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The Thermals - Here’s Your Future
Sowas höre ich in der Küche. Ultralaut.
Hutch + Kathy forever.
Thermals reblog for many reasons, least of all their girl-friendly mosh pits (I know! how 90s, the use of “mosh!”) and the fact that Stu and I saw them at the Bowery and then got a killer drink at Allen and Delancey after all sweaty in jeans among the model-y, banker-y, try-hardy New Yorker-y throng. It was a really good drink.
I am at Kripalu, a nonprofit yoga retreat center and school in the Berkshires, and there are obviously a million and two amazingly Salad For Breakfast things going on around me at any given moment. A workshop on shamanism and a worshop on “creating transformative workshops” are just two of the…
OMG, M.C. Yogi. That sounds…apropro for the place. I went to Kripalu two or three weekends back and had a pretty amazing time.
It took about five minutes for my first Lululemon bag sighting and ten minutes for my first Elizabeth Gilbert book sighting (Committed).
Hey internet - my BFF is going to be out in Los Angeles “taking meetings” the last week of April, and will likely be moving there from London, England. She is somewhat daunted. If anyone has any advice/wisdom regarding neighborhoods and sublets and BBQ joints, would you send me an email at Elisabeth (Period) Donnelly at gmail? It would be much appreciated and you could make a friend who is British in the process.
Upstate New York
So yesterday, spurred on by curiosity (and that pitch perfect Marie Claire snippet from the book…that ends just as she’s going to prison!) I perused Piper Kerman’s Orange is the New Black, about her year in a prison in Danbury. The funny thing about the book is that Kerman got busted for drug muling-at-24, but she had to wait six years after initially getting busted about ten years after drug-running to end up serving her time, as the system needed her out and free in order to bust the kingpin.
In the intermin, she met a magazine editor, Larry Smith (who started Smith magazine and is likely doing great with all those six word memoir books, right?) and the results are sort of interesting: Smith got two Modern Love columns out of their relationship, and Kerman got a book deal with Julie Grau herself as editor. Now I know that was likely an awful and terrifying time in their lives, but the results are all so calculated, in a way.
This Slate article on it gets it spot-on when it slates it (ha) with books about dilettante strippers, alcoholics, and dominatrixes. I would say the book is similar, in some ways to Diablo Cody’s Candy Girl, light and diverting and lacking a certain amount of soul. Or the dilettante stripper book Bare by Elisabeth Eaves, where she talks about being at the Lusty Lady and then needs to go to an actual straight-up strip joint to improve her story. Again, it lacks soul. I wish Kerman’s book didn’t; but not every book is Newjack.*
(Also: a grumble, but dude - don’t say you went to Smith for school and are bisexual in the first act and then spend your whole time in prison talking about your awesome dude! That is the exact opposite of Chekov’s gun. Exact opposite. Perhaps I would’ve liked this book better as gritty fiction, instead of nice white lady memoir.)
* Actually, there’s something interesting about gritty-investigative-reporting-classic Newjack vs. the dumb title Orange is the New Black lady prison thing. Oh how I wish this happened to someone who was an amazing writer!
** Shame Sady Doyle’s off tumblr, as far as I can tell, because I want to know her opinion!
Have a good weekend, and get this song in your head. It will make you feel good. “Sweepstakes” by Gorillaz, rapped by the most adorable rapper alive, Mos Def. (Whatever he does - perhaps it’s the adenoidial tone in his voice - he’s always adorable, right? And really charismatic.)
It’s maple season!
(Unrelated but true: the funniest thing I saw recently was a poster for a stage version of Revolutionary Road, put on by Northampton High School. It had a photo on it of a boy and girl dressed up in 50s thrift store duds trying to look tough and wise against a brick wall, with “It takes backbone to lead the life you want” scrolling across the bottom. To say that I fell over laughing is to put it mildly; it’s just that Revolutionary Road is a story that requires you to have some dreams that died before really getting the emotional impact, and you would have to be an awfully unlucky 17 year old to really understand it deeply. Thus, hilarity!)
Really excellent and tumultuous month of March.
I went to a yoga retreat last weekend and I’m thinking about how to live more deliberately. Now I’m testing my relaxation by A) finishing up a computer project, and B) passover. It’s very interesting!
Catch you in a few.
Rachel Maddow’s full-page ad in the Boston Globe (via)
Rachel Maddow is really cool.
“When you’re angry with the world and yourself to the same degree, you’re running in place. It takes a great deal of energy. It can be exhausting. You lash out at people. You’re hard on yourself. It all takes place in your head. After a time people give up on you. They think you don’t give a damn and don’t care about yourself. If they only knew.”
“Vivamus pellentesque vitae neque at vestibulum. Donec efficitur mollis dui vel pharetra.”
I wish I was born in … 1941 and my name was Nora Ephron and I started my journalism career at Newsweek when I was 21. I wish this for all of us.
(via lizcolville)
YES YES YES YES YES YES YES TRIPLE SIGNED.
NVC, let’s talk about The Emperor’s Children film. Who do you see in various roles? Aren’t you glad that it’s not starring Bryce Dallas H, since I thought that may happen considering the Ron Howard factor? (And good for Greta Gerwig for getting out of movies where she has to be all naked-y w/ the director of the movie. Stupid mumblecore! Totally the worst. It kind of makes a lot of sense that she got the role, but I bet Hailey Feiffer of The Squid and the Whale and Margaret and generally being awesome hates her!)
Situations in which I can see myself pursuing a life of the mind: sitting in a car service center’s waiting room. This is purgatory.
Do you ever get the feeling that there are whole wide swaths of America where people have just given up? How do you avoid becoming embalmed and bitter?
Oooh, this will be interesting. The Wrap is reporting that it’s going to be a Noah Baumbach (am I the only one who could give a shit about his films? I liked Kicking and Screaming but that was it. Perhaps it’s because he + Wes Anderson together, save Fantastic Mr. Fox, equals terrible, self-absorbed, dudes with issues crap and terrible lady characters? And that I have real doubts about how this guy could make a great movie about class, which this should be?) movie starring Keira Knightley (as Marina, for SURE.), Eric Bana (doubtful that he’s Julian…the seductive Aussie Ludovic? But he was so Jonathan Rhys Meyers in my head), and Richard Gere as Murray, of course. What up, Gere? You got some Oscar bait if you play it right.
In my nightmares, Bootsie will be played by Jonah Hill. This should have great roles for women but we’ll see with Baumbach, who is the worst, I say. (The Squid and the Whale had moments but was overall excruciating for me.)
I did an interview with Claire Messud for the Boston Globe around 2007 - it’s not on the website, because Boston.com is the WORST, but she’s hilarious in person and was very charmingly self-conscious about the particulars of this piece (we were “hanging out” and “keeping it real”). I used to see her and James Wood at the coffee shop next to my old apartment in Somerville all the time. I think The Emperor’s Children is very very funny and very very class conscious in a way I appreciate.
Vermont is beautiful during mud season.
I got a Formspring question the other day asking me what my writing process is like. I was very flattered, so much so that I didn’t even think I’d post it, because the implication that I a) have a process for anything, b) write as if I have a process for that in particular, or c) ever get anything done have not yet been proven. It seemed only right, however — since you asked — that I share all of my secrets with you, so you can be as responsible and purposeful as I am.
First things first: you don’t sit down to write without you’ve exfoliated your entire body. I personally find it impossible to uncork the bottle of genius within unless my arms are as soft as the fur of a blow-dried baby alpaca. If you can find a sandblaster, great; if not, use something pineapple-scented from CVS. When you’re finished, clean your bathtub. You don’t want little scrubby particles sullying the enamel, otherwise how can you concentrate on your writing? You’ll be thinking of the grit, hoping that you don’t forget about the fact that your bathtub is dirty, because if you forget, you might take a bath and the weight of your body will embed the sharp little grains into your upper thighs. Discomfort is the antidote to genius. Don’t forget this.
Now you’ve cleaned your tub and you’re almost ready to work. First, though, you’ll have to brew some coffee. The best coffee for unleashing creativity is brewed painstakingly, nurtured into existence bean by bean, drip by drip. If you can’t construct your own Chemex out of some leftover beakers, or you can’t find your glass-blower, then you’ll just have to manually select the beans you’ll be using and grind them with a mortar and pestle, one at a time. While the coffee brews, prepare a snack of Grand Marnier souffles and read a five-foot stack of periodicals to get your juices flowing.
When the souffles are done, you’re almost to the finish line; first, however, you’re going to have to convert all of your vinyl records into MP3’s and make a playlist for inspiration. You can’t get inspiration from digital. It has to be analog. If you don’t have the know-how to convert your records to MP3’s, spend some time reading articles on the internet, smoking pot, and letting the information saturate. Don’t rush yourself. It’s important not to rush.
While your computer is processing the music files, it would be best not to do any writing. This is called “saving up.” A million times a day, you probably find yourself thinking of a story, or a joke, or an idea, but unless you have your analog mix tape, your low-acidity artisan coffee, and your silky forearms, what good will it do you? You need to create a calm environment, a temple for stories, a warm womb to protect you from confusing your pronouns or referring to your protagonist as Ray when his name is Roy. Prepare. Prepare forever. Prepare a chicken breast in marinade. Prepare to learn to knit. Prepare to meet your maker. Prepare a blood orange martini.
Finally, it’s time to write! Unfortunately, you can’t write when you’re sleepy or punchy. You should probably just wait until tomorrow, and start the whole thing over again.
(via barthel)
Was listening to Dipset when this happened. It was appropriate.
An interesting note from Anna Maria Cox’s review of And the Heart Says Whatever is this (*I have not read the book, I’m looking forward to it): “For my—admittedly self-interested—part, I thought the piece, while well written (the book is, too), missed a chance to examine not just Gould’s decision to go off the media cattle farm but also the existence of so many tender young things happy to take her place in the pen.”
Tender young things happy to take her place in the pen is the perfect distillation of what, frankly, I find to be the toxic lifestyle of trying to make even a living wage as a writer in a bloggy age. The way that writers are being shaped into content producers who are reacting reacting reacting and hardly ever living. The race to be the pithiest wit regarding a variety of things. The lack of a real Maxwell Perkins-like editor in your life, or even a newspaper editor, committed to making prose clear and snappy so you can improve. The staring at the screen for hours at a time until you go blind.
Anyways. That’s all. I’m truly surprised every time when I realize that there are many people who would like to be writers, and who happily sign up for jobs that are rather cruel in their treatment.