of a savvy older cousin, who convinced me that Axl Rose was a permanent jerk for being mean to Courtney Love, and who sided with me in defending Tonya Harding against the deeply annoying Nancy Kerrigan. I was kind of a strange little girl. My parents have a great collection of early Beatles and Beach Boys records, which I loved so much I broke the record player by jumping up and down next to it, and I listed to cassettes of the same artists until I wore them out. Moving to Massachusetts was a revelation for me, in part because it marked the time when I started watching Ghostwriter regularly, and a few years later, stumbled onto the local KISS station and became obsessively devoted to Top 40 countdowns. "Unbreak My Heart" was a revelation. In addition to being strange, I was a cultural late bloomer.
So this New York Times piece on the eerie surge of premature pop culture nostalgia by people my age succeeds not in kindling any particular warm fuzzies for me, but in making me feel, at 24, old AND out of it. That said, I'm willing to support anything that promotes Harry and the Potters:
So this New York Times piece on the eerie surge of premature pop culture nostalgia by people my age succeeds not in kindling any particular warm fuzzies for me, but in making me feel, at 24, old AND out of it. That said, I'm willing to support anything that promotes Harry and the Potters:
What I Do Is Me
I swear I read things written by people not named Ta-Nehisi, but his account of a day that made him awed and unsettled about what he's doing with his life made me think quite a bit, particularly this paragraph:
My experience has been, as Daniel Strauss says, that people become artists, or in the case of journalists, artisans (I wish that term hadn't fallen into disuse. It lends a level of precision to the space between the novel and the corporate report.) because they can't stop doing whatever it is they love: write, paint, sing, compose, act, etc. And I think that inability to stop comes from a match between talent and desire. I write much better than I draw, paint or collage, despite the classes I've taken in the latter disciplines, and I keep writing because it's the way I'm best capable of expressing the ideas and capturing some of the beauty I was, um, less than capable of capturing through art.
Something in me means that I'm not capable of getting beyond luridly-shaded caricatures of St. Basil's cathedral, or women with leaves on their heads (not a lot of visual imagination, sadly) when I draw or paint, but I can write a killer kicker line on a piece about teenaged comic book characters. And I keep doing writing because there have been moments in my life--senior year of high school, most of 2005, and the last five months, when I've felt like I have suddenly understood certain things about writing with an intense sharpness. In between, there have been vast, frustrating plateaus, and there have certainly been times when I thought about quitting, or when I didn't know that what I was headed towards was a career in writing at all. Ray Bradbury describes the kind of moment I'm talking about (although his revelations, and his results happen on a level I can't even imagine inhabiting) in Zen in the Art of Writing:
Bradbury is a huge fan of this poem, by Gerard Manley Hopkins, as am I:
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves - goes itself, myself it speaks and spells,
Crying "What I do is me: for that I came."
I say more, the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is -
Christ - for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.
I think that's about as good and concise a push to go big or go home on what you love, and what you get satisfaction from as you can find.
Something that's been amazing for me over the past seven or eight years is watching my friend Kat Harris become the musical theater artist she is today. We've lived in the same neighborhood since sixth grade, and we've been friends long enough that we knew each other when neither of us had an clue what we were good at, or what we wanted to do. She remembers me when I knew basically nothing about popular music, or movies, or how to find a seat in a middle-school cafeteria, and I remember her when she was seriously into Metallica, and was, like me, a debater. And somewhere in college, musical theater just clicked for Kat. I remember with startling clarity the way loving theater illuminated her, and how hard she worked to get into the Musical Theater Writing program at Tisch, and how hard she worked once she was in the program. But all that work wouldnt' have gotten her anywhere if she hadn't had an eye for subject matter and an ear for words. Her work is beginning to be performed, and singers are reaching out to her for pieces. I'm excited by the prospect of other people getting to experience her work, but I'm also excited by the constant sight of Kat become who she is through her art.
In my mind there is no gift--there is a considerable amount of labor, but I don't have much interest in talking about talent. There are a lot of talented niggers on the corner, in jail, under early tombstones. That's what my mother used to say.I agree there's no question that talent is no guarantor of success or even survival. But I think about writing, about how to teach it, about how to get better at it, and about the imperative to do it, I think you have a much more interesting conversation if you talk about the interaction between talent and labor. And I think that's true of art in general.
My experience has been, as Daniel Strauss says, that people become artists, or in the case of journalists, artisans (I wish that term hadn't fallen into disuse. It lends a level of precision to the space between the novel and the corporate report.) because they can't stop doing whatever it is they love: write, paint, sing, compose, act, etc. And I think that inability to stop comes from a match between talent and desire. I write much better than I draw, paint or collage, despite the classes I've taken in the latter disciplines, and I keep writing because it's the way I'm best capable of expressing the ideas and capturing some of the beauty I was, um, less than capable of capturing through art.
Something in me means that I'm not capable of getting beyond luridly-shaded caricatures of St. Basil's cathedral, or women with leaves on their heads (not a lot of visual imagination, sadly) when I draw or paint, but I can write a killer kicker line on a piece about teenaged comic book characters. And I keep doing writing because there have been moments in my life--senior year of high school, most of 2005, and the last five months, when I've felt like I have suddenly understood certain things about writing with an intense sharpness. In between, there have been vast, frustrating plateaus, and there have certainly been times when I thought about quitting, or when I didn't know that what I was headed towards was a career in writing at all. Ray Bradbury describes the kind of moment I'm talking about (although his revelations, and his results happen on a level I can't even imagine inhabiting) in Zen in the Art of Writing:
All during my twentieth and twenty-first years, I circled around summer noons and October midnights, sensing that there somewhere in the bright and dark seasons must be something that was really me. I finally found it one afternoon when I was twenty-two years old. I wrote the title "The Lake" on the first page of a story that finished itself two hours later. Two hours after that I was sitting at my typewriter out on a porch in the sun with tears running off the tip of my nose, and the hair on my neck standing up. Why the arousal of hair and the dripping nose? I realized I had at last written a really fine story. The first, in ten years of writing. And not only was it a fine story, but it was some sort of hybrid, something verging on the new.Anne Lamott says in Bird By Bird that perfectionism "will keep you cramped and insane your whole life...I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping stone just right, you won't have to die." She's absolutely right that the fear of not doing something exactly right can be crippling--I don't think Ta-Nehisi has to learn French before going to Paris. But I think that working really hard, that striving for the moment when you create something that satisfies you utterly is important, because in those instants when your hard work results in the highest expression of your talent, you find out who you are.
Bradbury is a huge fan of this poem, by Gerard Manley Hopkins, as am I:
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves - goes itself, myself it speaks and spells,
Crying "What I do is me: for that I came."
I say more, the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is -
Christ - for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.
I think that's about as good and concise a push to go big or go home on what you love, and what you get satisfaction from as you can find.
Something that's been amazing for me over the past seven or eight years is watching my friend Kat Harris become the musical theater artist she is today. We've lived in the same neighborhood since sixth grade, and we've been friends long enough that we knew each other when neither of us had an clue what we were good at, or what we wanted to do. She remembers me when I knew basically nothing about popular music, or movies, or how to find a seat in a middle-school cafeteria, and I remember her when she was seriously into Metallica, and was, like me, a debater. And somewhere in college, musical theater just clicked for Kat. I remember with startling clarity the way loving theater illuminated her, and how hard she worked to get into the Musical Theater Writing program at Tisch, and how hard she worked once she was in the program. But all that work wouldnt' have gotten her anywhere if she hadn't had an eye for subject matter and an ear for words. Her work is beginning to be performed, and singers are reaching out to her for pieces. I'm excited by the prospect of other people getting to experience her work, but I'm also excited by the constant sight of Kat become who she is through her art.
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