“After all, the distance any of us non-New York writers have from New York is frustrating, but also valuable. There’s an option to retreat from the noise–or, okay, the music–that I don’t think a writer in, say, Brooklyn has. This distance has benefited me for the last four years, as I write and write, without looking up, or around, me.”
— Edan Lepucki, Going Native: Writing Place in Los Angeles over at The Millions

This whole piece is great. I have to admit that living in a genuinely boring place has helped my writing, somewhat. At least the pace. The role of place and location in writing is the thing I’m most interested in at the moment.

But I do miss a literary scene, which Brooklyn has in spades. I’ve lived in cities (Boston) for longer than I needed to simply due to their bookstores (Harvard Bookstore, you are my favorite).

Books and visceral reactions



When I finished Revolutionary Road, I was in a coffeeshop in the West Village, killing time because I was late for a yoga class and didn’t get in, but it was way too early to get to work. Reading Revolutionary Road, as a woman in a serious relationship, was a very different experience from when I banged through it in high school. The writing was still exquisite, of course, but I understood the characters in a deeper way; their hopes and aspirations of how life in Paris would make them interesting, fascinating people; the way that they boxed themselves into a corner thanks to time and choices. I related to some of that idealism. When I came to the end, I couldn’t put the book back in my purse. It scared me. It was a live thing, a record of life at its rawest and its most emotionally excruciating and the fears that we all have, as people trying to exist and find some proof of worth in that question. I felt like it was a snake, and I didn’t want its physical presence anywhere near me. I ran out of the coffeeshop and walked, briskly, to work.

Regret is a stupid, self-defeating concept, but I do have one that sticks in my mind. Last year, some high school kids were putting on a version of “Revolutionary Road: The Play.” The poster featured a boy and a girl dressed in Mad Men-wear, striking a faux wise and weary look in front of a brick wall. I do regret missing high schoolers taking on Revolutionary Road as theater. It had to have been incredible.



When I finished Desperate Characters, I started laughing. But it was a strange laugh, a sound I hadn’t made before. Deep and long and hearty. I wasn’t quite sure what was in that laughter. It wasn’t funny ha-ha. It was something different.

Needless to say, both of these books are masterpieces.

Dating Jared Leto



There was a point in time where Jared Leto was dating a whole slew of twenty something actresses, and it made no sense. He was in his has-been phase, or he was pursuing his band or whatever (and they are inexplicably big, I believe). But seeing him squiring the likes of Scarlett Johansson and Lindsay Lohan confirmed one thing: the myth of Jordan Catalano lives on. These actresses are all younger than me, and my guess is they saw My So-Called Life in a tender, vulnerable time in their lives - and getting older, and hotter, they got to actually date Jordan Catalano and live the dream. Getting the chance to date Jared Leto must’ve been, for them, a moment in time where they were Angela Chase in the boiler room.

I saw Temple Grandin last year, kind of by accident, one of those movies that you settle on when you’re at a friend’s house and they have 500 channels on cable. If Temple Grandin had been released theatrically, mark my words, Claire Danes would’ve won the Oscar for best actress. Easily. (Which in itself is funny, because I bet she and Natalie Portman have been competing for parts since they were luminous teen actresses.) The movie was good, and it felt, somewhat, like a movie that would’ve been released theatrically even five years ago, as a passion project. Was Harvey Weinstein asleep at the wheel? It’s great that HBO put it out, but it would’ve been nice for the total media saturation that you would’ve gotten with a movie. Claire Danes won awards the whole season long, fifteen years after I thought that she was the best teenage actress I had ever seen.

I suppose Glee is filling the same role for kids that My So-Called Life did for me. I saw My So-Called Life when I was in seventh grade. It was aspirational. I looked up to Angela Chase as a friend and I knew that I would be her, in some form or fashion, in the future. My best friend dyed her hair kool-aid red and it washed out in a day. I’ve been rewatching the show with my boo recently; he never saw it, and letting him in on it feels like letting him in on secret teenage me. I wonder how Glee is affecting seventh graders these days. It has to be, in some ways, a really resonant time to be a gay teenager and to see some version of your life reflected in TV these days - and that’s what I think is important about Glee, which is just spottily entertaining - but ultimately, when it comes to realistic, well-written characters that you care about, it really can’t hold much of a candle up to My So-Called Life. It’s the rare show that gets that deeply inside someone’s specific human experience. But the echoes are kind of interesting.

“

BILL MOYERS: So, whose lives are less and less necessary in America today?



DAVID SIMON: Certainly the underclass. There’s a reason they are the underclass. But in an area– in an era when you don’t need as much mass labor. When we are not a manufacturing base those people that built stuff, that made stuff– that were– that their lives had some meaning and value because the factories were open. You don’t need them anymore.



But also unions and working people are completely abandoned by this economic culture and that’s what Season Two was about. It was about one of the forces, one of the walls that basically make the corner culture. And, you know, that’s heartbreaking to me. I’ve been a union member my whole life and I guess its a little gilded union now. Gilded guild.



BILL MOYERS: The Writer’s Guild.



DAVID SIMON: The Writer’s Guild, yes, but I was a newspaper– a member of the newspaper guild before that and I thank them for letting me earn an honest living. ‘Cause, you know, without them, God knows what we would have been paid in Baltimore. But I look at what’s happened with unions and I think– Ed Burns says all the time that he wants to do a piece on the Haymarket.



BILL MOYERS: The Haymarket strike.



DAVID SIMON: Yes. That– the bombing, and that critical moment when American labor was pushed so much to the starving point that they were willing to fight. And I actually think that’s the only time when change is possible. When people are actually threatened to the core, and enough people are threatened to the core that they just won’t take it anymore. And that’s– those are the pivotal moments in American history, I think, when actually something does happen.



You know, they were– in Haymarket, they were fighting for the 40-hour work week. You know? So, it wasn’t– it sounds radical at the time, but it’s basically a dignity of life issue. And you look at things like that. You look at the anti-Vietnam War effort, in this country which, you know, you had to threaten middle class kids with a draft and with military service in an unpopular war for people to rise up and demand the end to an unpopular war. I mean, it didn’t happen without that. So, on some level, as long as they placate enough people. As long as they throw enough scraps from the table that enough people get a little bit to eat, I just don’t see a change coming.

”
— From David Simon on Bill Moyers’ Journal, 2009.

Just Kim



In the wake of Patti Smith and Just Kids, do you think that editors are calling Kim Gordon, every day, to ask her to write her own memoir? I also feel, strongly, that if Kim Gordon did her own version of L.C.D. Soundsystem’s “Losing My Edge,” it would be pretty epic.

It was fun to watch Gordon at Tom Tom Magazine’s Women in Media/Women in Music panel - the conversation must’ve felt to Gordon like her “Sacred Trickster” video. I would love to, at some point, go to a “Kim Gordon You Are The Coolest How?” panel, where she could talk about collaboration with Thurston and maintaining a relationship and stuff like that. It would be interesting. But what struck me about Gordon was that you got the idea that music was more of a side thing to her visual art, which makes sense. It’s what she was trained in.

She’s so beautiful, too. Cheekbones of glass. There’s something about her beauty that reminds me of Betty Draper. Maybe it’s the cheekbones and blondeness, the cool. Maybe it’s that she got out, she escaped, with the specter of a perfect wife and mother probably hanging over her head. The opposite of rock. I want to know more. She’s mysterious!

And Gordon did not pick up an instrument until 28. Nor did Patti Smith. And isn’t that fact inspiring?