Seriously, it's a guilty pleasure



I had never watched it before, but the last Bachelor (with that scary Jake Pavelka) coincided with me starting a running routine. So, when half-dead and ready to transition into my day, I would stick it on in the backgound on Hulu while I worked. Lately I’ve really liked dumb TV or Gilmore Girls episodes in the background while working from home. It’s like being a little bit less alone.

Anyways, once I knew that the Bachelorette would be plucky Ali F. from Williamstown, Massachusetts, I had to admit that I knew I’d be watching it. Sure, she seems like a mainstream type interested in fame, but she also has a certain spark on screen - she seems fairly smart for a reality TV girl. Some of her personality traits reminded me of people I know in Massachusetts. I had never seen The Bachelorette before, but it’s so much more fun because a bunch of guys fighting over a girl is sort of odd and wonderful and when you put  that in the reality show dynamic it’s different. Sort of like turning the tables.

Then there’s the fact that The Bachelor/ette is structured like an EPIC ROMANTIC FILM with CRAZY dates - a picnic at the Hollywood sign! running around the Museum of Natural History after hours! lots of helicopter rides to exotic locations! - and the vibe is something you don’t get from films anymore, coupled with the, like, original reality TV talking heads and quite transparent editing/plotting. At its basis, the show is so weird and retrograde. And yet - there are occasional moments of these Truman Show people stuck in a mansion and stuck on dates acting like real people in this simulacrum of romance.

One of Ali’s final two, Cape Cod Chris L., is a really interesting case. He’s very Massachusetts, frat boy-ish, and yet there’s something wonderfully manly and decent at his core (even in his slightly Paul Newman-ish handsomeness, often hidden behind frat-boy dress sensibilities). His main plot is that he quit teaching in New York to move back to the Cape to help his family out while his Mom passed away, and the way editing goes, he’s still mired in grief. When Ali visited his family, it was a perfect picture of the occasionally stifling New England family dynamics that come from the area - where you stay provincial. It was interesting to see.

My other reality show obsession, right now, is Work of Art on Bravo. I think because it’s so subjective at its core - I mean, art, you know? You like what you like and some guy could like it differently. The show rattles around in my brain after the fact. No reality show ever does that. The Project Runway setup, and the fact that there’s a wide array of artists in various fields, from oil painting to performance art (gone too soon, Nao!) to multi-media stuff (Miles, the likely winner) - it all comes together to create a bit of a trainwreck. Because the show favors people who are able to game the creative process, to come at it quickly. There’s rumors that Miles had already planned on “redoing” older pieces, I believe it and in this case, it’s a smart way to play the show. A guy like Abdi, who is clearly coming at each task with a clean slate and a bunch of ideas and goes through a whole trial and error thing, is flailing because he wasn’t prepared in that way. I really hope the show gets another season, and that they retrofit the challenges to work for people - imagine being a photographer, and you can only stick around in the room? What if you do landscapes? What if you don’t rely on photoshop trickery?

William Goldman is the Best



Currently reading William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade, and falling in straight-up love with the guy. Always have appreciated him, but really, he is quite the treasure. Your formative movie experiences were most likely spilling from his brilliant brain.

One of the best things I went to at Tribeca was a tribute to Goldman where the likes of Aaron Sorkin and the (silver foxy) Tony Gilroy spoke beforehand. I wrote it up; do read it if you like to hear what geniuses have to say. Forgive me for the overheated first paragraph and the blatant typo in the second sentence. I can say that this piece was written under a stressful, no-sleep situation.

One thing I’m finding frustrating about my old pieces from there is that we were such a small rush-job of a place, I see far more typos than I wish I did, and I’m afraid that only makes my writing look amateur. I know the internet has taken writing out at the knees, but it kills me to see how it’s taken out the art of copyediting and editing. There aren’t as many Maxwell Perkinses anymore, but boy do I appreciate them when I cross their paths.

Conversations about Music



In Montreal, while biking through a park, I told a friend my overarching theory of music that I like: the main force behind it has to be a despondent alcoholic for the music to really hit.

Exhibit A? Our mutually loved, formerly favorite band, a band that’s released several gut wrenching albums but only came to a quasi “success” with some recent concept albums that while good - and with some amazing songs - didn’t hit the heights of the previous work.

Part of the problem, I theorized, was that I always saw this lead singer out and about in Brooklyn, looking happy with his lovely girlfriend. This situation, of course, will not do. I sincerely worry about the next album and whether it will be good or not.

Exhibit B: Cat Power. Because do you really listen to The Greatest? Or do you listen to Moon Pix? Do you like it when she says “Jackson, Jesse, I’ve got the son in me/he’s related to you, he’s related to you, he is dying to meet you.” I thought so.

Then we mused on Jeff Buckley. Where he’d be these days. Whether, if after years of beautiful music, lines of all-too-willing women, whether he’d making beautiful music. Whether the fact that he died meant that he never started to suck.

After all, Elliott Smith never put out a bad album.

And then my friend said the cruelest thing of all: “He’d be Cat Power.”

“For Kunstmann and his associates, there is little appeal to wandering around underground. Their cinema aside, the catacombs are a means, not an end: a way to access UX work sites or to hide their tracks. But as a first-time visitor plunging into these grey chambers, the experience is thrilling. It is a labyrinth of branching channels and sudden openings, cool and quiet. Most of the catacombs are dry, tall enough to stand in—but from time to time we duck or crawl, or swish into ankle-high water. Still, they are not the dank, sweaty caves I imagined. Even wading into a passage called Banga, whose thigh-high water swirls like miso soup, the tunnel’s soft silence recalls a theatre, a wine cellar, an attic.”
— “The Lizard, The Catacombs, and The Clock,” a wonderful piece on secret societies, Paris, and the catacombs by my friend Sean Michaels. You must read it.

Muddled, Complicated Feelings



I had a big post in my head. About friendships and connection and all those things, but luckily, these feelings are just swooping out and I’m far calmer than I have been for the past few days. But, to wit:

Have you ever been snubbed? Like straight up, oh, this puts whole years of my life into question because apparently my friendship isn’t valued enough snubbed? It conjures up all these ugly feelings - like, am I a jerk? Do people hate me? What did I do or is it just a careless snub? Are we even friends anymore? (To be honest, it’s probably a careless snub but it just validates some anger I have from…oh, you know, not being able to get a job where I lived for a certain amount of time.)

I know for me, when it comes to friendship, if I decide that you’re my friend, I would do anything (ethically and legally good) for you. In general. But I think that I’m not necessarily so great at showing, per se, that I care about people who I consider my friends beyond a select few. Do I blame some of this on having four siblings who traveled in and out of my life as a kid? A little bit. Things like that have aftershocks - you may not know the issues you’re getting at the time, you just know that your feelings are hurt and you’re cautious as a result. Even when you’re older and over it and have pretty decent relationships with your siblings that will, hopefully, just improve as you get into the same life bracket.

It sucks, though, because I do remember a halcyon era of having a straight up “crew,” and ever since I’ve moved, that crew has become diffuse; and even though, in my head, I’ve considered them close friends - when you’re crying on someone’s porch about your mother being sick, there is a certain level of trust - the truth is probably much more different.

I do think - there’s this imitation of closeness that you get with friends when you’ve moved or through the internet that just isn’t really the same.

My closest friend right now that I see every day - and I don’t count my partner in this situation, because that’s simply unsexy - is our car. And since we’re hoping to sell it, I can’t take it anywhere outside of where we live right now. I don’t particularly like where we live right now - I like the proximity, but I’ve been the asshole adding mileage to it so I can deal with living where I live. It sucks. I’m sad that I can’t take the car out myself and generally mad about the situation. There’s a fair amount of self-loathing there too. For me, the car is freedom. But I’m trying to be a grownup about it and patient for a month.

I miss living somewhere where there’s a palpable sense of community. I went to Montreal last week and would basically move there in a second - on St. Viateur, there are two lovely coffee places, Cafe Social and Cafe Olympico, and every morning, the porches have friends and neighbors sitting together, enjoying coffee, and chatting. I don’t know where that place is these days. It is not anywhere near my house, I know that.

Other ugly feelings include the whole Olivia Munn/The Daily Show/Jezebel thing. Because talking about it, one can’t not sound like an asshole, or resentful of the fact that Olivia Munn is pretty. In some ways, I think Olivia Munn being on The Daily Show isn’t too different from James Franco’s running around in the worlds of art, literature, and films. On one hand, it’s like, good for these guys. That sounds fun. And on the other hand, it’s like, gosh, these pretty people are really getting carte blanche to tread on dreams, huh? They don’t seem that talented, and there’s a limited number of slots! And a recession! What’s up with that? James Franco, in particular, is like a performance art referendum on the supposed “egalitarian merit” of systems like academia and literature.

And the gender divide in the creative areas of showbiz is depressing enough, and should be talked about (my theory is that a study on the amount of female directors in doc vs. features would be QUITE REVEALING - partially due to the way these are funded), but Jezebel using the fact that Munn hasn’t gone up through the improv ranks as an excuse to despair on the lame stuff she’s done…it negates the (quite fair) argument, really. But when are women not following comedy? In boys club college improv groups? UCB? Where’s the roots of all this? And who’s starting the Old Girls Club that needs to exist?

I’m looking forward to the point where I can feel less threatened and biting regarding these sort of things. I’m in the middle of taking a leap, career-wise, I’m in mid-air, and it’s so easy to feel overly bitter - feeling bitter is so gross - when reading these things. But I gotta do me, and figure out there’s a downy mattress waiting for me when I land. It’s just not there right this second. I think my yoga class today will be amazing.

Light Boxes



I interviewed the very nice Shane Jones about his excellent book Light Boxes for BlackBook. Get the book, put on Funeral by Arcade Fire, and have a great time.

Also - and I say this as someone who spent yesterday reading the faux poetic stories of a wanna-be tough guy writer who’s seriously a marshmallow, and I didn’t buy one word of it - listen to your good friend Shane Jones when he says he tried writing like Carver and Hemingway and then Marquez gave him the freedom to be whimsical. It’s really good advice.

“

There were plenty of dark moments. After I finished college, I got a job on Wall Street as a derivatives trader, but after a couple years of it I was calling in sick in order to work on my novel. By then, I’d been writing seriously for seven years. My second novel was nearly finished, and I figured it would take a year or two, at most, to become a published author. So I walked away from the bank and my cushy job.



Two years later, after pouring everything I had into that second novel, I was broke, back in debt, and the book had been rejected by almost every literary agent in America. I moved back to Baltimore, into my parents’ basement, and took jobs in construction and drove an ambulance.



It was a pretty depressing couple of years. I’d turned thirty, but I was living with my parents, doing manual labor, and making the same wages I had made as a teen-ager. Nothing I’d done in the intervening decade—getting into Cornell, my job in banking—mattered anymore. I had taken an enormous risk, and, as far as everyone could tell, I had failed miserably.



Meanwhile, I continued to fail—the first year I lived with my parents, I applied to a bunch of M.F.A. programs and was rejected by all of them. Now, by this time, I’d written two novels—not things I’d dashed off and stuck in a drawer but books I’d painstakingly revised and rewritten, labored over for years. I didn’t consider myself a hobbyist.



But, anyway—no, I never questioned that I was a writer. In fact, strange as it might sound, I never questioned that I was a good writer. I did, however, begin to seriously question my writing. It occurred to me that I couldn’t even define literature—not even to myself. I could give very erudite and intimidating answers to other people, the sort of bullshit that anyone with an English degree can throw up as a smokescreen, but I didn’t have a substantive answer that I believed in. I didn’t know why I liked the books I liked. So I decided I would throw everything away, everything I’d heard in college and everything else. I decided I would trust only myself—what I really believed and felt to be true. Which, of course, didn’t exactly occur overnight: it probably took the better part of 2004. But it was a very conscious effort.



That was when things began to change. I think of it as year zero, though it was actually year ten. The cynical part of me says, Well, maybe it could have happened some other way—maybe you could have kept the cushy job and kept writing. But I really don’t think so. I think you really have to stare down the demons. You really have to know what making art is worth to you.

”
—
20 Under 40 Fiction Q&A, Philipp Meyer. Having read the brilliant American Rust, this answer makes so much sense.

On Fashion



- I had a meeting last week in the city, and tore through my closet trying to find something that looked professional and cool. But far, far too much of my clothing is…flowy. Ruffled. EVEN MY PENCIL SKIRT HAS RUFFLES. And you know what the problem is? ANTHROPOLOGIE.

My last job was two blocks away from the Soho Anthropologie. Close enough for me to stroll through there around lunchtime, to escape there anytime I was stressed out. There is some evil merchandising magic to an Anthropologie that offers you a vision of the perfect dreamy shabby chic life where you spend all day in gently worn greenhouses wearing pretty dresses that DOES SOMETHING TO YOUR BRAIN.

I was in close enough proximity so I could haunt the sale racks, and little by little, my whole wardrobe is now Anthropologie. And that doesn’t make me look professional and chic! I’ve also lost a little weight and I have, like, no idea what to flatter lately. I was dressing for boobs and not legs, now I’m not as sure what I can pull off.

I just dont know how I should be dressing for my frame.

Moral of the story? Anthropologie has diminishing returns. Even if it takes hold of your brain like a drug. How do you dress cute and professional for creative professions, though, where the rules are often out the window? Is Madewell the answer? Using Charlotte Gainsbourg as a guide?

The one time I got in trouble for “what I wore” to work, funnily enough, I had specifically picked out my outfit for the sake of that day’s interview. This was a case of trying to look like an indie dream girl so my interviewees would like me.

- Second note: I truly realize how much women dress for other women. Or other people’s opinions. Since I’ve moved upstate, I’ve been beholden to nobody but myself. Consequently? I’ve started to dress like Kristen Stewart in Twilight and on the street. My winter uniform was easy - awesome plaid shirt from the guy’s section in H&M, hilarious gauzy t-shirt underneath, great black jeans.

But when it’s summer? How do you dress tomboy cool? I have no idea. I just want to wear little dresses so I’m not overheated, but, frankly, I don’t want to look girlish and cute. I want to look tough. I want plaid and jeans but it’s too hot!

Also, upstate, away from NYC boutiques and the pressures and pleasures of NYC fashion, I finally like and get Urban Outfitters and Forever 21 again. (My feet are happier, too; two years of bad heels on brick streets mean that the balls of my feet are just slightly misaligned in a manner that won’t age well.)

- Lastly, I dyed my hair this morning. Dark. About three years ago I used to dye my hair red (my natural color is that nothing in-between dark blonde/brown) and looking at old pictures - oh god, it was so brassy, and so “hello! I’m quirky!” Since I’ve been a working lady I go for a chocolate brown, as much as my hair will take it. It usually ends up not that dark. I would like to have a Lauren Graham black Irish look, dark hair and blue eyes, but its more like medium hair and greenish eyes.

I had been wanting to do it for a couple of days but my SO said he’d help. He came in from his run, before his coffee, and started sort of ape-ish-ly pawing at my head. I have a lot of hair - like, ten men’s worth, not kidding - and got a little nervous. He just seemed so boyish and confused about how, exactly, the dye gets onto the hair. I felt like he was a monkey grooming me.

“I imagined the velvet and lace finery she must’ve left behind, the pages of notes in her round, precise cursive for her next book of critical theory, the hush of her ordered rooms, the students still living at the vulnerable precipice from which she’d rescued me, and it slayed me. A friend took me out kayaking in Red Hook’s harbor to cheer me up but I found myself shaking as the sun set on its dirty waters, imagining the will and misery required to plunge herself forever into the dark mystery of a river.”
—
If you read one thing on the internet today, please read Lisa Rosman’s beautiful piece on her indieWIRE blog New Deal Sally, weaving together the film Father of My Children, mentorship, and death. It made me cry.

frameseven:

Let’s go back up to your house, and
take our clothes off. And just push and pull ourselves until we’re deep
inside of sleep, and with your body next to me, its sleepy sighing
sounds like waves upon a sea too far to reach.

Okkervil River, “Seas Too Far To Reach.” Can’t even begin to talk about this song. One of my favorites ever. It’s perfect.