You broke my heart

Thanks a lot, state where I’m from! (tl; dr regarding politics in Massachusetts. FEEL FREE TO SKIP + NO MORE POLITICKIN’ EVER.)



As far as I can see it, there are PLENTY of things to learn from Martha Coakley’s defeat. Most obviously: don’t run a shitty campaign, Democratic candidate. Do the work, kiss the babies, don’t diss the Red Sox and that INSUFFERABLE Curt Schilling (wealthy Republican) in Massachusetts. Most important? When the Democrats are corrupted (Governor is bad, the speakers of the House have resigned due to shenanigans) and running one state and doing a mediocre job in a recession, they’re not likely to win an election. Not without baby kissing!

Hopefully the national democratic machine can get up and running as a result. But I don’t think it’s necessarily the national “referendum” on Obama and Health Care and things that the national media is making it out to be. To whit:

A) There is definitely a problem with women running for positions in Massachusetts. They are usually - and part of this is probably a result of Kennedy having a Senate seat sealed down until death - straight-A student types who came up through the AG’s office, through the local government representation, whatever. When they’re thrust into the spotlight against a male candidate, they come off as Tracy Flick - entitled, expecting to win handily - against their male opponents. It’s how Mitt Romney - carpetbagger Mitt who guts coporations! who has many houses! - came off as a guy you wanted to have a beer with and won the governorship, as opposed to Democrat-in-MA-entrenched candidate Shannon O'Brien. He was handsome; she was a political lady, comparably part of the machine. He was overall, more appealing. Half the reason MA’s current Governor, Deval Patrick won, was due to the fact that he was up against Rommney’s Lt. Gov, Kerry Healy, and not a dude.

*Jane Swift was Governor for a minute because she was the Lt. Gov. and the then-Governor became an ambassador to Canada.

B) Why do female political candidates come off as Tracy Flick in the media? And why does it end up making Republican millionaires - who don’t push policy that actually affects humans positively - look like total bros, dudes who could’ve been in your frat?

(And the inverse of this: Sarah Palin’s bimbo-verse. Another topic, however.)

C) Massachusetts currently has a Democratic Governor and a Democratic house/senate, state-wide. The speaker of the House, Salvatore F. DiMasi, resigned in July for corruption charges. Deval Patrick - who was sent into the house on a tidal wave of TOGETHER WE CAN (as coined by David Axelrod, Obama’s consigliere) - has very low approval ratings. Part of this dissatisfaction, to be honest, is that there’s a recession and people are feeilng it. So they will vote out who’s in power. But short memories - this is all a consequence of eight years of terrible federal government.

D) Massachusetts people, super excited that their VOTE ACTUALLY MATTERS NATIONALLY (it never does) actually decided to leave the house and vote.

D1) There’s a youth-drain in Massachusetts and the red band around the greater Boston area is full of older people from the suburbs where I’m from. You know what? Those are people who are at middling colleges who get basic jobs (blue collar or not - but jobs that are secure) that enable them to buy houses, etc. They are mad because they don’t see the government affecting them for the better - and they’re likely to vote. My relatives who are republican wouldn’t shut up on Facebook about this election even though it’s not likely Brown will affect their lives for the better. They don’t want to pay high taxes, health care is already “raising taxes” in MA, they’re not thinking about the fact that their kids will likely not get jobs that offer health care and will be stuck in some permalancing hell, because Health Care being YOKED to jobs when there aren’t very many and the OLDS aren’t dying is a PROBLEM. Republican philosophy - “stay out of my taxes” - is appealing but it doesn’t belie the truth, that these guys cut taxes for rich Corps. It’s not helpful to the middle class, guys!

Like Devo said, DUTY NOW FOR THE FUTURE. That’s a two-fold problem: Massachusetts can’t keep their best and brightest because it’s too expensive and those who are staying are voting for feelings, social ideals, and not facts.*

*And - and! - Dems in MA need to not be lame.

D2) How much campaigning did Coakley do at colleges? Seriously? Because there’s a quarter of a million college students in Massachusetts. Get those kids registered and interested and you’re all set. They do live in MA 9 months a year.

E) The VERY VERY IMPORTANT election in MA that David Axelrod better keep an eye on will be Deval Patrick’s re-election (which is very unlikely). He’s widely seen as a bad governor. He’s been pilloried for getting new blinds the minute he got in office. Recent coverage includes the story that he complained about having to run for reelection to Obama and Obama said, tough shit dude.

Axelrod got Patrick elected with the nebulous slogan “Together we can.” Nobody really knew what they meant but it was great to get hopeful from. Together we can have a better Massachusetts! Sure! But Patrick isn’t controlling that conversation, making the media report on Together, We Did All Sorts of Things. It’s more like Patrick screws up having a casino! Patrick ignores MA because he had to go to New York to get a book deal! Importantly: he really isn’t a great Governor, BUT - I get the idea that if you get in on an Axelrod theme of “change” “hope” and “togetherness” and people can’t point at concrete examples of why their life is better, your political career is screwed.

F) To whit: I feel like with Fox News Channel existing, Democrats simply don’t control the conversation. Obama’s office needs to trumpet some of the change that has happened so far. I do not, AT ALL, understand how Democrats and the Left let the Republicans sell bullshit “family values” type social ideals while passing policy that doesn’t help the people who vote for ‘em. Friday Night Lights the book has a good example: Odessa, TX votes Republican, the Bushes cut jobs in that town. Ew.

G) Lastly: yes there’s a recession, people are unhappy. O is cleaning that up, hopefully? That doesn’t mean we should put the people who put our country desperately in debt, devaluing the dollar around the world back in power. O needs to remind the country of their short, short memories. I don’t doubt that any president post-Bush would end up coming off badly because the country is very much a mess and the media just feeds into the divides.

Sorry this is long. I never plan on posting about politics again. It’s just frustrating and important. It doesn’t make any sense to me why Health Care is in the hands of people/corporations making profits off Americans being ill. It’s really gross. If the Democrats don’t pass something - don’t get galvanized - it’s going to really be awful, the results. I really feel like we need a Peter Finch in Network for the left. I’m feeling particularly emotional about it because health care is a must for me now; I have a syndrome that ups my chances of cancer and that means I should be tested every year for a variety of things - preventative care, you know? So that I don’t leech off the system in the future?

And I do wish that I had a job coining verbiage - winner talk - for the left. You can sell people “Change you can believe in” but you need to convince people that “Change is happening, on and and on and on.” YOU’RE NOT DOING THAT AXELROD.

Invisible Audiences



After “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue 1999–2000 Jeff Wall

I really, really feel like everyone everywhere should read Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. It is my favorite book, likely, and the best written - strange and mysterious and horrifying and brilliant and prophetic.

This Britticisms post on the “Whitewashing of Young Adult Fiction Continues” is also a must read. To elaborate, generally, on what she’s discussing: I wish there were more outlets for cultural idealism - I mean that in the best possible way - where minorities are represented, where the target audience, and where you fit in, is not being condescended to. (As a woman who is not an idiot, for example, I know I am starving, starving, for representations of smart young women in film, Whip It aside. Which is why I’m still citing the complicated female friendship at the heart of Walking and Talking fifteen years later. Ms. Britticisms, in her post, mentions seeing Tyler Perry films, just for a shred of representation. ) I feel like the promised idealism of the internet is just killing the small guy, for now, and that means that media, from film to music to books that get published are desperately flailing at the percieved audience that buys things.

One thing to keep an eye on/to keep hope alive is a company like Adam “MCA” Yauch’s Oscillosope Pictures, whose stated intent as a film distributor is simply to put out stuff that’s good. No more, no less. The results are far more interersting than your average distribution company, and the kicker? All of these films are, on average, excellent. It’s a small fry Merge-esque set-up, and we’ll see if it works. I hope it does. Unlike IFC Films (if a bigger company put out In the Loop it would be mentioned for Oscars. It’s criminal that it’s not), who do put out a wide variety of interesting things, Oscilloscope is actually trying to get their actors (Woody Harrelson in The Messenger) nominated for awards.

Silver Foxy



Manifesting my destiny: dear world, I would like to interview Martin McDonagh. (But for what publication?) I bought In Bruges on DVD, I loved it so. Such a great movie. And, and, if I ever got to talk to Mr. McDonagh, I’m sure he would like me because his short that won an Academy Award, Six Shooter, features Brendan Gleeson as a character named “Donnelly.” I’m a character named Donnelly!

And his career is fascinating - supposedly he wrote all his great plays in a three month rush at age 27? And then they were all put on in London at the same time? So cool. He’s always been hot, too, google image bears that out. But I love the silver hair, I gotta say.

His new play, A Beheading in Spokane, opens in New York in a month. It features Zoe Kazan (who I’ve been told I look like!), the ever-incredible Anthony Mackie, Sam “in every movie ever and I’ve been in the same room with the guy and Leslie Bibb like six times in 2009” Rockwell, and CHRISTOPHER WALKEN. AND it features Christopher Walken as a man LOOKING FOR HIS MISSING HAND!

Here is the description:

Carmichael (Walken) has been searching for his missing left hand for over a quarter of a century. Enter two bickering lovebirds (Mackie and Kazan) with a hand to sell, and a hotel clerk (Rockwell) with an aversion to gunfire, and we’re set for a hilarious rollercoaster of love, hate, desperation and hope.

*** Edit! The title is a BEHANDING in Spokane, and I constantly misread it as Beheading because BEHANDING is not a word. You got me, McDonagh!

Requiem for a Party Girl: Rambly thoughts on The Long Blondes



For me, The Long Blondes are one of the more fascinating could-have-beens of the 2000s. Two full length albums, one selection of B-sides, countless NME covers and new cool thing British buzz. It translated to an album that sold something like 600 its first week in the states. Despite the endless amounts of style, the band just wasn’t able to break, and when guitarist and main songwriter Dorian had a stroke - in his late twenties/early thirties, gulp - the band ended up breaking up.

The Long Blondes are not a likable band. Sonically they’re fine; catchy guitar rips, many a four on the floor beat, sounding like all the great pop bands of the world. Where they get interesting is in the lyrics. Kate Jackson, the lead singer, plays a role on most of the songs - a femme fatale, bored and messing around in other people’s love lives, obsessed with her relevance and worth in a world that’s spinning past her. She’s snotty and cocky, competitive and insecure.

The songs sort of play out like requiems for a party girl.

Flip through an issue of Paper Magazine; find an it girl with a band with one song, an occasional modeling career, a life as a DJ or an artist on call or a muse. The songs on Someone to Take You Home and Couples both feel like they’re written form the point of view of one of these girls (ah - a good example: 20something Sofia Coppola before she made her films and established herself as an artist. Lissy Trulle. Sting’s daughter with that rad song with Robyn.) They go out. They are in the right parties. Nobody ever tells them there’s a list, sawhree! in a condescending tone.

They are it, they are the zeitgeist, they are the star of their own private movie. But they’re worried - fretting - and that’s where the Long Blondes come in.

Here’s the thing: instead of Kate Jackson writing the lyrics, the lyrics were mostly written by Dorian the guitarist, which had the effect of giving the girl singer a particular role. “Once and Never Again” is a song aimed at a hey nineteen of a certain age, likely coltish and new to the scene, and Jackson’s sympathetic - I know how it feels to be your age/oh how I’d love to feel a girl your age (the latter line being a nice double entendre about emotions and/or hitting on the girl). Giddy Stratospheres is a dump the boring girlfriend and domestication, have wild sex with me song. Jackson calls the girl the “dead eyed bitch” says “she’ll never take you giddy stratospheres,” jeers “have you forgotten/what it’s like to have her on all fours?” The girl is boring, the song rides a killer guitar riff, and Jackson the character’s quite bemused - she knows she’s not going to get the guy back, most likely, but she can’t help snottily telling him what he’s missing. The next song “in the company of women” talks about how competitive Jackson feels over a guy - and she’s “waiting in the wings for you to make your first mistake so watch out girl.” Then there’s “Heaven Help the New Girl,” which implies that hey nineteen from “Once and Never Again” has gotten Jackson’s boyfriend - and she can have him, fights and a terrible flat and all.

All this feminine competition is disconcerting. It pushes the listener away from the Long Blondes. Kate Jackson would, sincerely, steal your boyfriend and not feel so bad about it (even though she’s “too old,” and references being too old, at a mere 26, another annoying affectation). After this suite of songs, there’s a short break with Separated by Motorways, a shouty number that’s one of the Blondes’ first singles. Jackson wrote the lyrics - she says “oh girl you’re too wonderful” after citing rumors of blow jobs with the neighborhood boys, and the song ends, happily, with two lonely girls going on the run. Perfect.

The last five songs on the album hang together differently. “You Could Have Both” is sung by the other woman, Jackson again, offering a life as a side-girl, with a spoken word breakdown about what, I suppose, is a quarterlife crisis “That’s what happens/when you’re listening to Saint Scott Walker. On headphones. On the bus.” Whereas “Weekend Without Makeup” has this character all domesticated, and she hates it - she’s a landlady these days.



Second album: “Guilt” is kind of involving, a story about a girl in a couple tempted by another boy. “I got a boy and we fit together, see/before I knew you and you knew me.” It’s good. And the bridge comes together nicely “so tell me/when you’re out next, so I don’t go at you and make a fool of myself again.” Then she claims that she’s “making her choice and sticking to it.” There’s a lot going on in the song. “Couples” sounded better to me when I thought it was about the loneliness of the rock band lead singer “people everynight tell me that they love me/ you’re not lonely, I am baby” - but I had misheard the lyrics. “People every where they tell me that they’re lonely/you’re not lonely, I am baby,” that’s different. Sadder. Commiserating in mutual misery. *Oh! According to Perpetua, the album booklet has the lyric as this: “these people have the nerve to tell me that they’re lonely.” Meaner! This one has Jackson seeing couples everywhere, always noticing the appreciative eye of the boy, and feeling done with this town. It works.

The next song, “I Liked the Boys,” Jackson’s domesticated - like the first album’s “Weekend Without Makeup” - but in this case, she’s “lying in the hay/looking at the stars/when I was young I liked the boys/when I was young you were my boy.” The mood: resigned, lovely. Bittersweet. “Too clever by half” is sort of a hilarious disco vamp - Jackson’s claiming that she’ll get with her cheating boyfriend’s significant other, as a revenge on their nefarious plans to run off with each other. “Erin O'Connor,” on the other hand, addresses lovers’ rock by suggesting that sex would be better if he would “close your eyes/and think of Erin O'Connor/I’ll pretend I’m Lily Cole/and I’ll imagine that you’re someone else as well.” It’s one of the best songs on the album, succinctly summing up ennui with pretense. It’s way sadder than it sounds. “Nostalgia” continues the themes - looking back on a love life, “that was just nostalgia/ I may never have a daughter because there’s far too much to tell/and far too much to answer for…that’s all in the past.” The last song, “I’m Going to Hell,” is one of the giddiest - assuming this bad behavior, this being careless with people’s hearts, spoiled and greedy and rapacious, is just leading towards certain damnation, so why not enjoy it?

I liked the music of The Long Blondes, Kate Jackson’s style, far before I liked the songs. I always felt like they were pushing me away, like I was potential competition, not a passive listener. They kind of pissed me off. But I think part of it is due to the lyrics, and the weird way that Kate Jackson is playing such a role as the singer, inhabiting a variety of female insecurities at the same time. They’re not talked about that much. She’s always playing the Jolene, giddily singing “If that’s your boyfriend (he wasn’t last night),” admitting that she’s a fuck up, seeking an easy cure in sex. It’s a complicated angle. One that I’m not used to hearing from a female voice - even if she is channeling someone else’s fantasies. There is something interesting and cinematic about The Long Blondes, and something there to learn from. I’m not sure what it is yet. But they could’ve been stars.

Andreas Gursky's 99 Cent



Two films from 2009 make good use of Andreas Gursky’s 1999 piece 99 Cent as inspiration: The Hurt Locker and documentary Food, Inc. I had seen both films in a relatively recent amount of time, so it was really interesting how the Gursky images translated to these stories.

In The Hurt Locker (and Kathryn Bigelow was a painter who was a Whitney Museum fellow, so you know she’s referencing this. You just know it.) Jeremy Renner’s character is in a Gursky landscape, lost in the supermarket, and it echoes how adrift he is in the world outside of dismantling bombs.

(Hey! Check out my awesome interview with The Hurt Locker’s screenwriter Mark Boal from last year. It’s a great piece, if I do say so myself.)

Food, Inc. is a film that shakes up your perception of the way that you eat, precisely due to the fact that it synthesizes arguments in Michael Pollan’s work and Fast Food Nation while also providing horrifying visuals and real-people testimony. (The wonderful Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms appears, and he is the only person I’ve ever seen who you can actually say, talks in all capitals with exclamation points at the end.)

It begins in a supermarket, the products swimming in a manic Gursky visual. Showing you, the viewer, that the supermarket is a place where human order is lost.

(I talked to Food, Inc, director Robert Kenner, as well! I suspect/am rooting for more than The Cove/ that Food, Inc. will be nominated for Best Documentary.)