Wayback Machine: Brooke Hogan at the Mall

[I found a cache of articles that I had written that don’t exist online anymore, so I need to put them somewhere so they’re going here for now. I feel like a screenwriter with no produced screenplays lately. And yep, I got to go to the mall with Brooke Hogan and it was weird, in an American way.]

As the headlining pop star on a mall tour, deciding to shop around the very mall where you’re due to perform later can be a complicated proposition.

On this Sunday in July, 19-year-old “Hogan Knows Best” star and potential pop princess Brooke Hogan is set to headline the Simon DTour Live! Concert at the Emerald Square Mall in North Attleborough. For most of the day, Hogan eats pizza with her dancers and manages a series of meet ‘n’ greets with her young fanbase and interviewers.

Her mother, Linda, familiar to any fans of VH1’s Hogan-family reality show, stands imperiously in a corner, all blond hair, leopard print, and sky-high clear Lucite heels. The possibility of Hogan’s perusing a store requires negotiation with Linda, Hogan’s handlers, and the mall security guard.

Their decision: While shopping, Hogan can pose for pictures with her fans, but no autographs, please.

Hogan is hoping to cruise either the Forever 21 or Rave shops, but before she gets there, like a magpie, she’s drawn into junior retailer DEB.

“Cute!” she squeals, inspecting the shiny hot-pink heels on display. At 5'11", Hogan cuts an imposing figure, and she has the same cleft chin as her famous father, wrestling legend Hulk Hogan. For the teenager, fame and music has been wrapped together with her TV show. “The show hits all demos,” Hogan says, tapping on her Coke with manicured black nails, Fendi bag on her shoulder. “The show has good role models for kids.”

The store doesn’t have the pink heels in her size, and Hogan makes her way to the jewelry. Many of Hogan’s fashion choices are for the sake of performing, she explains, while fingering handfuls of shiny bangles: “They look like diamond bracelets from afar … Good for show.”

Hopped up on caffeine, Hogan flutters back to the shoes, muttering “10, 10, 10” as she browses the too-small offerings. “I’m a 12 ½,” she says. “My feet are, like, spreading by the minute.”

Hogan loves wearing heels, which she feels look best with “pants that are really long, or skirts that are really short.” She grabs a pair of white heels to give to her mom. “You know how hard it is to be a woman and have shoes that don’t fit?” she laments.

Besides her duties as a pop star, Hogan is beginning work on a clothing line. “We’re in the baby stages,” she says while inspecting a flashy prom dress, paying careful attention to its rhinestone and sequin detail. She adds, “I never wear pink, because I feel like a giant Barbie Doll.” When it comes to fashion, Hogan says, “I don’t exactly stick to one trend. I like to wear stuff that makes an impact.”

Teenage girls and 'tweens interrupt Hogan and ask for a photo; she happily complies. After a talk with her fans, Hogan brings her armful of goods up to the cashier, throwing a large Tweety Bird lollipop on the pile. “I’m going to get this for my dancer, to come onstage with for the song 'Tasty’,” she says. After a sweep through the store, Hogan’s jewelry, shoes, and apparel come to about $150. “I’m in a daze. You ever get in that stage where you’re just staring?” she asks, the shop-girls nodding in agreement. Then they ask for a picture with her.

Going through her purchases, Hogan points out her armfuls of bangles – a gift for her best friend, even though her pal sticks to jewelry by Jacob the Jeweler, nee Jacob Arabo, the famed hip-hop “bling king.” Hogan, on the other hand, likes “the cheap stuff.” She recounts her last visit to Jacob’s, where she did buy something – a watch – and starts to describe the diamonds on the timepiece as she exits DEB, but is distracted by the troop of teenage girls posing as mannequins in the store window. “Do you really do that?” says Hogan to the girls. 'Are you serious?“

The girls are in sparkly dresses, standing like Edgar Degas’s "Little Dancer of Fourteen Years” – one leg pointed forward, hands behind their backs – trying not to break their poses.

“I’ve never seen that before! That’s really crazy, too!” bubbles Hogan, standing outside the window and gesturing at the girls.

She breaks the spell: Flattered by the pop star’s attentions, the “mannequins” are now smiling and giggling as they try to hold their positions, keeping one leg pointed forward.

Originally published in The Boston Globe on Thursday, August 6, 2007.

“Breeziness has become for many the literary mode of first resort, a ready-to-wear means to seeming fresh and authentic. The style is catchy, and catching, like any other fashion. Writers should be cautious with this or any other stylized jauntiness - especially young writers, to whom the tone tends to come easily. The colloquial writer seeks intimacy, but the discerning reader, resisting that friendly hand on the shoulder, that winning grin, is apt to back away.”

— From Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd’s perfect, brilliant, buy-it-now book Good Prose. It’s like having a writing class taught by two diligent artists, and it’s nice to hear advice from Kidder, since he’s your favorite nonfiction writer’s favorite writer (in my The New New Journalism book literally every writer profiled is like, “I wish I was Tracy Kidder”).

theparisreview:

R. I. P. Les Blank, one of cinema’s greatest documentarians.

Film: Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.

No! I interviewed him once - a farce due to a suspenders-wearing rude photographer* who called me “Missy,” refused to take the picture to the specifications of the article, and rushed out of there to photograph a “front page” event - but in the face of such sexist indignities, Blank was a gentle soul and gave me lovely anecdotes about Burning Man, which he went to every year, and his work on car art documentation with his son.

His eyes lit up when I mentioned Gap-Toothed Women, his documentary about gap-toothed women. He brought along a friend who shook my hand heartily and said, “Hello, I’m Howard. I’m in telephones,” and he did not just sell telephones, he also made his car into a giant telephone and may just have an alter ego that’s something along the lines of Telephone Man. Damm!

“While shows with female leads like 30 Rock and Girls never boast ratings that reflect anything close to the weekly word count expended in their honor, they also weren’t completely ignored by the public. Enlightened, for the most part, was. There were several reasons for this, including the show’s slow pacing, the lack of an easy, universal “point,” the subtlety of the humor, and the intentionally unremarkable lives of all the characters. But above all these things, I believe that the viewing public just wasn’t ready to watch an older, neurotic woman try to sort out her problems in an earnest, scattered, and oftentimes maddeningly awkward way. And when the first season ended and Amy Jellicoe hadn’t gotten much better or much worse, the show crossed over into the narrative structure of our real, sad lives. Nobody wants to watch that on TV.”

— Grantland, no: 30 Rock and Girls were set in New York, so they were obviously more important to the way we live now, and the media chattering class that needs something to chatter about could easily latch onto it. Enlightened, on the other hand, involved California: squishy New Age thoughts - and the last New Age thing to grab onto the consciousness, Eat Pray Love (which did not blow up until its paperback release, through word of mouth) and other stuff of its ilk, Oprah-approved, was a fable with a happy ending - grafted onto a slightly miserablist, ironic 90s indie movie vibe. The latter is obviously a harder sell than something where there are boobs and transgressive sex scenes, and from what I could tell, HBO barely spent any money on promoting the show correctly (why would you depend on TV critics, TV critics who “saved Chuck,” who are very slow to cotton onto anything that isn’t set in New York right away? The chattering class only started caring about Breaking Bad, initially popular in the southwest, where it is set, on or around the end of season 3/beginning of season 4; right around the time that Mad Men had its epic hiatus). And another sign of neglect: anytime I was at a friend’s house where they had HBO, Enlightened wasn’t available On Demand. Whereas I could always watch Girls. (I have no doubt that HBO bought the respective Golden Globes for Enlightened and Girls, btw. Golden Globes historically slide by on charm.) I imagine when HBO sent Emmy DVDs out, Girls was in a gold-encrusted box with Deborah Lippman nail polish inside while Enlightened was probably just a slip of paper with a link to watch it online, somewhere, only if you knew the passcode. It’s really too bad, I feel like Enlightened at the least was about to reach Peak Think Piece if there was a season three, and I wanted to write one!

Rory Gilmore's Early-20s Crisis →

I feel sick to my stomach to hear about the Boston Phoenix closing immediately - it’s terrible news. Like countless others, it’s one of the first places to publish and take a chance on me, and thanks to them I had adventures like Bowling with Franz Ferdinand and getting to peek behind the scenes during an MTV reality show. It was a great place to get started as a writer and so many talented people have come out of it - on tumblr, in the newspapers, everywhere you read words. Here’s a link to one slim piece that I wrote on Gilmore Girls’ season 6 premiere; basically how it was a proto-Girls-like “quarter life crisis.” Remember those, pre-Recession?

Oh, and I’m pretty sure if it wasn’t for a very early-on mention of Grizzly Bear upstairs at the Middle East where the writer (by Simon Vosick-Levinson, I think? I have a weird memory for this stuff) mentioned their “four-part harmony,” and if I didn’t go to their next show at TT the Bear’s with a notebook in my hand, I would’ve never met the guy in a band who invited me to the party where I met the guy who changed my life. So thanks again, Boston Phoenix!

ETA: An hour later, still gobsmacked. How sad! It hits a variety of different emotional points involving journalism and the ways that Boston’s changing as a city (everything alt and fun from high school/college is GONE now in a way that suggests total obliteration). And reading that someone like Susan Orlean got her start there, and that people could go from The Boston Phoenix onto bigger and better publications, was a big part of the reason I always wanted to write for them. Ugh.

“For my final night’s drive it is snowing heavily. I decide to cover every single geographical point on the Roadrunner map in one long drive, setting out shortly after nine o’clock for Gloucester. It is a beautiful night, the roads empty, the snow falling onto my windscreen in great beautiful plumes, I put my hand outside the window and the flakes float gently, coldly on to my fingers. I drive past the Stop & Shop, I drive out towards Amherst, to south Greenfield. I take in Route 128, the Mass Pike, Route 3, from R9 I loop down to R495, down towards Quincy, I head out to Cohasset, to the rocks. And as I spiral about the snowy landscape I feel like a skater, pirouetting across the ice.”

— The Guardian sent a writer on a rock'n'roll pilgrimage to Massachusetts for the sake of Jonathan Richman’s “Roadrunner.” It’s pretty great! (It is also the inspiration for the current petitioning of Roadrunner as Massachusetts’ state rock'n'roll song … but as a wrinkle, some other delegates have nominated Aerosmith’s “Dream On,” because they don’t get it. It’s super sad. Steven Tyler payola, obviously!)

Had Bunheads on in the background of making breakfast the other morning; half-watching it, I could tell it wasn’t one of their better episodes, a kinda bottle episode thing set in the ballet studio. Fell onto the side of bad quippy, with inexplicable Tommy Lee Jones jokes by teenage boys. Then - and it felt like all of a sudden - I heard this song coming on, “I Predict” by Sparks, which sounded a little like Sparks to me (but I know their new wave-ier stuff) if it was filtered through a clompy, stomping, big beat Queen tube, and since it’s Bunheads, it was this Magic Mike-y group dance with tiny teenagers in silhouette where everyone’s playing a miner in a hardhat.

Little did I know that the video for “I Predict” is equally weird, it’s David Lynch’s very first music video, featuring one of the Sparks stripping to eager customers. MTV banned it because of Ron Spark’s Hitler mustache.

Massachusetts politicians are trying to make The Modern Lovers' "Roadrunner" the official rock song of Massachusetts. →

This is the most delightful news of the day!

itscomplicatedproject:

The issue #1 zines are here! That’s the cover — and the zines as they looked when Niina opened the boxes yesterday — above.

Since the first issue is themed around artists whose work we loved as teenagers, we knew we wanted the issue to look like a school notebook with doodles all over it. Niina did the sketches, and then the amazing Gina of Birds of Lace Press took them and designed this cover.

The zine is 54 pages, and contains essays by Nona Willis Aronowitz, Elisabeth Donnelly, Tom Ribitzky, Brooklyn Copeland, Nina Mashurova, and Judy Berman.

We’ll be sending issue #1 to Kickstarter backers ASAP, including those who ordered both issues. Watch this space for more info on how to buy the zine if you don’t already have a copy coming via Kickstarter (or if you did but also want to buy dozens more copies to distribute to everyone you know).

the start of a thought on violence in film

When the talk about violence in our country shifts to talk about violence in our movies, it feels like the wrong tack to take, sliding away from real issues and real solutions to something more in the air about living in a violent culture and what that means. The latter is very hard to quantify. The former, well, it should be obvious. Maybe things will be changing. I hope that they are.

Film violence is strange to me. I don’t understand why, on average, sexuality is regulated much more stridently than movies where characters fall down and die with no consequence in shootouts. One movie last year bothered me above and beyond the rest:

The Hunger Games (the film version). In what world should that have been a PG-13? In what world did they get away with a PG-13? The film product of the bestselling series was squarely aimed at tweens, and as a result, the film was worse than it could’ve been. I know parents who freaked out about the fact that their 11 year old kids were invited to this film for a birthday party. There’s something craven and gross about aiming this kind of blanded-down edgy content right at kids.

The fight scenes in the games were disturbing. Instead of showing kids-killing-kids and making the audience feel it, viscerally, there was blurry shaky-cam, where you the audience member couldn’t figure out what was going on. Consequently, to me, it felt like the deaths were marginalized and of little importance.

If the movie had been R, on the other hand, the director would’ve had more leeway to linger on the gore, the violence, what it meant and what it means. It could’ve been horrifying. It probably should’ve been! The Hunger Games wasn’t great - Jennifer Lawrence’s soulfulness made it seem like a better film than it was, but like the Twilight films, it was a workmanlike adaptation of a bestseller with the blandest possible choices, when the secret of The Hunger Games is that it’s dealing with issues, choices, morality and ethics. But all those questions are under the cover of ultraviolence presented as bread and circuses.

Sometimes I wonder what it would do to brains if every time somebody was punched or shot-at in a film, if you the audience felt it and understood it as something bad, painful, a snuffing-out of life force. I remember watching the David Gordon Green film Undertow in the theater - there’s a fight scene early on, the sort of fight scene where you’re cringing because it’s ugly and surprising and you actually believe in the hurt. Shockingly, that scene stands out for me, it stands out in my mind because it’s so different. It’s … feeling everything, perhaps, to quote Fiona Apple. Compared to that scene, every other movie is just a nihilistic exercise in style.

Whether it’s rotting our little brains, who knows? But there is something to be said for doing work that wants to illuminate what it’s like to be human (hey, like Mike White and Laura Dern’s Enlightened!) and just doing something that’s saying, look at me, look at this action, feel nothing. I want to feel everything.