Arts Deux

It takes two busses and a train to get on her good side

2012-01-04T18:14:00.000-08:00

Obesity is a delicate issue. There's a lot to discuss there.*

I'm speaking, admittedly, from outside the affected group–I've never dealt with being obese. Right now, though, I'm trying to lose weight; I was unemployed for about two months and severely depressed, and because of that I've gotten badly out of shape and, combined with the usual lack of motivation to go outside in the winter, a bit chubbier than I'd hope to be. I've put this much weight off before, though, and I know that it takes a healthy diet, exercise and patience. For me the patience is the hardest part; I'm a spontaneous, instant-gratification type, and not being able to lose the 15 pounds that I want to drop in a week is irritating to me. Body dysmorphia is a real and terrible thing, and it affects more people than one would expect. Losing weight is hard because you have to notice yourself every single day, have to feel those jeans being a bit too tight, look down at yourself in the shower and face the demon of it.

There is a serious issue in this country with obesity. According to the Center for Disease Control, one out of every three Americans is obese, and about 17% of children and adolescents are obese. Seventeen percent. In my own state of Oregon, at least 25% of the population is obese. I see it every day at work or in transit. It's an epidemic that affects people emotionally and medically, and the environmental impact is surprising–obesity means less people biking and more driving, more companies that make junk and fast food continuing to stay in business and do things to the environment that are incredibly upsetting. Am I saying that stopping obesity will stop global warming? I wouldn't be so bold. But I would argue that a change in lifestyle that emphasizes health and wellness will lead itself to awareness and action–at least, that's my theory on it.

"Hold up, Meg," you say. "Why are you talking about this? Isn't your blog reserved for tiresome rambling about pop culture that no one but you reads anyway? Why so political and shit?"

Well I'll tell you, buddy. The photos at the top of this post are from a campaign called Strong4Life, a statewide campaign in Georgia focused exclusively on childhood obesity. One of their many catchphrases is "stop sugar-coating it, Georgia." Naturally, the ad has been met with some opposition. Its brilliance can't be ignored, though–remember all those anti-drug PSAs that show people tweaked out in a bathroom, or Rachel Leigh Cook smashing a kitchen with a frying pan to represent how heroin destroys lives? Remember the truth campaign (which is apparently still a thing) aimed at tobacco companies that used body bags in their commercials? Good negative advertising relies on shock value. That's really the only way that it works. How long have we been trying to "raise awareness of childhood obesity"? How has that helped the rate of obesity go down? Is it really helpful when the government itself decides that, instead of investing in healthy options for schoolchildren, simply shrugs and says that frozen pizza sauce is a vegetable?

There's this billboard that I go past every day on the way to work that has a picture of a sad, doe-eyed boy of about two or three. The text says something like "he got off the bottle. Now it's his dad's turn." How is that attack on alcoholism–one that uses a child to make a point–any different than one of Strong4Life's videos that has a kid sitting down with his obviously obese mother and asking her "Why am I fat?"

The answer comes down to this: people are sensitive. The excuses pile up: 1) eating healthy is too expensive. 2) Obesity is hereditary. 3) Body obsession is unhealthy, let kids be who they are, they don't need to be skinny like all those celebrities to be beautiful. 4)The government has no right to tell me what to eat. 5)These ads are promoting a negative stereotype of fat kids, which will only empower bullies and increase low self-esteem among kids who already feel bad about themselves.

To which I reply: is sensitive, but weight isn't simply a cosmetic issue, but a health issue; it isn't about looking good in a bikini, it's about living longer and better.

1) Eating healthy is much less expensive than one would think; according to the USDA, most fruits and vegetables cost less than fifty cents a serving, which is half the price of a small fry at Mickey D's.

2) There is evidence that metabolism and appetite are hereditary; however, there is a serious difference between being unable to be skinny and unable to be average.

3) Yes, there is an unhealthy obsession with appearance in this country, which leads to diseases like anorexia and bulimia, but again, this is about health, not sex appeal, and a media-focused lifestyle is one of the things that got us into the habit of obesity in the first place (think of how much we'd have to do if we didn't have a television upon which to watch skinny celebrities do whatever it is they do to make money and be famous?).

4) Go ahead and support whatever Libertarian values you want about how the gov'ment ain't got no right to tell me what to do, but let's point out that school lunches are a very, very small part of a child's life, that the trend of lunches being high-fat, high-sugar and high-sodium is yet another contributor to obesity, and that the reason pizza sauce was called a vegetable was because there were lobbyists for pizza companies convinced congress to vote that way, which means that the gov'ment is tellin' y'all what to eat (I just assume that you think it's okay as long as it's microwaved and full of high fructose corn syrup).

5) Yes, bullying is a serious problem. Low-self esteem and depression are not to be sniffed at, and there is a line that can be crossed when you call someone "fat." But you can't use bullying as an excuse to coddle. Being obese doesn't mean that you're a bad person, or a lesser citizen, or unworthy, unlovable, unattractive, or stupid. But that does not mean that it's okay to be obese. Just like it's not okay to smoke or drink too much or indulge in addictive and damaging drugs (which, by the way, the gov'ment has no qualm with regulating).

Bullying needs to stop across the board, but so does willful ignorance. As Strong4Life notes, ignoring the problem is what got us into it in the first place. It's the most in-your-face evidence of America's unhealthy addiction to excess instead of moderation and blissful stupidity instead of hard truth. The way that children are being affected is the worst part of this; not only do they have no choice in what their parents feed them, but they are being taught that those choices are good, and their bodies are responding accordingly. Do you know why all those kids in L.A. got sick after trying Michelle Obama's promoted pad thai and quinoa? It wasn't because that food is gross. It's because their bodies have been so acclimatized to sodium and corn syrup and cholesterol that the absence of those things makes them feel sick, even though it's ten times better for them in the end.

The problem with the sensitivity issue, the issue of being susceptible to bullying and eating disorders and body dysmorphia, goes back to what i said about my own issues with losing weight. Again, I'm not comparing myself to being obese, but the things I have to do–eat better, exercise more–are along the same lines as someone trying to lose much more weight. And I have a feeling that the problem goes back to patience. After all, how can a society that values fast food easily accept that they have to shop for healthier options, pay attention to what they buy, and cook it themselves? Living healthy and well isn't easy. And there's no such thing as a quick fix; losing weight takes months and months of constant effort and attention. And it's hard to go at something alone. It was hard for me to quit smoking when I lived and worked with smokers, but when I started to spend more time around non-smokers and other people who'd quit, the change was easy. If there was a community that supported a healthy lifestyle–a community, mind you, not just a few posters in the cafeteria–for everyone, then a shift towards healthier, stronger, more active kids would be much less painful than we think.

I have this theory about addiction. It goes like this: though addiction is a real and dangerous thing, there's also a state where one is addicted to the idea of addiction. If you think that you drink constantly because you're an alcoholic and that nothing short six months in the sanitarium will save you, you'll probably just keep drinking and leaning on that crutch of an idea, since you're beyond the point of just accepting responsibility and cutting down. Being depressed works the same way; it's too easy to say "I'm depressed so nothing can make me not depressed and my behavior is thus acceptable" as opposed to "I'm depressed but I need to be responsible for my actions and help myself, despite how difficult it will probably be." Recovery and responsibility is hard to handle. Wallowing and self-pity is easy, and we are too good at doing things the easy way these days.

So, America, I say get off your ass and eat some fucking quinoa. Break a sweat because you have to. Deal with not having the satisfying high of sugar and fats because it'll kill you. And stop being hard on organizations like Strong4Life that are trying to help, not trying to put down fat kids.

*Pun intended? Yeah, sometimes I'm a terrible person.

Television thinks you're stupid.

2011-11-19T12:45:00.000-08:00

First of all, thank the heavens nobody reads this thing, since it has been near on a YEAR since the last time I did anything with it. Can I tell you what a year it's been? No, I can't. I'm thinking that it might just be a novel in the works, or something. It would be called something like "The Year that Everything was Okay and then Wasn't in a Big Way but Hey I Got Through it." Or something. That's the thing about shitty years: you always get through them.

Anyway.

Lately I've been watching a lot of Hulu, catching up on certain shows and starting on others. It's an educational experience: I've learned why I never liked The Office (it makes me sleepy) and why sometimes terrible television is the best television. Specifically, the sadly canceled The Playboy Club.

Oh secret lesbian bunny, we hardly knew ye.

Plots driven by stiletto homicide aside, I'd like to talk about Grimm. All summer long there's been a buzz here in Portland, a stir of excitement for this show, mostly in the form of people commenting on where they were shooting it: "They're shooting that show Grimm in the Pearl district/downtown/Forest Park/the Park Blocks!" At first I knew nothing about it, and truthfully, I didn't give a shit. I went to school in Vancouver, after all, a place that's great at being any other city in the world besides Vancouver. So I was not only used to shooting locations, I was used to avoiding them. That being said, I never actually saw the location shooting, but slowly I learned what it was. It was a cop show. It was a cop show about fairy tales.

A word of warning to the folks who make this show. I know about fairy tales. And what I don't know, my best ladyfriend knows more.

So when the show premiered to surprisingly outstanding ratings, I was intrigued. It marketed itself, I thought, for a niche audience: true, everyone loves cop dramas, but one apparently based off the work of The Brothers Grimm? Granted, I had a feeling that most people in this town who still watch television were watching it, given that it was all over the news and there's nothing Portlanders love more than, well, Portland.

So I booted up the ol' Hulu and checked it out.

Shit was shit, all I gotta say. The first episode involved two of my favorite horrible dramatic lines, "Your parent's didn't die in a crash....they were murdered." and "Where is she? WHERE IS SHE?!"

I'd devolve into the pithy details involving plot and characters and blah blah blah, but mostly I'd like to explain a few things that I've learned in these four episodes that I've watched:

It takes about ten seconds to get to the deep, dark forest from pretty much anywhere in Portland
The streetcar goes to Hillsboro
Not only do Portland Police detectives carry their guns all the time, they whip 'em out at the drop of a hat
Portland is full of monster type persons, and they all have basements where they keep their victims, usually in cages, occasionally on a four-post bed
Chemotherapy just makes your hair fall out, the rest of you stays pretty strong
There's a junkyard right next to Union Station
The Portland Police Bureau looks like somewhere Sam Spade would hang out
You can track someone's location based on a picture they took on their phone and then posted on Facebook
Queen bees always leave the hive
tree frogs live in Portland, and they're actually toads
Wanna track a car? There's an iPad app for that.

Auditory Feasting

2010-12-10T13:53:00.000-08:00

I don't pretend to be a music critic, nor anyone who really knows that much about music in general. I was once told by someone in a band that they sort of hated people who gushed about music when they weren't actually musicians. But here I am, gushy gush.

Anyway, December is the time of year when we look back on the twelve months that were, and reflect. And though I can't think of that many positive world events (which I will probably delve more into later, though given my less than perfect blogging schedule, will not jot down on this or any site), films (the summer season was lackluster, at best; I was pleased at finally seeing The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, though that's the only thing that really stands out for me), or television shows (The good is still good, and.... yeah), I can at least attest that it's been a damn good year for music.

How can I say that confidently? The same as anyone should. When I say "it's been a damn good year for music", what I mean is "it's been a damn good year for music that I like." Small-minded? Possibly. I have no problem with understanding how you might like something like Lady Antebellum or Taylor Swift or Katy Perry, because to each one's own (a response I like to call American Shruggism, which is what you get when someone says "whatever, man, it's a free country"). But I won't really be behind admitting that the release of these albums did anything to solidify 2010 as a good year in music, no matter how many undeserved Grammys they will, undoubtedly, win, as the former two examples are nominated for, like thirty awards.

Note to those who trust the Grammy awards to dictate the best of the best: don't. The Grammy award will go to the least innovative, smiliest, most likely to appeal to baby boomers nominee.

So anyway, my personal year in music has nothing to do with anyone else's year in music. I sounded off in reader polls, I've done my part. And now I have to think; do I send out recommends to other music-lovers? Just in case they've missed something? Though I am asserting my own individual taste in music, I'm sure my choices won't come as a shocker to that many people. And truthfully, I'm not going to be completely informed: I've never really listened to the The National. I don't like Sufjan Stevens. Such is life, such is taste, such is experience. That's how it works out.

Here's what I thought of my favorite music of 2010: badass. It made me want to assert myself and be happy and spend an entire day carrying a baseball bat over my shoulder just because I can. It was dark sunglasses and smirks. And when it wasn't that, it was sweet, and dreamy, and creative, and poppy. It was standing on the roof of a skyscraper during the day, where you can watch birds flutter by and write poetry and look over the beauty of the world. And it was standing on the same roof at night, when you're having a fantastic dance party, and it was standing on that roof a few hours later when everyone had danced themselves weary, and you can look over the city alone, and feel infinite possibility, and be Batman. Here's the soundtrack that makes that possible, broken down fairly easily:

If you're only gonna get a couple albums, get:

Titus Andronicus - The Monitor

I've already spent a little time discussing the garage-punk New Jersey team that has renewed my confidence in a genre that has, in my opinion, become too muddled by old rockers who won't leave and young rockers who prefer crying and tight pants and clichés to actually saying anything worthwhile. Patrick Stickles' Oberstian warble finds its place in a sound that somehow seems to be the true bastard great-grandchild of american folk. It's a sound of a snake growing out of the skin that it needs to shed but can't truly get away from. "I never wanted to change the world," he sings in "A More Perfect Union", "but I'm looking for a new New Jersey." The Monitor takes inspiration from the Civil War, but sounds hardly archaic, Stickles observes "you'll see blue trampling over grey, and green over brown" as though it is still happening in someone's backyard in Virginia. The conflict of blue and grey is a backdrop for conflicts that resonate long after the blood has dried in the battlefield; it seems eerily apropo that, at a time of Tea Partiers and divisions within political parties and unpopular wars and the growing gap between rich and poor, old and young, that the album would open with a quote from Honest Abe himself: "As a nation of free men, we will live for ever...or die by suicide." But a few pounding bars later, and ten drinks into the night, you find yourself crying out to another altruism, and finding delight in the Bacchanal brutality of American history: "Tramps like us, baby, we were born to die!"

Vampire Weekend - Contra

"Did he really just say 'I looked psychotic in a balaklava'?" a friend asked after hearing the opening lyric to Contra, Vampire Weekend's sophomore album. It sounded ridiculous. And it is. You almost want to hate Vampire Weekend for being such a Cupie Doll of an indie band (a title which I would only give to the likes of Sufjan Stevens). But then, you'd realize that you're hating them out of a Scrooge-like contempt for joyful things, and that Contra is, at its heart, a love letter from someone you met at summer camp years ago that you just rediscovered under your bed and are reading out on the porch, in the sun, probably drinking Horchata. It is brimming like a root beer float with afro-pop and M.I.A. samples. Contra is perfect, and it is unapologetically sincere. This is not music to be kept secret by those who covet so that their beloved bands won't sell out. The way I see it, a Vampire Weekend song on every radio. As ridiculous as it might be in its lyrics and its preciousness, there's no reason not to like it.

Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Where to begin. In terms of entertainers, it may have been a year dominated by Kanye West; after retreating from the world in the shadow of his humiliating faux pas at the VMAs, West slowly re-emerged on Twitter, on the arm of a new model, and he began to show that he was not going to retreat and lick his wounds and never return. As followers of his website learned, he had been engineering an incredible ensemble album. The first single "Power" was released, and West reassured those who were hoping for great things: beneath a chanting chorus and a pounding beat, he rhetorically declared "How Ye doin'? I'm survivin'/I was drinkin' earlier, now I'm drivin'." "Power" proved to be the perfect song to introduce us to the songs that would soon compile Fantasy: as innovative as the promising music West produced before his rap career, as egotistic as the pink polo-wearing playboy on Graduation, but as self-aware and the autotuned mourner of 808s and Heartbreaks. Kanye West seems to have figured out his place as the 21st century celebrity, where it is impossible to hide from criticism even for a moment, where every mistake or act of stupidity might be broadcast within a few minutes. Instead of hiding like Michael Jackson or crying with anger against it, West has embraced the power that he has, and is nursing its potential as a tool to understand himself, rather than a mask that will destroy his humanity. "We found bravery in my bravado" he declares, and you realize that he's hit the nail on the head: that cockiness is douchey, yes, but it's also courageous in its own, dark way. It's the darkness that this album, as the title suggests, embraces: on "Monster", a song already famous for Nicki Minaj's schizophrenically perfect guest verse, the chorus declares to any naysayers: "I'mma need to see your fuckin' hands at the concert," daring them to criticize West for his music instead of his easily hated on public image. And, at least in this case, criticism seems difficult. If nothing else, he's put together an outstanding house band, with enough talent to make Quincy Jones' phone book seem scant. Bon Iver. Elton John. La Roux. Rhianna. Gone is the image of Kanye West as a rogue douchebag that no one will talk to because he was mean to poor Taylor Swift. This is a man who, apparently, does have all that power; and the best we can do is enjoy every damn second of it.

If you only want to hear a few songs, listen to:

Florence and the Machine - "Dog Days Are Over"

Florence and the Machine are up for a Best New Artist Grammy this year, and it'll be a shame to see them lose to Justin Bieber. Don't despair, though: because "Dog Days Are Over" might be the most uplifting song of the year, and in this recession, we need it. Light and flighty harps, soaring vocals, and a heart-pumping chorus that really does make you want to do that running-through-a-crowded-city-street-because-you-can thing.

Cee Lo Green - "Fuck You"

At last. Someone said it. And they said it with soul. As much as I like to be picky about good, deep lyrics, there's really nothing better than knowing that, instead of being Byronic about a lost love, you just want to go "Fuck you, and fuck her too." The censored, Gwenyth Paltrow version of the song has it as "Forget you", which is a bit too hopeful, suggesting that the act of forgetting someone is the best way to deal with the situation of feeling rejected. The truth is, it isn't. The best thing to do is to just say "fuck it," with anger and humor and hubris. This is the real message that every advice columnist should give but is too afraid to: if someone gets you down, they can go fuck themselves. It's a rejection song that serves as a realization of this freedom, and thus a celebration of it. And you'd better dance to it.

Janelle Monáe - "Tightrope"

It's nice when people are have fun that inspires you to have fun. I'm noticing that pretty much everything I'm listing on this post fills me with some sort of happy thought. No matter how depressing this year was, there was music that made me smile and bounce and know that I was going to get through it. And then there's this, introduced to me months ago but not really appreciated until recently for, shall we say, personal reasons. I'm too young to have any actual memory of James Brown at his heyday, but it had to be something like "Tightrope"-- you can almost hear the ghost of "Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine". And then Big Boi (who had a damn good year of his own) shows up and I'm fucking sold. And I have shoes that look like that, so, you know how it is.

Sleigh Bells - "Riot Rhythm"

I don't know if Sleigh Bells is for you. Sleigh Bells is what happens when you take airy electro-pop and bury it alive and it punches through its own coffin. Theirs is, in my opinion, the best debut of the year, Treats is abounding with extremely loud rhythm and sweet vocals, and "Riot Rhythm", with its choral "You gotta march!" sounding like a playground chant, is a solid, standout track. It's a song that should have been played during Spike Jonze's adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, instead of what Karen O recorded. In fact, you could see Sleigh Bells as a proper heir to Master and Fever to Tell Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and thankfully so, since the genre of "pounding drums with shredding guitar and screaming lady vocals" need never die.

Girl Talk - "Let it Out"

Girl Talk might be the true artist of the twenty-first century. Where others do various incarnations of "post-" genres, or sample and cover 80s classics, or try to sound like something we've heard before, noone embraces the present and the past as honestly, as joyfully, and as skillfully as Greg Gillis, alias Girl Talk. All Day, this year's offering of Gillis' illegal art, is an astounding feat in and of itself, but just listening to six minutes exemplifies just what it is that makes Girl Talk unique. While there are plenty of mashup artists, or at least people who attempt to put a couple songs together to make a new product, no one does it as well, or makes it sound so fresh.

And, if you only get one thing from the entire year, it ought to be:

Joanna Newsom's Have One On Me is an album that is daunting to listen to all the way through. It clocks in at just a bit over two hours, and this is something you really ought to listen to. And if you know Newsom's style, you wouldn't be in the least bit surprised that she made a triple LP of completely new material. Have One On Me is funkier than the folky Ys and the freaky Milk-Eyed Mender. This is something Joni Mitchell could have done if she was the type to write songs that average in at about seven minutes. It's an album that you could listen to all the way from my house to Seattle and never get bored with, and one that goes perfectly with the road; she's singing about love, kindness, loss, and hope. If there's anyone who can truly symbolize the flicker of light at the bottom of Pandora's box, my money is on Joanna Newsom. Have One On Me is her fullest album yet, and only the late arrival of Kanye West could have ousted it from its rightful spot at the top of the list.

In the end, there were a couple dozen really great albums that came out this year, which I either haven't heard or haven't listened to enough to know what to write about them. But for me, the above albums and tracks will be what I remember of the year that was, that will carry me into the year to come.

This is going to take me a while.

2010-05-30T00:04:00.000-07:00

Nothing is better than a giant philosophical revelation at midnight. Here we go.

Our human understanding of the world is based on opposites, dualities that are based on incomparable polarities. Some would refer to this as a more "westernized" way to see humanity and society, but that is frankly for another blog to discuss. I will, however, be discussing things that exist within a mainly Western tradition, so I'll keep it in mind. The stigma against dualities is that they create a "black and white" understanding of the world, i.e. an "us or them" scenario, in which there is no room left for interpretation or the so-called "gray matter" in the middle. But I find this understanding of duality as stubborn as it claims duality itself to be. I am comfortable in this interpretation because I know that both the black side and the white carry so many complexities within themselves that their essence as overruling opposites only strengthens one's understanding of what they contain; much like the highest dogma of a religion lends to all of its mythology; Christian parables are varied, yet they all carry the same undertone of piety, sacrifice, Christian love, et cetera. Opposites are not so much unwavering structures as they are themes through which to understand the world and culture we live in. It is this definition of duality which I will use for my argument.

As stated above, one commonly phrased set of opposites is black and white, through which we can understand the basic nature of duality, at least in the Western tradition. Opposites are, by definition, extremities that have nothing in common, save for the theme on which they rest. And (especially in the Western tradition, though I have no doubt that this thought is more or less natural) they have values: Good and Evil, Love and Fear, God and Satan, Heaven and Hell. Each of these values lends to other, more seemingly neutral opposites: Day and Night, for example, are often valued as positive and negative (respectively), much as Up and Down are, given associations one might have with the brightness of Heaven and the darkness of Hell.

And then there is Life and Death. There is probably not a more potent set of opposites. On the plane of existence, there is no gray matter: a thing is either living, or it is dead. A human being is either living in some capacity, or they are a corpse, and where the rest of them goes is up to whomever buries them, and it certainly does not make their body less dead. And, of course, the values associated with Life and Death need not be described. It is positive to be alive. We have always viewed death with negativity; the only idea that makes it tolerable to most is the idea of a return to life--through reincarnation, perhaps, or in an afterlife--so that one does not have to exist on the negative pole. I believe that it is in human activity that we can see our homage to both Life and to Death, with a pair of opposites that is not so clichéd: Art and War. In this I propose that Art pays homage to Life, and War to Death. Though this interpretation may seem a bit obvious for such verbosity, hang on for a sec. I'm getting somewhere.

I'll start with Art and Life. Life, in the human understanding of it, has a great deal to do with Creation, not only in the religious sense, but in our day-to-day observations: pregnancy and birth are "the miracle of life." Evolution is life's show of creativity, even: the traits adapted by a species like the molding of a sculptor's clay. Thus, the creation of art is, as the saying goes, an imitation of life; not in the sense that art merely mirrors what happens in reality, but that it attempts to do what existence has done for millenia. It is man trying to replicate the mythic acts of Gods, to repeat the creative action on a much smaller scale. Art exists, also, to validate life: since it replicates what might be the ultimate positive pole, art is proof that life works. You needn't go further than consider that religion itself--the tool which so many use to validate and explain life--may be the highest form of human artistic accomplishment.

War is easily comparable to Death. War serves as a vehicle for death: it is defined by lives destroyed, by civilizations obliterated, ultimate weapons that destroy life's chances of continuing. But war is also conflict of any kind; quarrels and barbed statements, childlike destruction as well as adult cynicism. Politics, for example, will always be warlike, especially within the United States, where they rely so heavily on the Liberal/Conservative structure. I am not assuming that politicians are agents of death, but I will suggest that the destructive tendencies within politics occur more out of Freud's Thanatos than his Eros. This is also what I meant earlier, by the complexities within the polarities: Politics are Conflict, and Conflict is War, and War is Death, but that is not meant to conclude that Politics are Death. Merely that they bear that connotation, that subconscious understanding that to make a career of disagreement is to invite negativity into one's life.

I have always believed Virginia Woolf's idea that good art is not political. This does not mean that politics and art need to be separated. Art can--and, in many cases, should--comment, critique, satirize, or at least acknowledge the political and social issues of its time. But Art cannot be used primarily as a weapon, it must exist, as I have said, as a validation for the importance of life. Even nihilistic, absurdist art can do this; so long as the effect it has is profound to the point that the observer or audience feels moved (intellectually stimulated, "alive"), they have validated life. They have made the audience aware. This is not easily accomplished. Yes, I love art for art's sake, and I will always encourage others to create it, but one cannot validate life while creating something that refuses to be aware of as many facets of existence--good or bad--as possible. But art that does not have that great profundity, the transcendence which we crave which fills us with the life-affirming sensation, eventually suffers for itself. Sometimes this is simply bad art, which there is a lot of in the world (which cannot be blamed, after all, not every living thing is an agent of love, and besides, bad art is still done with the hope of celebrating creativity, so in application, it is very good), but when it is combined with the political, the cynical, the biased or enraged, the bad art fails to cover up the message within, and so it is revealed as a wolf in poorly shorn sheep's clothing.

You can probably find dozens of examples of such failures. In my opinion, for example, the dystopian futures in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and George Orwell's 1984 are similar, yet Atwood's over-arching political ramblings and observations eventually kill her prose, whereas Orwell's gift for suspense and terror make us almost forget what we're reading about, though we remain aware of his message, letting it rest between the lines as opposed to in bold print. Artists who go for so-called "shock value" bear the same cross as faulted political tellings: they introduce jarring, conflicted elements without using them as small additions to the overall piece. The Saw films will never be real art. Eraserhead tiptoes along the line between meaninglessly disjointed and truly moving, and depending who you are, it falls too easily on one side or the other.

Now I am not saying that all works of art should be positive and have happy endings, the affirmation of life that I seek out is not so much a wedding at the end of the play as it is that unspoken gut reaction one feels after experiencing real art, an understanding below the skin, that effects your life. Think of how many times you have heard someone say "this album/book/movie changed my life"? Even the saddest things confirm this: Think of "Eleanor Rigby," or Johnny Cash singing "Hurt," the pain in Mozart's Requiem, the trembling, mad look on Saturn's face as he devours his children in Goya's painting, all are profoundly effective and possibly timeless pieces of art that are not "affirming" in the kindergarden graduation sense of the word. They make the air shimmer, they shift your perspective, they help you feel more alive.

I can think of countless experiences like this. But what is truly unfortunate is that there are more experiences of the former kind: art that is destroyed by its own "message." Art should not have an overall message. It should contain a message, yes, perhaps, but this is only a portion of the entire experience. Political ideas themselves do not change people. Art changes people, and gradually the politics inherent might slip through and help create an opinion. I never said art was perfect. But I will say this: it is not War. It is not Death. It is Life. Artists, as few as they are and as much as they seem overshadowed amongst others with different careers, are, in a way, the medieval monks of modern art, slaving away in the candlelight so that they might give the might of creation permanence and glory. Keep up the good work, guys. Make us feel alive.

Nicknames:

2010-03-25T15:29:00.000-07:00

I have several. Off the top of my head, from several eras of my life:

Meggie

Megara

Bagheera

Megasaurus

Shmeg

Megatron

Divney

Tiger-Eye

Scooter

Egg Meg

Nutmeg

Panther

Emo Panther

Major League Baseball

Megala

Megnifisance

I think there's a trend here.

Stencils? Stencils!

2010-03-15T19:29:00.001-07:00

So I've been making some stencils lately, and putting them on T-Shirts. Standard DIY fare. They're out of order, but I can't figure out why the Facebook uploader is a stupid ass jerk whore.

This is the back of a peacoat, complete with a Hamlet reference. What is the Hamlet reference? It's a compass with a mark at north-north-west. Get it?

Power to the left! I am going to re-make this in a different color, because black fists are sort of taken by that one group.

Tools of the trade: the four stencils that I've made thus far.

Skele-hands and Jackalope shirt completed.

The beginnings of the Jackalope shirt.

Skele-hands.

This and the next one show the process of stencilin', which is really not worth photographing.

See? How exciiiiiiiiiiiiting.

Colin's skele-hand shirt, up close. Of all the skull hand stuff, this is probably my favorite.

Colin's shirt, again. I never get tired of this stencil. Don't mind that spot on the right side of the hand, that was a drop of water that Colin put on it to get a bit of paint off.

WoMonday

2010-03-08T12:08:00.001-08:00

Happy International Women's Day!

It is bothersome that, of the 365 days in a year, there's only one that's meant to commemorate women. True, March is also technically Women's History Month, but that's not as recognized as Black History Month (and hey, did you know that November is Native American Heritage month? I'll bet you didn't). To put it lightly, to represent any minority with a day or a month is more or less a conundrum: "Hey, sorry you've been all oppressed and misrepresented and stuff, nice job still being tough and overcoming obstacles. Can't we just give you, like, a Monday in March and call it even?"

Honestly, I would hate being a white man. You never get the opportunity to be interesting or badass.

Despite my misgivings about the whole "you get one day, ladies" thing, I would like to take this opportunity to point out a few of my favorites, the women that I'd have on my Fantasy Football Except Not Football, More Like Historical Figures Or Something team. If you don't know them, Google them. Learn a little somethin'. Most of these gals should be familiar, though:

Abigail Adams

"Remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation." Basically, yeah.

Ada Lovelace

First computer programmer. Take that, nerds.

Clara Bow

Star of the silent screen, the original "IT" girl, helped re-define femininity and, with her flapper image, helped open the doors for female sexual freedom.

Virginia Woolf

"The story of men's opposition to women's emancipation is perhaps more interesting than the story of the emancipation itself."

Kate Chopin

Wrote The Awakening, possibly the first true work of Women's Fiction in the United States.

Dorothy Parker

Wit extraordinaire, poet, socialite, co-founder of the New Yorker, my personal goal in life.

Marie Curie

First person to win two Nobel Prizes. In case you didn't know.

Mary Seacole

The other heroic nurse in the Crimean War.

Hillary Rodham Clinton

First female senator from New York, first First Lady to run for elected office. Oh yeah, and she was almost president.

My Mom

Quite possibly the best.

2010-03-02T00:07:00.001-08:00

Quick Post: Albums That Own My Life Right Now

2010-02-23T19:34:00.000-08:00

I don't pretend to be the type that's an expert on music. Usually, I'll love something for its lyricism, or I'll say something stupid like "and then there's this part where the strings go wraaaaaaaaah and it's awesome!" The truth is, for those of us who aren't really musicians (I play guitar, but that's it, and I'm not even remotely good), all we can say about music is what we like, and damned if we can say anything smart about technique or composition. That doesn't mean that I don't know what I'm talking about, just that I don't have the know-how to say it. In any case, here are three albums that are owning my shit, for no other reason than I like them. Look them up, listen for yourself, I doubt you'll regret it. And with the exception of Knives Don't Have Your Back, they're pretty new.

Edited out the parts about France and husbandry.

2010-02-21T18:35:00.000-08:00

GIve thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportion'd thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar;
The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new hatch'd, unfledg'd comrade. Beware
of entrance to a quarrel, but, being in,
Bear't that the opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgement.
Costly thy habits as thy purse can buy,
But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparent oft proclaims the man.
Neither a borrower, nor a lender be;
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Hamlet, am I right? Even if it is from the dumbest character in the play, the words themselves are more or less helpful. It seems contradictory at first: do all these things to please people, but be true to yourself! And yet, at this point in my life, it makes a sort of sense to me:

"Give thy thoughts no tongue, Nor any unproportion'd thought his act": Keep your thoughts to yourself, and don't act rashly.

"Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar; The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel; But do not dull thy palm with entertainment Of each new hatch'd, unfledg'd comrade.": be nice and open to other people, but not too casual, keep your old friends close to your heart since they've been there for a long time and can be trusted, but don't waste your time with new friends who don't know you yet.

"Beware of entrance to a quarrel, but, being in, Bear't that the opposed may beware of thee.": Don't fight, but if you fight, you win! I like the phrase "the opposed may beware of thee." Don't beat them, but let them know that you don't appreciate your shit being fucked with.

"Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice; Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgement.": pay close attention to people, but don't make yourself very well known, size everyone up, but don't judge them immediately. A lot of this makes me think of the "every time I meet someone I think of how I could fight them." idea. Listen closely but don't be too loud, don't get into fights but by all means finish them, don't judge people, but size up their weaknesses anyway.

"Costly thy habits as thy purse can buy, But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy; For the apparent oft proclaims the man." : Don't be tacky. Clothes make the man. Buy LOTS of them.

"Neither a borrower, nor a lender be; This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.": So this is the best-known and most often quoted thing that Polonius ever does in the play. "To thine own self be true" is a pretty heavy mantra, in any case, but I totally dig it. The hard part here is reconciling being true to oneself while also being more or less a spy to everyone else. I think it's perfectly possible.

Pooooooooooooooooem

2010-01-12T23:50:00.000-08:00

I am confessing and repeating

(doing what poets have done too long

and too often

and with every metaphor)

My heart is yours to grow.

It will be poetry, for you

it will have assonance

and rhyme with penance

laughing and skipping

behind your shadow,

like a small girl in a blue coat,

so slight her balloon lifts her

off the ground as she goes, so oh!

That will be my voice,

the hopes in my mind,

a breath that will emerge

so light from this heavy frame.

Poetry, mostly love

from a mostly heart:

something shuddering shimmering

off in the water, far out

from where your feet rest,

the sand creeping on your toes,

the sun crawling down.

Books To Get Out Of The Way

2010-01-04T22:03:00.000-08:00

Having now read On The Road, the apparent crown jewel of the Beat Generation (at this point, I prefer "Howl", Allen Ginsberg's poem, but whatevs), I can safely summarize it as: meh.

I should go into some detail, just in case someone 1) reads this blog and 2) loves On The Road to no end. I got what Kerouac was doing easy enough: taking wanderlust, individualism, jazz, and a new idea of what writing should be and setting it down to paper. And though Sal Paradise's adventures gave me a serious desire for being out on the road myself, there wasn't anything within the book that struck me as divinely profound (see the "the only ones for me are the mad ones" quote, which may be one of the most common amongst the hipster set). The language, once, jive, was archaic, the motivations less rebellious, the sex and drugs blasé. At it's heart, it was a good story, but in all honesty I don't see what all the fuss is about, so shoot me.

Anyway, this brings me to my big point of this post: a list! List list list. Today's theme is:

The Top 10 Books To Get Out Of The Way Before Graduating High School

Like it says, these are the top 10 books to read before graduating High School. These aren't necessarily the cream of the literary crop, but they do contain all that profound self-realization crap that most teens look for in books, as well as giving them a good idea of just what a good book ought to be. Naturally, most of these books are on school reading lists, if not, then hand-worn paper back copies of them are shared over the lunch table, where sixteen-year-olds declare things like "dude, this book changed my life" or "read this, though really, it's seriously deep shit". And these words ring true when we are young, I remember feeling like my brain worked differently after reading some of them. But then something happens when we graduate and grow up: is it a loss of idealism? The immersion into deeper, more nuanced things? Whatever it may be, when we read these books for the first time after reaching a certain age, the tone shifts, the language becomes sour, and we are left unimpressed by revelations that would have floored us five years before. Like an inoculation, make sure that every teenager you know reads these books before turning 19:

10.
Farenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)

9.
Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brönte)

8.
The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemmingway)

7.
To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)

6.
The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)

5.
On The Road (Jack Kerouac)

4.
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

3.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)

2.
1984 (George Orwell)

1.
The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)

In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness

2009-12-29T22:52:00.000-08:00

Christmas happened again (it does that), and amongst many other wonderful gifts from many wonderful people, one that stood out was a small book from my mother called You're a Genius All the Time; which is a collection of maxims that Jack Kerouac outlined in reference to writing. There are about 30 of them, but these are my personal favorites:

Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy

Submissive to everything, open, listening

Be in love with your life

Something that you feel will find its own form

Blow as deep as you want to blow

Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind the unspeakable visions of the individual

No time for poetry but exactly what is

Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog

The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye

Write in recollection and amazement for yourself

Believe in the holy contour of life

Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind

Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better

Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning

No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language, knowledge

Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it

Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form

In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness

Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better

You're a Genius all the time

This stuff hit me pretty hard, sad as it is to say. As someone who imagines herself to be a writer, I spend very little time writing; my new job at this coffee place downtown takes up a lot of my energy (I think during my interview I was a little too enthusiastic about the possibility of opening at 5:30 in the morning, but it's not so bad), and now that I have a somewhat social life, I spend my days off blustering around. Not that I'm wasting my time, quite the contrary; I've had a better Christmas season than the past two, when there was nothing to do and no one to do it with. But my New Year's resolution '09 was (I think) to publish something, and unless that Erotic Short that I wrote for that show in February was accepted, then we can count this year as un-resolved. In any case, it's inspired me to keep a writing journal, but it's been harder and harder for me to keep a clear head that would facilitate writing. In violation of my usual blog-rule of keeping my personal life out of my posts, here are some vague reasons why:

-Probably still bitter about getting my heart all broke this summer;

-Wanting to have financial independence but being unable to keep two nickels to rub together, hence too often being stressed about self-inflicted financial problems;

-Thinking that I have the best of intentions but then realizing possibly too late that I'm more selfish than I am generous;

-Having feelings I can't express for various reasons, leaving them like the bitter aftertaste of hazelnuts in my mouth;

-Being afraid of what I can't control;

-Refusing to accept that I can't control it;

-Hating myself for all of the above, and

-Causing myself undue stress, pain, and depression from all that self-hatred.

What sucks the most is that all of that crap is internalized--it isn't something that anyone else has anything to do with, and it isn't something that affects anyone else. This means that I have to take responsibility for and deal with it on my own. The horrible thing about 2009 is that, despite all the sea changes that I've experienced, it's been a grand old time for disappointments, or at least let-downs. I don't want to list them all, they'd end up being redundant, and a lot of them are either resolved or don't cause me any worry any more. But it's still weight that I've carried, and though I might be mostly relieved, a lot of the experience has left me weakened, which makes the whole internalization even worse: I can't ask anyone for help. I have to deal with it on my own.

This situation ought to be more of a challenge than a burden. I have caused or suffered all of my problems alone, I should deal with them alone, thus making me the only one who can give myself strength. I'm too good at doing the opposite; discussing my issues to the point of whining and then placing all my self-worth in the opinions that others have of me (though it isn't a peer-group thing, usually it's one or two people on whom all my happiness relies). My best friend, who is one of the people who I rely on, called this unhealthy, and I can't think of a better possible word. My refusal to rely on myself takes me too often to a perceived point of no return, and I end up drowning in myself. When I was a teenager, it was simple self-pity, but now it's self-loathing, which is more dangerous: I am the person I trust the least and fear the most.

And yes, this is all complete naval-gazing, but like I said, my problems demand such a vantage point. What I am going through is petty compared to what many others experience in their lives. There is no point where I can call what I feel sorrow. But this is all the more reason to confront it, and the perspective of "other people have it worse" changes the approach I take but it doesn't make the workload any smaller. And if I do want to, as Kerouac writes, be in love with my life, I have to find some sort of love for myself. And I can't do that simply by listing off my better qualities. I know that there are things that make me a good person. I strive to be a good person. But, as Owen Wilson said in Zoolander, I gotta straighten some shit out.

So this will be my pre-New Year's Resolution: by Friday, I will expand upon the above list of vague things that are wrong with me, and make an outline of what to do and how to approach each issue when it rears its ugly head. It's a very self-help-five-step-program way to do it, but I think that my happiness and the happiness that those I care about the most-- who are too often hurt by what I've done--is more important than my pride or my insistence on being tortured. I would rather get over myself and use that energy to be creative, and do what I'd hoped to accomplish this year. And it may have taken me a long time to figure all of this out, and it happened only because my life started to strain me more than ever, but at least it's happening. I intend to make the most of it.

Please don't whisper sweet nothings in my ear when the sound of shredding vocal cords is all I wanna hear

2009-12-15T14:25:00.000-08:00

Hey guys, remember Desaparecidos? Probably not. The only people who remember Desaparecidos are likely just Bright Eyes fans who know the band through lead singer/lyricist/future folk monster Conor Oberst. Honestly, isn't that a little perverse? Congrats, Desaparecidos, you will always be known as "that band Conor Oberst was in that wasn't Bright Eyes, after he was/wasn't in The Faint, before he did solo stuff and way before Monsters of Folk." Tough break. When I was in my Saddle Creek Records phase (have I mentioned that before? I feel like I say it every third post), I actually liked Desaparecidos a bit; they were more awake and less thoughty than Bright Eyes, while still keeping Oberst's overwhelming defeatist angst that he carried so well in that part of the Aughts, before he was slightly miscast as our generation's Dylan.

Listening to them now, though, there are parts I snort at too easily; the overly-social lyrics ("opportunity, no it don't exist/It's the opiate of the populace"), Oberst's screaming that gets whiny so soon it just sounds like he's crying-fighting ("I don't think she likes me!"). But for what he and his band mates were doing, they did it well: almost-punk basement rock; which is what Punk should have turned into instead of getting sidetracked into New Wave (not that it was a mistake) or Grunge (which was a serious mistake).

The only ever released one album, Read Music/Speak Spanish, and it is–with the exception of the few disparages that I mentioned above–not that bad at all. You can almost feel Oberst's spit coming out the speakers as he mumble-screams about divorce and capitalism, the guitars are lo-fi enough to absorb but not be overwhelmed by, and the bass and drums sound more like they're coming up from the floor below instead of from iTunes. They play infomercials over their bridges, it's hardcore without being actually hardcore, and it's rock without having even a drop of douchewater. You could never imagine them being anywhere larger than a dive bar, and with good reason; this is the sort of music that stadiums ruin, the perfect argument against the wide open spaces of crap like Warped Tour.

It might be for this last reason that bands like Desaparecidos never really did make the big time, the music has been around for a long time, but it's hard to transport the songs out of the local venue and into anything else, and it's even harder to say of lo-fi rock that it's supposed to sound that way, especially when it can be done so poorly. But oh my dear reader, worry not. Because, after more or less forgetting that I wanted to listen to it, I listened to The Airing of Grievances, the first full-length by New Jersey's Titus Andronicus. And it is very, very good.

I don't really know that much about Titus Andronicus, so I won't pretend to figure out something biographical (everything that I mentioned above that is of that ilk is only due to my aforementioned Saddle Creek phase). I will, of course, note that in my previous post, I not only mentioned the Shakespearean play that the band took its name from, but quoted from a speech that singer Patrick Stickles himself recites at the end of the album's opener, "Fear and Loathing in Mahwah, NJ", a song which also might contain my favorite possible breakup lyric of the year: "the way we hold each other so tight would look more like a noose if held up to the light/because we betray each other in dreams every night/now let's never speak of it again, all right?"

Stickles' vocals are, as a matter of fact, closely interchangeable from Conor Oberst's baby-punk screams, but they seem to arise more out of desperation and a "fuck you" (or as he himself says, "fuck everything! Fuck me!") attitude instead of just straight up anger at the way things are, he sings with self-loathing and indulgence at the same time, shout-growling "there's nothing I've ever done I didn't learn to be ashamed of", and later, "I hope I never get my fill of pushing this boulder up this hill." And while we're on the subject of Sisyphus, I ought to point out that this album's got plenty for the tongue-in-cheek intellectual: not only does the band borrow from Shakespeare's tragedy, but Sickles also quotes from The Stranger, makes a semi-oblique reference to a W.H. Auden poem, and seems to be one of the few who can do Biblical referencing well. Go team.

Somehow The Airing of Grievances manages to be sincere and ironic, breakneck and thoughtful, angry and contemplative at the same time. And for once, it is a take on lo-fi production that I can get behind, like The Strokes' Is This It, only faster and less of a hipster. It seems to sound the way it does because that's just the best way to hear it; not because they couldn't afford better production, and not because they could afford better production but wanted to seem more indie. And, long story short, I want to see them live, it seems like I'd get bloody and like it, which is really not something that ever happens in my case. Where the audience at the Desaparecidos show bounced their knees and nodded to the beat, Titus Andronicus is more like when the Violent Femmes scream "When I say dance, you'd best dance, motherfucker!"

How do I just end this by geeking out over Shakespeare?

2009-12-13T17:54:00.000-08:00

Though this is the Christmas season, where most people are supposed to be thinking on the greatest birth of births, here is a poem that exemplifies my hate-on for birth in general. It's one of those things that I don't like people getting romantic about. I cringe at the idea of home or natural births; when it comes time for me to have mine, I'm more than happy to get pumped full of drugs and get that child out no matter how. So long as the result is a healthy baby, I don't care how it's done.

Anyway, the poem:

We are born in a horrible blood-bathed world
(we would call it so had we seen it,)
pulled or ripped from shaven motherhood,
smelling like nothing human, if we are lucky
breathing, not covered in shit.
The world outside is too cold, it is no place
for a sensible person. Why were we so warm before?
Why live for months in a personal ocean,
needing no air or hands,
what joke was it that chose that for the prologue
and not the play?

Sliced and tied off like a tourniquet
Fresh meat ready to be rolled in bread-crumbs
before being placed in a second oven,
blind and ugly we enter the world, if we are lucky
(apparently) that is the best way to go,
asleep, as though there is nothing more to see.

They smack the air into us and it is a knife,
you know it is,
Our throats are castrated for our lungs.

Good? Bad? I kind of like it, though for some reason it makes me think of Benjamin Button a bit much, and also that whole "the luckiest man is the one who has never been born", which is just one of those philosophically pretentious cure-alls, like Absurdism. Seriously, fuck Absurdism. It is so lazy and yet still so pretentious.

Also, I've been in discussion with a friend of mine who is infinitely more knowledgeable about medical terminology than I, and apparently I'm not using the term "tourniquet" correctly, and this bothers me. I want to use the best sort of metaphor, but what is it? And why is it that every now and then the word "tourniquet" makes me think of the three Musketeers and D'Artagnan playing old fashioned doubles tennis? Does anyone else see that?

This poem will be, hopefully, an excerpt from a larger body of work that will be my take on the "Seven Ages of Man" speech that Falstaff does in Shakespeare's As You Like It. Here it is, as a refresher:

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like a furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Man, isn't that depressing? I love how the comic relief characters in Shakespeare are usually the most upsetting to read or watch. I wonder if I'll actually do seven different poems for the seven different ages. Too obvious?

There's another Shakespearean inspiration for this work. It actually comes from Titus Andronicus, which might be my favorite tragedy; it is the most fucked up of them all, and if you want to see what I mean, just watch Julie Taymor's brilliant and beautiful adaptation. Just take a gander:

See what I mean? Messed. Up. Anyway, there's this part where the deliciously evil Aaron the Moor, who is escaping Rome with his newborn infant and is captured by Lucius, who has more than enough reason to hate Aaron. Aaron is a villain, who is more or less the cause for all the terrible things that happen to the good characters (he convinces Titus to cut off his own hand just for the hell of it), so Lucius decides to hang his baby in front of him, because even the good guys are sort of monsters. Aaron, despite being damnable beyond hell, loves his son, and pleads for Lucius to spare the boy, Lucius agrees to only if Aaron confesses everything that he's done:

Lucius
Say on; and if it please me which thou speak'st,
Thy child shall live, and I will see it nourish'd.
Aaron
And if it please thee! Why, assure thee, Lucius,
'Twill vex they soul to hear what I shall speak;
For I must talk of murders, rapes, and massacres,
Acts of black night, abominable deeds,
Complots of mischief, treason, villanies
Ruthful to hear, yet piteously perform'd:
And this shall all be buried by my death,
Unless thou swear to me my child shall live.

This is so wonderful to me, you guys! The juxtaposition of Aaron being such an awful person, and yet caring only for the life of his child! When I was in England, the kids in my Shakespeare class admitted that they did not get this character at all, and I was like "GODDAMMIT HE IS SO GOOD." Long story short, I am a fucking nerd. The stuff that Aaron confesses to, though is some of the wickedest shit Will S has ever come up with. My favorite:

Oft have I digg'd up dead men from their graves,
And set them upright at their dear friends' doors,
Even when their sorrows almost were forgot;
And on their skins, as on the bark of trees,
Have with my knife carved in Roman letters,
'Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.'

Yeah, and then he's like "the only thing I hate is that I didn't get to do that a thousand more times" and then he gets buried up to his chest in sand and is like "whatever, I'll just scream at you the whole time."

So yeah, I want to write something that reflects the dichotomy of life being cruel and awful and our need for it to continue regardless. As exemplified by Aaron the Moor.

Sometimes I wish I'd just written a thesis so that I could get all this English Major talk out of my system. Vernacular, vernacular.

Is there anyone here who can tell me what making mixtapes is all about?

2009-11-25T22:57:00.000-08:00

My birthday is today, which in my house means that the Holiday season officially starts on Tuesday, December 1 (which, to be fair, is when it should start. I enjoy the everloving tinsel out of Christmas, but I think it's ridiculous for the sales and decorations and Starbucks limited beverages to last more than three weeks). One staple of the Holiday season is music; every city has at least one station that plays nonstop Christmas music starting the day after Thanksgiving. Starbucks comes out with a new Holiday compilation every year. So I'm getting on the bandwagon for this one: presenting, for the first time ever....

An Arts Deux Christmas

Unlike most compilations that people like my dad will play endlessly through the whole month of December, An Arts Deux Christmas tries to stay away from the typical "standards" that dominate playlists and radio stations. The sad truth of Christmas music is that there are so few songs and yet so many versions of them, so though you get the variety, you still are bored to tears for hearing "Winter Wonderland" three times every hour.

Thus, though there are a couple typical Christmas tunes on this compilation, many of the others have little to nothing to do with Christmas whatsoever, and even those that do mention Christmas are not necessarily religious in any other way. I tried to put together a mix that reminds me (and you too, I should hope, dear reader) of the season: the weather, the mood, the darkness of winter and the cold of the wind, the crunch of the snow and the joy of a hot drink in your hands. Below I am listing the tracks and, instead of simply stating my purpose for them being in the mix, I'll just tell you the Winter scene that pops into my head when I hear them. If it sounds good, just click on the link above (or the one below, same thing) and enjoy! Remember, YouSendIt links expire after seven days, so if you happen upon this and would still like to download it, drop me a comment or hit me up on Facebook. Feliz Navidad.

1) This Christian's Hope
Denson's Sacred Harp Singers of Arley, Alabama
Walking by an old Baptist church on Christmas morning while going to pick up a few things in the store, when the streets are covered in snow and the voices of the chior resound out of a half-open door and reflect off the walls of the sleepy buildings.

2) God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen
Bright Eyes
At a holiday party with friends as well as the Ghost of Christmases Past, feeling happy from all the spiked eggnog, full of mischief and love and dancing continuously.

3) White Winter Hymnal
Fleet Foxes
Rolling down a snowbank in the middle of the night, landing winded and laughing on your back, looking up and seeing your breath dissolve into a perfectly clear sky.

4) River
Joni Mitchell
A few days before going home for the holidays, looking at storefront window decorations, remembering something that made you happy but you can't name, waiting to feel the warmth that December somehow brings.

5) Christmas Time Will Soon Be Over
Jack White
A happy gathering with the family, cheeks red from coming in from the cold, carrying bundles of gifts, singing together until it gets dark and everyone has to go.

6) Listening to Otis Redding at Home During Christmas
Okkervil River
Getting on the plane or train to go, remembering that what once made you happy is no more, and that some small part of home is different and gone; yet home is still home, and you will always feel right there.

7) Wither Must I Wander
Martha Wainwright
Taking a walk through the park under giant pine trees at dusk, remembering how the first Christmas tree was (apparently) a man trying to replicate the stars shining behind the tree branches.

8) Hallelujah
Leonard Cohen
Laying on your back early in the morning, after the tree is decorated but before there are presents under it, with no other lights on in the room, letting the glow eerily fill the space, wondering what it is that makes it so mysteriously beautiful.

9) December Will Be Magic Again
Kate Bush
Wrapping presents and baking, playing with all the kids who come to visit, pulling Christmas crackers and making jokes, putting up ornaments and smiling at the joy if it all.

10) Cosmia
Joanna Newsom
Snow angels and late-night explorations, followed by experiments with spiced hot chocolate and reading old stories by candlelight.

11) O Tannenbaum
Vince Guraldi Trio
Getting a coffee before going shopping or just browsing downtown, enjoying the cold hustle and bustle of a city, looking at the tacky yet still happy decorations along the sidewalks.

12) His Master's Voice
Monsters of Folk
Dawn on Christmas day, because you couldn't sleep, watching the world wake up and suddenly understanding things in a way that don't have explanation or reason, yet still fill you with joy and hope, even after a long dark night before, then pulling on your robe and running down to meet the rest of your family with hot coffee and breakfast.

Download Link:

https://www.yousendit.com/download/MVNmeW42bEpuSlJMWEE9PQ

Four Band Shirts I Would Totally Not Regret For That Long

2009-11-22T21:00:00.000-08:00

Ah, band shirts: the one thing that, almost always, ends up being a bad idea. Even those of us who are nothing but fans of said bands, spending $20 at a show for a t-shirt that will eventually make you look like either an idiot or a snob (depending on how soon the band appears on the CW) always comes back to haunt us; after a while they are relegated to painting or cleaning clothing. Sometimes they become rags, or garage sale fodder.

However, after talking to a friend about getting band shirts for her younger brother for Christmas, I put some thought into it: are there any shirts that would tempt me at the show to throw away hard-earned money for intoxicants so that I can cover my body? Yes. There are four. That's it.

1. Octopus Shirt
Band: Okkervil River
Well, it is Okkervil River, and they are one band that I will get all dorky over. The design is both interesting and ridiculously indie, and was designed by William Schaff, who designed most of Okkervil River's covers.

2. Wolf Trap Shirt
Band: Beep Beep

Beep Beep was a band that I listened to when I was going through a phase of only listening to Saddle Creek, which led me to some good things (The Faint, Azure Ray) and some not good things (Cursive). Beep Beep, whose music I cannot find on my iTunes, were fun and bouncy, and I always wanted this shirt whenever I saw it online. It is so cute and also so gross lookin'! Coyote Ugly! The only downside is that this is one of those shirts that has nothing to do with the band itself, unless they are referring that either they are the type of band that would bite off their leg to escape a trap, or if one ought to react in such a way while listening to Beep Beep.

3. Ribbon Shirt
Band: Gogol Bordello

I was at the Gogol Bordello afterparty a couple weeks ago, and it was ten types of fantastic, and one guy from the band's entourage burned me with a cigarette accidentally and kissed where he did. He was wearing this shirt. I should not have to explain why this shirt is great.

4. Sphinx Shirt
Band: Neko Case
"I listened in when you thought you were alone / calling the sphinx on a tornado's phone" These lyrics, from "The Pharaohs" (a track on the wonderful Middle Cyclone) make no sense. They are pretty, and in the context of the song you sort of get it, but whereas the Gogol Bordello shirt was a reference to a song title, this one is not only harder to follow, but the payoff might not make bullions of sense. Me, though? I think it's hilarious. And clever. And I love it. Also, the fabric is apparently thinner and more washed looking, instead of the typical American Apparel fabric. Of all four of these, I would take this shirt overall.

Just some food for thought. My birthday is in a week!

In which I stick my nose

2009-11-21T02:54:00.000-08:00

Okay, so Creationists are taking copies of Darwin's Origin of Species and passing it out to college students, with an added introduction that alleges Darwin as a racist, sexist, and the origin of Nazi ideology. I hate sticking my nose into these things, but should people who believe in evolution pass out copies of scripture with a foreward that sites all the crimes done in the name of Christianity? No. Because that would be missing the point of Christianity, just as Creationists are missing the point of Evolution.

I am not one to delve into the God question, I see myself as a Humanist, Agnostic, however you'd like to say it. The fact is that, if there is a God, I don't have any beef with them, and I have a feeling that She or He (or It, really) would be of a high and wise enough mind to place damnation on a level somewhere a bit higher than what we do and don't read. Censoring yourself from every possible outlet of information in this world is just as damning as watching pornography. The world is big and complicated, you can't root things out between Sin and Virtue. But these ideals are not, I think, sent down to us from a higher power. We see something that offends us, we call it wrong. Something makes us happy, we deem it right. eventually enough people see one thing as wrong or one thing as right that we assume it a universal truth. The Ten Commandments are a perfect example of this.

And don't think that I am only coming out against Christian Fundamentalism; I get just as irritated by Atheistic Fundamentalism, that teenage stubbornness where one refuses to read scripture or take any heed from it, and who assume that anyone–and anything–involved with the practice of religion is a result of boorish stupidity. I have read scripture, I have prayed, I have been to church. I have said grace at the table at Thanksgiving. And at no point did I feel that I was being simple or stupid, or oppressed. There are things to be found in faith that Atheism will never provide; and there are emotions that Atheism cannot explain. Is it possible, really, for me to look at Mount Ranier when I'm driving north and not have a fleeting thought of "Whoever made that is a damned good artist"? Or to know someone has died and not pray, secretly, quietly to myself, that they are in a better place?

Atheism rejects our human need for faith, for the belief in something greater than ourselves. This was not always the sky-cult of Judeo-Christian belief. Before that, it was the Earth and the deities that were wrought from it. But it has always been something; we always need a cosmogonic myth and we balance it with an apocalyptic myth. Science, with the Big Bang and the Universe's endless expansion and semi-predictable chaos, is another form of myth, though I will not say that it is false. All myths are true in their own way, all myths are useful. Science has proven to be one of the most useful because it denies that it is infalliable; its laws are subject to change upon each new discovery. I trust science to explain the workings of my world, and I admit (as most scientists do) that it does not explain everything.

Humans, when we get down to our core, are too complicated to accept a single explaination for the way things are. Only following a single doctrine, then, is going against what being human is. We did not fall from grace out of the blue. We got curious. But if it weren't for that curiosity (to use a Biblical metaphor), there would be nothing more than two naked people sitting in a garden naming animals. And I, for one, think that Original Sin did us a world of good.

So, back to the issue at hand: distributing copies of The Origin of Species explaining that, despite laying the foundation for modern Biology, Paleontology, and a host of other disciplines, gave Hitler a good reason for Genocide. Not only are these allegations false, but they go against everything that academia tries to promote. If these ladies and gentlemen (amongst whom is former Tiger Beat cover boy Kirk Cameron) really want to break into the academic world and make Creation level with Evolution in classrooms everywhere, they could start by promoting something that is less sensationalist and more guided by reason and willingly open for debate. Also, you have to remember that, though it is the basis for so much scientific study, it has always been called the Theory of Evolution, not the Indisputable Fact of Evolution. If Creation is to be taught, then it, too, must be posed as a theory, therefore negating its very purpose in the eyes of those who promote it so intensely. Academic institutions are places of debate and discourse, and therefore could never really promote fundamentalism in the classroom. Calling one of the most influential academics of all time a liar based on false accusations of racism is just childish.

I read a small portion of Sarah Palin's new book in a review of it online, where she says that she can't look at everything people have done and think that they were once fish crawling out of the ocean. We've heard that argument before; the assumption that Evolution is an insult to humanity since it infers that we are descended from monkeys and fish and not borne directly from the mind of the Almighty. Hogwash, I say. There's something, to me, that's even more beautiful about the idea of us, out of the billions of possible organisms, somehow changing and evolving, turning a simple backbone into a spine and a few electronic pulses into the most complex brain that's ever been known, to go from floating to swimming to crawling to walking upright when no other species really could, to grow hands for building and turn small families into civilizations, surviving mass extinctions throughout millions of years, until we reached the point where we could dream up hundreds of possibilities for our own origins and millions of hopes for our own future–is that not, Ms. Palin, the ultimate underdog story? Is Homo Sapiens not a cunning and wise and adaptive survivor? Have we not proven ourselves worthy of the Gods we create and hold fast to?

There is nothing to be ashamed of in the idea of once being small. Everything was once small, even in Genisis, there was chaos from which light and life was created. We are above throwing stones into the gears of other's ideas, and the only way to continue to evolve as a society is to allow free thought, as well as freedom of worship. But please, let's do it in an arena where we can at least be courteous to one another.

Because, really, I can't pick just one.

2009-11-09T22:15:00.000-08:00

In the Spring of 2008, while living in the literal ass of England, my two best friends and I went on an adventure through France, Germany, and Vienna. Being the people that we are, we said some pretty ridiculous things. Here, thanks to Amanda's diligent recording, is the cream of the crop of words that came out of our mouths that fateful few weeks:

"It's all the New Kids on the Block in ONE GERMAN MAN!"

"Ahahahaha.........We're poor and sad."

"I can't remember who I'm sleeping with... oh wait, NOBODY."

"Good old patch-knees. Rawwhh!"

"Ssssir it's not hot enough in the hot tub...?"

"Vehre you guys just flashing zeh towns? Get your feet off zeh seat und stop flashing your tits."

"Well, what are you gonna do?"
"Pssh...Fuck a tree, apparantly."

"Get on the bus, douche. We're in hell."

"We got trouble! Right here in Nurnburg City! With a capital N and that rhymes with BEN and that stands for GETBACKHERE!"

"Danke....................

.....................................................................................................................schoen...?"

"God I love these ghetto fabulous Germans!"

"Hilton says 'no' to everything except being rich."

"Where is the key-"
"It's in my butt."

"How am I taking this badly? you're the one who put it up your butt."

"Ok It's an hour and 15 minutes until the next traaeeiighhhhhhch."

"You have good eyes, Meg. They're big and awesome."

"He's probably a perfectly nice guy, and here we are saying he's a dangerous muppet James Spader Javier Bardem."

"Oh shit, it's Napoleon."

"What is it?"
"Pshh, I don't know, gigantic?"

"...............SUGAR!!!!"

"Why don't you restock your cart before you come on this train and sell your wares!?!?!?!"

Quick Reviews

2009-10-24T01:00:00.000-07:00

I was a dick about my Summer Reading Reviews that I planned. I'm sorry, blog. Here's what I've read and finished since my last update (in no particular order):

Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones
Sebold's debut novel, which a few years ago was the IT book, stayed far from my radar for a long while. The reason is this: when I was in high school, I saw at least six girls do terrible dramatic re-enactments of the book's first chapter, which describes the rape and murder of the 14-year old narrator, Susie Salmon. Rape is a tough thing to read and to watch, not because it's a horrifying subject (it always is), but because sometimes it's just so poorly done. Sebold, to her credit, writes it with enough balance between description and discretion to not make me throw the book across the room. The rest of the novel deals with Susie's friends and family attempting to cope with the aftermath of her murder; their attempts to find her killer, her family falling apart, and Susie's adjustment to her new heaven, where she watches helplessly, and often joyfully, time pass for those she left behind. Sebold's greatest gift in this novel is a damn good narrative voice. Her Susie is sweet and tragic, loving and regretful, and it is her feelings towards her family that carries the greatest feeling, more so than what her family actually experiences. I was disappointed in the secondary characters in the novel, the rest of the Salmon family and a few more of Susie's friends, as well as her killer; they are convincing but never seem to flesh out or develop; the third act of the book was almost boring for me. Once again, it seems, I picked up the novel that everyone and their mother raved about, and was disappointed. Damn my Bachelor's degree.

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

Now THIS is more like it! Check it out: in Soviet Moscow, the Devil and his companions (a naked girl, a hunchback, a man in a checkered suit and a giant talking cat) pay a visit to wreak a little havok. Bulgakov's take on the Faustus myth is darkly funny and compellingly intelligent; not for the weak of mind but oh so worth it. With reckless abandon, the Devil causes a fair amount of death and destruction so that he might throw a good party, and saves the love of the titular Master and Margarita, an impovershed writer whose manuscript on the religious figure of Pontius Pilate has been destroyed, and the woman who willingly gives her soul to be with him. The novel not only deals with religion in a unique and arguably perfect way, but criticizes a society that refuses to accept the existence of either God or the Devil. Oh, and the cat's name is Behemoth, and he loves shooting things.

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

I feel like I can't write that much about this novel, only because it would be too difficult. Invisible Man is dense, no doubt, but that does not mean that it is impossible. Ellison has crafted a sort of African-American Ulysses, a voyage from the impoverished South to the well-to-do yet hypocritical University and finally to the bustling world of 1920s-1930s Harlem. Ellison's nameless narrator seeks his identity through them all, finally settling on being, more or less, the titular Invisible Man. Though a strong and powerful criticism of American racism, Ellison's prose wanders so often into the experimental that one forgets to think in terms of political statements and instead delves into the allegorical factors surrounding race and the way we see each other, the hypocrisy inherent in all people, and the overwhelming and never answered question of the human condition. If there really is a greatest American Novel ever written, this must be close to #1.

H.P. Lovecraft, At The Mountains of Madness

Lovecraft's weird fiction has avoided me for some time, and finally I got around to it, picking up "The Call of Cthulu" as well as some other stories, one being his novel, At The Mountains of Madness. The story follows an Antarctic expedition that stumbles upon the ruins of an ancient inhuman civilization that inexplicably causes the deaths of several members of the crew. Lovecraft's gift is for horror, and unfortunately it does not shine here as it does in stories like "The Call of Cthulu" or "The Colour of Outer Space". Though the civilization that Lovecraft creates and describes is well-formed in the prose, the narrative delves too much into scientific musings pertaining to geological history or mathematical distance, and there are too many moments where Lovecraft tries to build suspense, but eventually is just tiring. How often can you almost describe something, and then say "but I am too afraid to speak of it!" We know you're going to. There's no way that you won't. Also, the novel is missing that Lovecraftian sense of doom, where mankind is unable to cope with the scale of the unknown universe, that nihilistic sensibility that really makes for the best sort of horror.

Glen David Gold, Sunnyside

Ah yes, Sunnyside. I loved Carter Beats the Devil, Gold's first novel, and his follow-up was about Charlie Chaplin and the beginnings of Hollywood, so you know I would be on board. Gold is far more ambitious with this novel, he does not only follow Charlie Chaplin, but others as well, notably two men who seem to have little to nothing to do with Hollywood at all. The stories all revolve around the First World War, in and out of the trenches. Gold's Chaplin is a man filled with both ambition and indecision, full of love and a good touch of self-pity. Chaplin's motivations are sometimes hard to figure, but I'm just along for the ride, and Gold's prose is practically sparkling. Be warned, though: just because it's about Charlie Chaplin doesn't mean that it's all fun and games. But anyone who's seen Chaplin's better films – The Kid, City Lights, Modern Times – knows that humor is to be found in tragic circumstances, in fact, it must be found in order to survive. Gold's novel, then, is much like life itself: sometimes funny, often tragic, but mostly beautiful and, really, always worth it.

Generically speaking

2009-10-23T23:26:00.000-07:00

I've been writing for a long time. Not professionally, since I still feel unprepared for that, but even so, I've been making up stories for as long as I could think, and when I was in second grade I had an assignment to write about sailors and pirates, and I wrote about a girl who dressed up as a boy so she could be on a ship and run away from home. I never finished the story, thinking that it was going to be a novel, which is for the best, I suppose. Turns out that around the same time, Neil Gaiman had written Sandman #53, which was of a similar theme, only infinitely better written. Though I've always had dreams of being a performer onstage, writing has always called back to me; and I've realized that my mission in life is to spin stories, since it's the only thing that I'm really good at doing. Whether that makes me good on a broader spectrum remains to be seen.

But what to write? In every artistic profession, it makes sense to be well-versed in all genres and forms of expression; or at least most of them. I could, if I put myself into it, write romance, horror, mystery, or drama. I could work my pen into period fiction or sci-fi or fantasy. But I don't necessarily enjoy all of those; one of the hardest parts of writing a novel right now is that I'm trying to defy genre, and so am combining romance, historical fiction, stream of consciousness, magical realism, with dashes of suspense, fantasy, and plenty of drama. I have to change my voice between characters! It's so much harder than I anticipated!

Still, though, it's a challenge that I'm happy to meet. I'm working on it sparingly, but I'm not giving up on it by any stretch.

Still, I don't think that I was meant to be a novelist. When I sit down and I write for the sake of writing, when I have an idea that grabs me around the neck and pulls me into it, it isn't really anything like what I'm writing in The Clockwork Mouse. As a matter of fact, they tend to be one of two things:
Erotic Poetry or Folklore.

Does that seem strange to anyone else? It is to me. Here's why I think either thing happens:

Erotic Poetry:

Let me be frank ("Hi, Frank!"). I'm not a fan of most erotica. It has too much of a tendency to be fetishist and crude and, while I know that being explicit can turn plenty of people on, it too often lacks the compelling beauty of sex that I love so much. I don't mean that in a sentimental way; I don't think that love is necessary for a sexual relationship to be good, and boy oh boy can it be good. Sex, to me, is magnetism, it's losing your thoughts and succumbing to what you're meant to do, it's the base and essence of feeling. It's really beyond love, because it's beyond emotion. Still, sex doesn't have to be dirty. One thing that I always want to do when I write is to never explicitly explain what's going on (though you'd know, of course, if you read it), in the dozen or so poems that I've kept (I've written plenty more but some aren't good at all), I only say the word "fucking" once. What I'm trying to express is that sex isn't about getting respect, or being mature, or being in love, or being angry, or being selfish, or being dominated or dominating. It's about wanting someone, wanting an experience, wanting to forget yourself entirely, to be something that isn't a single solitary person for just a moment. I'm also fascinated by the physicality of sex, something that I think sprung out of seeing too many Egon Schiele paintings in Vienna. What do the bones do? It follows the idea of the soul being connected to the body, not separate from it: our soul seeps out from our pores, it runs through our veins and our marrow. Sex is just as transcendant as prayer, but that doesn't make it holy. It's just personal and real and spontaneous, and nothing to be ashamed of. Anyway, this is how I write it:

the tense changes
life is not a moment
now it is skin shivering as it is exposed
small breathy laughs from you
trying to get the shirt over my head
or unhook
unbutton
and now it is not that difficult, now
my new atmosphere is in your mouth.

and if the lights are on or off it does not
matter
you are soft electricity, you glow
like an island far from the coast,
a lighthouse that i am swimming to
desperately.

i do not need to see you to touch you
to know where and how
and why does not matter now
whys are for the afternoon where there is nothing else to do.

but now i pound with tidal love,
i grip with soft and terrible force.

There it is, just an excerpt of a longer poem, of course. I've been debating putting any of this stuff up here, but then, if it's going to be what I might publish someday, I shouldn't be so withholding, yes? I suppose you could call what I write romantic poetry, too, since there's nothing explicit about it, but damn, guys. Have you ever read E.E. Cummings' dirty stuff? How often does the word "cock" appear? Talking dirty is just a cop-out for those who can't write beautifully. Also, capitalization: yes or no?

Folklore

This one's a little more easy to talk about, since it's been on my mind longer. Why Meg, you ask me, how does someone write folklore? Folklore is, after all, not the product of a single person, but rather of an entire cultural history. Well, Invisible Person, that's where I'm trying to do a few unique things. I've already used this Blog as a sounding board for the Archer Almanac, my big, huge, 366-story long anthology that I'm determined to finish before I die. Since I'm too lazy to link back to it, here's the basic idea: the citizens of the fictional town of Archer, which exists somewhere on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, create an almanac that, instead of predicting the events of the coming year, documents tales from the town's history, one for every day of the year, meaning that every day of the year is set aside as a holiday. It's sort of like Saint's Days, only there are more of them. Here's a bit from one of the stories that explains what tends to happen with each account:

Before this story continues, we must advise the reader of the Archer Almanac that we are now entering into the realm of unproven fact, one that relies only upon word of mouth and diary entries and nothing whatever upon official records or photographs. Testimony is often given enough credibility to be taken as historical fact, but we must remember that the people of Archer and quite used to the unusual, and keen to imagine it as part of the everyday. This either means that our town is either a place of unequivocal magic, or a place of unequivocally excitable people.

So it's a shitload of magical realism, which I totally dig. American magical realism! Hurrah! What I want to do, more than anything, is to reflect in my storytelling what I feel when I travel around the country, or when I imagine history unfolding. Much like the towns created by authors like Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Archer is surrounded by magic, that may be real, or might be warped by history and the human imagination; but isn't our power to imagine beautiful, magical things just as great as if they were real? I want to create a landscape where Tall Tales and myths are real, even if they are only so in the hearts of people. Too often, I think, folklore and fairy tales are dismissed somewhere after fifth grade, only for level two readers. Well, no more! I worship at the altar of the human imagination. Here is my offering.

So there you have it, my fortés. Erotic poetry, Folklore. If you happen to know anyone who's in the market for either, please direct them to me. I'm sure there must be someone.

You might as well get on the school intercom and tell everyone that I'm half Dracula

2009-10-16T23:06:00.000-07:00

So a coupla years ago I wrote a horror-esque story on Halloween (I don't remember if I wrote it on Halloween on purpose) which I faithfully posted here, if you wanna check it out. It's surreal, more or less, and I think that, looking back, there's a lot to it that I find funny. Funny ha-ha, sort of, but also funny sad: this is something that I wrote before I went off to England to actually take a workshop on writing, so it's pretty untested and definitely has potential. But enough blubbering! Read it, I hope you like it.

Anyway, I was considering doing it again, maybe making a few sketches or short stories that are more horror or ghost story-ish. Knowing me, that really means that this is the only one that I'll write, though I do have a ghost story in the back of my head. The waaaaaaay back.

I've also been reading a lot of Lovecraft lately, so maybe that'll leak through. At The Mountains of Madness, for those of you who haven't read it, is basically "science fact science fact science UNSPEAKABLE HORROR science science I AM GOING INSANE fact fact fact airplane." It is a page-turner.

So what's the big thing to write horror stories about these days?

Vampires!

Oh, wait, no. Vampires are the new Sweet Valley High, I forgot (except in the case of True Blood, wherein Vampires are just every pulp novel ever). The fact is, the Vampire horror genre is pretty much dead, at least in popular fiction. It is no secret that I loathe the Twilight series (don't take it personally, Twihards, it's only because I have a brain and it's a good one), and am hoping that it fades out like Nano Babies. But what if it doesn't? What if people forget what being a Vampire is all about?

Well, huddled masses, I have a solution. True, I wrote it in a few short minutes, and it's only a few hundred words, but if Vampires are going to be something, let them be this. I give you a character sketch of Dracula:

We have lived forever. We have been in every thing.

We are in the vines that strangle the sunlight from trees in the jungle. We are in the spores that drive insects mad. In the grass that starves the cattle with disease, the clouds that make the sun red. We have drunk your blood. We have made our way into your minds. You think of murder in the Subway. We are there. Every disturbed thought. Every broken window. Every orgy and rape, every hit and run, every child that throws another child down, we are there.

You may call us Vampires. I am of the We, though I have no name. Long ago I had one, I was wealthy. My castle was framed by mountains and sleet. And then–what does it really take to become like me? I drank no blood as part of a ritual. I took no vow and did not sleep upon the earth. I have slept since then, but it is not to dream or to rest. I forsake life, but refused death. In that moment, in that singular thought (which you shall never have, for you are too weak for it) I became what I would be forever, a creature on the edge of life, of death, of humanity. I was still human, on the outside, and I fed on the weakness, the goodness, in others. Some say I drank blood. I drank it in goblets, yes, but I also tore out kidneys and ate them raw, made armor for myself out of the skulls of my enemies. A mistress refused me and I ate her heart while it was still beating, in front of an entire court, her torn ribcage scratching my undead skin. And they feared me, then, with my robes saturated in the whore's blood, and called me "vampire" and "demon" and "dragon."

They say I am evil, but I am not. Did I sin? If there had been a God to forsake, then I forsake Him. I became the negative of humanity, I tore where they built, killed while they whelped, but I did not hate and I did not love. I did not desire, I only was.

Years after I changed I forsake my human form and became a wolf or a bat (as the stories go) but also a tiger, a shark. I became other things–sharp-toothed and nameless things that are made of the night, sucking the air out of newborn's lungs and taking women in their sleep. I became the wind and lightning, and when I was tired of that I came again in the likeness of a man, and walked the streets, and felt the delicious tremble of terror that followed me. As centuries passed, I would meet some of my own kind; we would regard each other with respect or perhaps disdain. At times we would fight like dogs over a bone and wars would be stirred under our rage. These times gave me some satisfaction. Neither would ever be defeated, save for the broken mortal lives that were strewn in our wake. We would stand in the mire and smile with fangs exposed and walk away, over mountains and oceans and decades.

I am here, now, in your mind. I do not need a solid form to survive. I am what compels you, perhaps, to swing a hammer into your father's skull, to burn down a forest, to break your lover's neck so that you may keep her forever, or to take her again and again until you are both bloody, and then to lap up what is left of yourselves. We are that chaos. You taste us every day. Do not bother to wonder if I love or care. If I find a beautiful man or woman to feed me, they will feed me, and their corpse will be strewn across the street. If there are evil men in the world, let them be so. They are as weak as you are, they will die, or stop, hesitate with their fingers on the trigger. There is no need for hesitation. There is no need for death or love, there is only us, the strong, and you, the weak, and we prey on you, in your sleep, until you are nothing but dust.

Albums To Listen To, If You Really Want To Get Me: Part One

2009-09-06T21:59:00.000-07:00

Ever wonder what music really makes me tick? What would be the best songs to quote in front of me to get me to go home with you? Well, look no further. Here's the first four of an eventual ten albums which I will talk way too much about, all the while begging you with sad puppy eyes to listen to, in the dark, on your headphones, when all the world is asleep and it's just you and your mind, waiting for that perfect moment, somewhere around Track 4, where you think, "I am so damn glad that I'm listening to this right now, there's nothing better in the world worth doing."

Okkervil River:
Black Sheep Boy/Black Sheep Boy Appendix

I don't know where I would be without Will Sheff's lyricism, or the endless perfection of this album (the so-called "Appendix" is more or less fitted onto the end of the album, and in my opinion is more or less inseparable from it), a rousing, growling mixture of folk, punk, and folklore. Though it has never been introduced as such, Black Sheep Boy is more or less a concept album: the trials and tribulations of the titular Black Sheep Boy, a character taken from a Tim Hardin song, which the album quietly opens with:

"Here I am back home again, I'm here to rest.
All they ask is where I've been,
knowing I've been west.
I'm the family's unowned boy,
Golden curls of envied hair,
Pretty girls with faces fair
See the shine in the black sheep boy.
If you love me, let me live in peace,
Please understand that the black sheep
Can wear the golden fleece,
And hold the winning hand."

From there Sheff takes this small whisper of a social outcast and fills him with regrets and anger, love won and lost, and the over-riding, disturbing image of missing children; taken from their homes, and those who grow up to become almost half-adults. The Black Sheep Boy, it seems, is a patron saint for such victims, as he tries to connect to them, as in "Black":

"Baby daughter on the road, you're wrapped up warm in daddy's coat. And I can still see the cigarette's heat. I can't believe all that you're telling me, what is cutting like the smoke through your teeth as you're telling me "forget it." But if I could tear his throat, and spill his blood between my jaws, and erase his name out for good, don't you know that I would? Don't you realize that I wouldn't pause, that I would cut him down with my claws if I could have somehow never let that happen? Or I'd call, some black midnight, fuck up his new life where they don't know what he did, tell his brand-new wife and his second kid."

The album, even if you don't take into account the plot that I, after years of listening to it, have assigned to it, is more or less a love song between the misfits of misfits; the people who have had terribly fucked-up lives and who want to find normalcy but can't, because in the end you can't escape your past, and you can't deny the darker side of your heart, no matter how afraid of it you are. The Appendix ends, with "Last Love Song For Now":

"But in last love dreams, the lost and passed out of this world are softly sighing. They're trying to decide if they should leave the things that keep them crying. And some will rise and keep on living with open eyes, with minds forgiven."

Joni Mitchell:
Blue

In all fairness, this should be Court and Spark, because my mother practically raised me on that album, but I also grew up listening to Hits, one of the first Joni Mitchell compilations, and it didn't surprise me, when I first got Blue, that the album was made up of many of those hits that I'd loved so dearly: "River", "Carey", "Case of You", "California". If there's an album that I need to bring with me when, some day, I have a "Getting away from it all" road trip, this is probably it. The songs are, mostly, love songs, but to give them that simplification takes far too much away from the truth behind Mitchell's profound skill. It's how you would want to sound if you poured your heart out, it's longing and open but never, under any circumstances, hopeless. IT's about being in love with the wrong person who is still the right person, and the quiet realization that you, too, might be the wrong person. Or, as Mitchell herself declares in "Case of You":

"You're in my blood like holy wine,
You taste so bitter, and so sweet,
Oh, I could drink a case of you, darling,
Still I'd be on my feet,
I would still be on my feet."

And later, in the heart-choking "River":

"I'm so hard to handle,
I'm selfish, and I'm sad
Now I've gone and lost the best baby that I've ever had,
Oh, I wish I had a river
I could skate away on."

That last lyric, "I wish I had a river I could skate away on" is such a universally wonderful feeling to me; the longing to be alone in order to accept life as it is, to accept loneliness when it comes, to accept the love lost, or ruined, or given away. Mitchell's troubled character is different from the self-loathing or suicidal singer-songwriters we know too well: she's self-aware, but never stops of pauses, never tries to cover her problems up with falsehoods, rather, she openly admits them, as she asks in "California": "Will you take me as I am, strung out on another man?"

And, of course, there's just such beauty in the words that I really can't get over it:

"All good dreamers pass this way, some day,
Hiding behind bottles in dark cafés"

Leonard Cohen:
Various Positions

I suppose at this point I should mention what it is that makes "good music" for me. As much as I love having a perfect auditory expereince, nothing really beats a beautifully written verse. Makes sense, given that I'm such a bibliophibian. Anyway, Various Positions is Leonard Cohen's best album. And Leonard Cohen is, along with Joni up there, the best songwriter living today, and maybe of all time (this is my own opinion, of course. But you know what? Not that crazy about Dylan). The music of Various Positions is slightly hokey; Cohen relies too much on synthesizers and other jangly instruments, and the backing vocals - though beautiful, at times - often give the impression that Cohen has stumbled into low-key dinner theater. But that means nothing to me. Why does it mean nothing to me? Because, in only nine songs, you find some of the best poetry that's been composed in the past fifty years. Hands fucking down.

Various Positions opens, for example, with "Dance Me To The End Of Love", which at first seems like a well-written love song, but is so much more - it isn't just love, it's crumbling, blissful, perfect, inescapable love. Many of Cohen's love songs have this strain, that love comes out of a physical requirement, a hungry necessity:

Oh let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone
Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon
Show me slowly what I only know the limits of
Dance me to the end of love "

This idea is more or less like Mitchell's "you are in my blood like holy wine" idea, but where Mitchell's bemused heartbreak is soulfully sweet, Cohen's warble is pained, carnal, and almost regretful. But there's no regret in love; love, quite possibly, is beyond regret, after all: it just is. Though Cohen sings "All the senses rise against coming back to you", he is irrevocably drawn, over and over again ("My heart's like a blister from doing what I do/If the moon has a sister, it's got to be you").

And the whole thing isn't just heartbreak; there's a fantastic amount of worldly poetry, as in "Night Comes On" and "Hunter's Lullaby"; music inspired by Cohen's involvement in conflict between Egypt and Israel. The deepest side to Cohen's lyricism, however, is his writing that deals with religion, with faith, with mythology. In "The Captain", the titular character muses

"Complain, complain, it's all you've done,
Ever since we lost
If it's not the crucufixion,
Then it's the Holocaust."

There's more there, of course: there's the rousing borken-hearts-club-band "Heart With No Companion", and the terrifylingly powerful "If If Be Your Will", but I can't talk about this album without mentioning its centerpiece, the original version of "Hallelujah".

There's a story about the song; that Jeff Buckley wanted to cover it, and called Cohen asking for the lyrics, and when he got to his apartment, there were dozens of pages of fax paper (remember fax machines?) laying about the floor. Cohen is famous for spending months on his songs, and this is possibly the best example. If you were to listen to the version that Buckley eventually compiled and recorded, alongside the verses Cohen chose for Various Positions, you would notice a marked difference between the songs. Buckley's version (probably the more familiar one) is a tattered love song, probably one of the best out there ("All I ever learned from love was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you"), and it's still Cohen's verses, anyway. But what shows up on Various Positions is something less from a broken lover and more from a descendent of Cain, a haunting search for spiritual understanding from a secular man, from someone who identifies with scripture and such but still is alone, who tries to understand the darkness around him:

"You say I took the name in vain,
I don't even know the name.
And if I did, well really, what's it to you?
There's a blaze of light in every word,
It doesn't matter which you heard:
The holy or the broken Halellujah."

The first time I heard the song was, for some reason, amidst holiday anthems on one of those Starbucks Christmas compilations. I didn't know what to make of it, at first; but then I realized: it sort of works for me. I mean, here I am, not really a religious person by any stretch, feeling a lift in my spirits during that time of the year, feeling something closer to spirituality than I usually know, and even if it isn't necessarily dogmatic, even if it's not a by-the-book Holiday Sensation, there's something I'd want to say, and it would be something along the lines of:

"I did my best, it wasn't much,
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch,
I told the truth, I didn't come to fool you.
And even though it all went wrong,
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Halellujah."

Neutral Milk Hotel:
In the Aeroplane over the Sea

One day, Jeff Mangum read The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. Not long after that, he and his band, Neutral Milk Hotel, recorded one of the most perfect records of the past 20 years. Haunting and beautiful and frightening, lo-fi and orchestral, simple and nuanced, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea is a thousand wonderful things at once. Mangum's lyrics are like a modern-day John Donne crossed with William Blake, but with a hint of Hieronymous Bosch's imagery. And, above all, it's sort of fucking weird. I mean, these are the opening lyrics to the album:

"When you were young you were the king of carrot flowers
And how you built a tower tumbling through the trees
In holy rattlesnakes that fell all round your feet"

What the hell does that mean? I still don't know. But when you hear the song; which is nothing more than Mangum's shouty, folky monotone and an acoustic guitar, you realize that what he's singing isn't nonsense, it's just childlike and fantastical, the spirit of someone younger and confused, dealing with a broken home and life, who turns to the moving and fluid world around them for insight and hope, who slowly grows up and into puberty while their life crumbles:

"And your mom would stick a fork right into daddy's shoulder
And your dad would throw the garbage all across the floor
As we would lay and learn what each other's bodies were for"

And so on. In the album's title track, Mangum simply and kindly surmises

And one day we will die
And our ashes will fly
From the aeroplane over the sea
But for now we are young,
Let us lay in the sun
And count every beautiful thing we can see"

The songs exist between life and death, between love and loathing. Mangum sings about re-incarnation, about being enamored with a two-headed fetus in a jar, about bodily contact, which is either dissection or sex: "They'll be placing fingers through the notches in your spine", or "How he'd love to find your tongue in his teeth". Yet it's never truly unnerving, I remain fascinated by each and every song; the dreamlike and surreal imagery that is so perfectly meshed with pure human emotion that, even when he's saying something like "the only girl I've ever loved was born with roses in her eyes", or "semen stains the mountaintops", you know, you know exactly what he means. And what is that? I'm not quite sure I can explain it. What I get from the album is a quiet profoundness, despite the jarring quality of the sound, it, like Mangum's lyrics, makes chaos into beauty, without getting rid of the joyful confusion of it all.

Coming soon!
Tom Waits: The Black Rider
Neko Case: Blacklisted
Elvis Costello: When I Was Cruel
Rilo Kiley: The Execution of All Things
Bright Eyes: LIFTED or The Story is In The Soil, Keep Your Ear To The Ground
The Fiery Furnaces: Bitter Tea

Yeah, you know what: I'm going there

2009-08-21T16:11:00.000-07:00

I'm currently laid-up with ridiculous lady-pains (seriously, fellas, when we say "you couldn't handle menstruation", it isn't just so you'll shut the hell up. It's because you couldn't handle menstruation), and my thoughts have wandered over to something that I've wanted to address for a while now, but have been wary of, well, addressing:

I AM SO WORRIED ABOUT THIS, YOU GUYS.

As of late, the entire goddamn world seems to think that this film adaptation of one of the greatest children's books ever (and don't you dare say it isn't) will be a beautifully done, masterful retelling, a creative expansion by some of the best in the business, director Spike Jonze (Adaptation, a shitload of music videos) and writer Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and the script for Away We Go). I mean, Maurice Sendak is one of the producers, how could it be bad? Well, did you watch the trailer? Did you ever read the book? Let's compare the opening of each:

THE BOOK:
The day Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another, his mother called him "Wild Thing!" and Max said "I'll eat you up!"

THE TRAILER:
Wild Thing: You must have a family.
Max: Yes, I have one of those, but...
Wild Thing: Did you eat them?
Max: No! I have no plans to eat anybody.

Do you see? Do you SEE? From what the trailers have seemed to attest, the story hasn't just been watered-down, it's been desperately altered. Where the Wild Things Are is a book about childhood, about anger and the need to be wild. Being wild doesn't mean wearing a wolf suit, it means being disobediant, loud, obnoxious, angry, and uncontrollable. It's a bit like the original idea of Mardi Gras, how people would have one day to act absolutely insane before bowing into the penance of Lent. The idea is catharsis, which is what happens a lot in childhood. It's what kids get away with that grown-ups can't: kicking and screaming and letting it all out. Max, as the 5-8 year old that he appears to be in the novel, is on the cusp of young adulthood. He could be going back to school, or having to give himself a bath, or do chores. He's having to grow up, and the place where the Wild Things are is his little-boy Neverland, where anger can be let out, where chaos can rule, and where he can be the king of all the Wild Things.

The Wild Things, by the way, aren't the shmaltzy, surrogate-family that the movie makes them out to be. They're the Wild Things, for pete's sake: they roar their terrible roars, they gnash their terrible teeth, they roll their terrible eyes, they show their terrible claws!! I see none of that in the trailer. Once again, they're only wild in that they're furry.

Where Sendak's book is a proper mirror for the frustration and happy chaos of childhood, what Jonze's film seems to be presenting is, to put it bluntly, the ideal Hipster child: Max appears to be quiet, dishevled, precocious, well-spoken, slightly wild but not so much that he forgets to be sad in a totally adorable way. It's what everyone assumes thoughtful artists were when they were kids (or what people who think they're artists were as a kid). But children are hardly like that, and certainly, I would hope, not those who grow up to be the INFP type: children are Wild Things. They're supposed to be. So far, I'm not seeing Max make ANY type of mischief: I'm seeing Max build snow forts and searching for meaning with his big, soulful eyes.

The truth is that I'll never know the quality of the movie itself until it comes out, at which point I'll see it, of course, and then duly report a proper review. What disturbs me the most is that it seems like the epitome of the hipster-ization of certain entertainment. It's no surprise that Sendak's iconic book, which I'm sure most people of my generation had read to them as children, has stayed, lovingly in their hearts. It's something, for example, that you would find under "books" on a Facebook page that isn't so much about how much Where The Wild Things Are influenced said person's lifestyle, but rather as a means of being ironically endearing. But that doesn't mean that the legions of the Hip have any right to claim Where The Wild Things Are as theirs to mold and re-fashion. Changing the central theme, the basic idea behind Sendak's illustrated ten-sentence book, even if you throw an Arcade Fire song on top of it, is a big no-no. Remember when Ron Howard took How the Grinch Stole Christmas and turned it into a big-budget, over-plotted wreck of a movie? Yeah, this could be the same thing, just with a different tint.

My mother gets The New Yorker weekly, and in this issue, the fiction installment is called "Max at Sea", an excerpt from the book that Dave Eggers has written based on his screenplay for the film. This, to me, is an unneccesary amount of convolusion, and I'm wondering how much of that has to do with Egger's hubris, or if the book is actually the novelized equivalent of Sendak's (not, of course, that you'd need an expanded edition. The best thing about Where The Wild Things Are is that it's so short but so damn good despite that, having an expanded edition is like wrapping the most delicious cake in the world with eight feet of bland Reddi-Whip). Anyway, I'll read the story, and hopefully that'll give me a better idea of just what these Hipsters are doing. If it's anything like this:

then we're in some serious trouble.

Good god, where did July go

2009-08-03T12:01:00.000-07:00

I have no idea, but it took me with it.

What's been happening lately...well, I got a job at Oak's Park, which is where I worked two summers ago. I was terribly reluctant before I came to work, but then after the past couple weeks, it's been pretty tolerable, and almost fun. There are more people my age there this year, and most of the really scary employees are either gone or working at other places in the park. It's still minimum wage (not that I should be complaining, minimum in Oregon is $8.40 an hour, which is one of the highest in the nation), but if I pull in a little under 40 hours a week, then that comes out to something under $300, which is enough from now until October to get me to Austin, move me in, and have some left over for funzies. If I can finish the summer with $2000 in savings, I should be set to go.

Also, I managed to get (I seriously hope) everything worked out for graduation at UBC. Once that's in, I just have to apply and pay off my debt! Will I go to my graduation? Eh, probably not at this point.

Reading has been slow lately due to being so exhausted at work. My writing time has been cut down to almost nothing as well. Novels I have managed to get in? I started and finished Vox, Let The Northern Lights Erase Your Name, and The Great Gatsby.

Vox, by Nicholson Baker, is about phone sex. That's the best way to say it. It is a conversation that a man and a woman have over the phone, regarding sex. It is also a well-written and sweet account of human loneliness and connection; it is both absurd and believable, touching and, well, arousing. In any case, it's the classiest erotica that I've read (and no, I haven't read a lot), and since there's nothing dirty in the title, you can read it in the bus without being suspected (I hope that other people are as turned on by that idea as I am).

Vendela Vida's novel Let The Northern Lights Erase Your Name only took me a night to read, but that doesn't mean that it's a simple or easy read. When her father dies, Clarissa Iverton learns that he was not her father at all, a fact that her mother, who disappeared when Clarissa was a teenager, never bothered to mention. Clarissa's hunt takes her away from her happy life with her fiancé into the foreign territory of northern Lapland, a journey that is fueled as much by Clarissa's slow-burn depression as it is her desire to know the truth about herself–a truth that is buried further than you'd expect, and which, when revealed, holds more answers than what Clarissa had hoped for. The novel is written with a strong understanding of honesty and mysticism, and even though some themes become a bit too frequent (hint: rape), Vida gives us a likeable and relatable heroine, which is harder to find than you'd think these days.
The Great Gatsby was a re-read. Guess what, the book is still amazing. Fitzgerald's tragic retelling of the American Dream is his most famous work. However, when looking into what the best F. Scott Fitzgerald works were, the next arrow seemed to point directly at Tender is the Night, a book which I know best as being Scott's version of what Zelda wrote about in Save Me The Waltz. After reading and studying and loving the hell out of Save Me The Waltz, I have this to say about Tender is the Night: shut up, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Get over yourself. I don't care about how pretty the second half of the book is supposed to be, I really couldn't take any more of the first part, which seems to be nothing more than rich people jaunting around southern France, all caught up in their own petty issues. I mean, you named the character based on yourself Dick Diver? And his only fault seems to be that he's too nice to his crazy wife? And everyone falls in love with him for no other reason than, I don't know, he's clever? Shut the fuck up, F. Scott Fitzgerald. It isn't enough to ruin The Great Gatsby for me, but that was nuanced and had a shitload of flawed characters, the first part of Tender is the Night is like a shitty Robert Atlman via 1990s A&E movie.

Other than those books, I'm still working my way through Invisible Man (it's worth taking my time, this might be the best novel I've read since The Sound and the Fury or The Brothers Karamazov). I'm also reading stories from Karen Russel's collection, St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised By Wolves, and that's pretty damned fun. So far, the stories have all been about children living in or around the Everglades and the islands off the coast of Florida, where they encounter supernatural, uncanny, or simply enlightening changes in themselves, those around them, and the land itself. The stories make me nostalgic for the 'glades, and for Florida in general; it's Hans Christian Anderson via Southern Gothic, and I love it.

What else what else what else....music!

I have three new releases for you to check out. Let's do them in chronological order: first up is Mos Def's new LP, The Ecstatic. I haven't really listened to much other Mos Def than the awesome The New Danger, but that doesn't mean that I'm behind on this, nor that I'm at all disappointed in The Ecstatic. Mos Def has to be one of the best acts in Hip Hop out there, simply because he's so un-stereotypical, he's the opposite of Flo Rida or Lil' Jon. He's fucking classy, and it makes you listen to what he's saying. When everything these days is about getting Timbaland to produce your new single, you have to give it up for the guy who puts Malcom X on instead.

And hey, look at that: a new Fiery Furnaces album! It really is nice to see the Freidburger siblings putting out something relatively normal (compared to their fifty-something track live CD, that time they put their grandmother on the record, or their new idea, a so-called "silent album"). Compared to something like Window City or the crazier parts of Bitter Tea, I'm Going Away is a return to the blues-psych-rock of something like Gallowsbird's Bark. This album is less about weird narratives and more about detached love songs, it might be the most accessible Fiery Furnaces album to date. That doesn't make it bad, of course, it's a well-tuned and summery record, and I am rather enjoying it. Rather.

Finally, we have The Dead Weather. The Dead Weather is a band invented by professional band inventor Jack White, including a couple dudes from other groups like Queens of the Stone Age and The Raconteurs, and vocalist Alison Mosshart ("VV" from The Kills). This is evidence enough to make me apprehensive. I mean, yes, Jack White is a very talented musician, and a pretty decent lyricist, and every time he does something he has the music community eating out of his hand. Does anyone else notice that? Every year and a half or so, there's just a period of Jack White Zomibiism, where every god damn music journalist raves about how perfect Jack White's music is. And you know what? I'm not buying it. I mean, there's plenty from The White Stripes that I loved, but Get Behind Me Satan was sort of retarded. I never got what was so great about The Raconteurs, they seemed to be nothing more than a vanity project. And now there's The Dead Weather, brimming with reasons for me to hate them: I mean, look at these guys! leather jackets and cigarettes and wayfarer shades? VV from the Kills? Making everything grainy and dark on their website? God damn it, you guys. This seems sort of like a joke, one of those overly-pretentious hipper-than-thou groups that will be flaunted by every boy with tight pants and a patchbeard until, about six months later, people seem to forget that they even existed (like, oh, I dunno, THE KILLS?).

And you know what the really sad part is? It's a pretty damned good album, even if it is called Horehound (blech). I mean, it's tightly good. Alison Mosshart is more or less the girl version of Jack White, which means that she can take all his creepy songs and make them a little sexier. The music and production is top-notch (as you would expect it to be), and it seems like White has found a nice outlet for the Detroit blues and Southern rock sound that he's worked for years to find. Do I admit that I like them? Eh, I suppose. Will I pay $30 to see them in concert this month? Probably not. I can see Will Sheff for $15, and that's a much better idea to me.

Anyway, judge for yourself. Jack white has a marshmellow butt:

And on one last music note, I now own one of these:
Ahahaha, it is so fun. Although, a word of warning if you want one: you have to have a little patience. And know how to make a decent playlist. But I'm enjoying it.

Call it overhaul, call it nothing better to do

2009-07-08T09:06:00.001-07:00

Well look at that. There's a posh new layout to this place.

This change in appearance comes on one of those days that I deem my "time to update my life on the internet!" days. This also mean that I spiffed up my Facebook profile and will be putting up a few new pieces on Deviant Art. The art will probably be put around here too.

I should also note that this is more or less something to keep the darkness at bay; I got a call back from Oaks Park today and they asked me to come and work on Saturday. After doing the things that make me happy, I'm going to search the hell out of the mall and call Budget and do everything I possibly can to cancel working at Oaks. The place is the equivalent of a big rotting wooden sign that says "You Have Failed" in the middle of a parking lot in the middle of the desert. If I only have to work there for three weeks or less before something else comes along, I'll be happy. But I work hard to earn a BA just so that I could go right back to cleaning up puke on amusement park rides. The idea that it's the only thing out there for me is insulting.

Okay, on to the makeover. First of all, the quotation in the top is by E.E. Cummings, from a fake interview that he did with himself for an edition of The Enormous Room. The quotation is important to me because I agree with it; but I should explain what that means. I think that people who aren't artists are people who never try and see past their own nose, who never find ways of expressing themselves or the world around them, and who have no respect or real interest in those that do. These are not the people that I want to surround myself with. These are not the people who mean something. I think that everyone is capable of being "deep", as they say, but there are too many who seem to think that they don't have to, that they're above that or better than it, or they choose to be ignorant. This is not the way to live your life, people. Negation will become of you.

Second, you'll notice that the page has been flipped, and that I've taken off the Bookshelf as well as the Turntable boxes. I did this for a couple reasons; first, that I don't really have the time or interest to change either of those whenever I start listening to/reading something different, second, that the Shelfari application, despite being neat to look at, was a poor representation of the books on my shelf (not to mention that I couldn't ever get it to display them randomly, it was just the same alphabetical books), and third, I don't want this site to be defined by any sort of specific "tastes" that I have. I think that literature, music, film, television, et cetera are things that can be enjoyed to a great and somewhat consuming extent, but I've gotten so annoyed with the laundry-listing that people do of what they Listen To or Read or Watch or whatever that it stops seeming like a way to describe yourself and it starts to seem like bragging. Honestly, I think that Hipsters use their long lists of bands, movies, or books like bikers soup up their hogs. In the end I think it's a way to give yourself a boner and alienate people with your Superiority. If I'm going to do that, I can probably find better ways than by talking about the latest Fleet Foxes EP.

Finally, on my own personal writing: unless this blog becomes an overnight sensation (it won't), I can't see why anyone passing through the interwebs would be interested in my extended character outlines or what have you, so I think that for the time being I'll keep most development-style writing about whatever novel or story I'm working on off of here. Also, I should at least keep some of it a secret. If anything amazing does happen, I'll let you know.

So that's where we stand with Arts Deux at the time being. I'm going to hopefully dedicate more of this blog to book reviews, film reviews, and other ramblings that I think fit into what it's all about. And you'll be hearing from my personal life soon enough, I'm sure; I do have thirty or so jobs to apply to today.

To the Resumobile, Robin!

Are we to accept this ignorance as comedic? A look at the "greatest books ever"

2009-07-06T12:30:00.000-07:00

So the word on the street (the street being Internet Meme Crescent) is that most people have only read about 6 of the following 100 books. Since one of my causes is making sure that the world learns how to read better, I ought to make sure that I qualify first, right? There's an X next to every book that I've read. Here goes.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (X)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (X)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (X)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - (X)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (X)
6 The Bible (X)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (X)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwel (X)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (X)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (X)
11 Little Women - Louisa Mae Alcott (X)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (X)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (X)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (X)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (X)
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (X)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (X)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (X)
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (X)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (X)
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (X)
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (X)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (X)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (X)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (X)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (X)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (X)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (X)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (X)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (X)
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (X)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men- John Steinbeck (X)
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac (X)
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie (X)
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (X)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (X)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker (X)
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (X)
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante (X)
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (X)
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (X)
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White (X)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (X)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (X)
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (X)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (X)
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (X)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Ronald Dahl (X)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (X)

So, in the end, I have read 46 of the 100 books on the list. But really, is that a critique of me as a reader? Let's examine this list a little closer, and maybe we can get a better idea of exactly who the BBC is trying to position:

First of all, the list is not a reference to the BBC's Top 100 Reads, rather, it's an article from The Guardian, called "Books you Can't Live Without". However, this is not a list as compiled by critics (like the Modern Library's Top 100 Books, for example), but rather a popularity list, made from votes readers submitted. This illuminates more on what the actual list represents: the reading done by the average UK citizen. Thus the emphasis on British authors, especially Austen and Dickens (with about five books each, meaning that they represent 1/10 of the list) and little recognition for recognizable American authors (they mention F. Scott Fitzgerald and Harper Lee, but omit the likes of Mark Twain, William Faulkner or Ernest Hemingway). There's also a poor representation of relatively advanced writing: for example, Joyce's Ulysses is mentioned, but his other notable works–Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Dubliners, for example–are omitted, as well as other Modernist texts, such as Joyce's contemporary, Virginia Woolf, or other notable twentieth-century authors, such as Kurt Vonnegut or Zora Neale Hurston (also, I should point out the tiny number of non-white authors).

There's also a staggering number of what I'll call Grade School texts; works of classic literature that are typically read in secondary school (High School here in the States). That's just an assumption by myself, but at least 1/5 of the texts mentioned are likely to be required reading for many students before they graduate high school. Not only that, but works of Children's Literature are almost as prominent. And while I don't ever discredit the importance of Children's Literature, I don't exactly see why The Many Adventures of Winnie The Pooh is better than Hamlet. And speaking of Hamlet, I find it hard to believe that people have really read "The Complete Works of Shakespeare" as the list describes it, while still allowing Hamlet its own spot, there, at the bottom, below The Five People You Meet In Heaven.

Most of the list is, as I mentioned, British Literature. The lack of American authors is pitiful, and the attention paid to so few Russian, French and other international authors is equally unsound. Plus, no Germans. And there are enough books that I can credit gaining popularity due more to hype, controversy, and the Oprah Book Club than to their actual artistic merit.

What do these submissions–and omissions–tell us about the average reader? Well, at least the average reader of the Guardian, who lives in Britain. Let's look at the top 10 books that they picked, which are (apparently) the 10 greatest books you could possibly read. Look out, guys, I'm going to get snarky:

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
This novel seems to fit most of what we're looking at with the rest of the list: British author, an acceptable piece of literature in its own right (if we were to look at any other top 100 lists, I doubt there would be an omission of this novel). But on the minus side, Pride and Prejudice is a relatively simple piece of literature. For its time it was groundbreaking, and though it serves as an excellent look into 18th century society, it is also a romantic comedy, and is not particularily well-written, being more revolutionary in what it is saying as opposed to how it says it. In many ways, Pride and Prejudice is the Wizard of Oz of books: everyone knows it, everyone gets it, everyone likes it, but does that make it truly great?

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
You know what, I hated Lord of the Rings. I didn't like The Hobbit that much either. Tolkein's overlong, plodding, and dull-save-for-some-battle-scenes saga is, perhaps, one of the best works of Fantasy Fiction. In my opinion, though, that's like saying that Independence Day is one of the best disaster movies ever. Yes, it's an anti-war book, but is it so hard to think of a hundred other anti-war books? Also, this series is responsible for practically creating the genre of Sword-and-Sorcery Fantasy, which I'm not sure is a great thing. The worst crime, perhaps, is that there is little in Tolkein's thirty thousand or so pages of walking across Middle Earth that opens up any insight into the human condition.

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Jane Eyre falls under a lot of the same categorials as Pride and Prejudice, though I'm happy to say that, at least, it's a better book. Virginia Woolf, in her introductory pages to A Room of One's Own, actually mentions that one is almost required to mention Austen and the Brontes, but this doesn't mean that they're necessarily great authors, just that they're the only women available. Jane Eyre is a good enough story as it is, and Charlotte is by far the most skilled of the Bronte sisters. Again this is a novel that must be remembered for its significance, but it is far from the best, even Bronte's later novel Villette is a better read.

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
First of all, don't put an entire series as one book. This happened with The Lord of the Rings as well, and I let it go as it was three pretty closely constructed books, but the entire Harry potter series? The list makes this error further down with The Chronicles of Narnia (despite how The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe has its own place). To be completely honest, I love the shit out of Harry Potter. But is it better than the next book on the list, To Kill a Mockingbird? No. Have more people read it? You bet. The series is the biggest thing to happen in literature in the past fifty years. But this isn't a list about what books are the most familiar, it is the books which are the best. And, though JK Rowling is a pretty good writer and she managed to make a series that was as good as the hype suggested it to be, I'm not sure that it deserves to be placed on the top shelf just yet.

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Finally, something I can agree with! Well, at least I agree that it should be in the top 10. This is also the only American novel to rank this high (sad), and the only one that was written in the twentieth century AND isn't a fantasy story. Does that seem weird to anyone else? That there are no books about modern life this high up?

6 The Bible
Okay, look. The Bible is a great work of literature. But what does this exactly say? Most of the time when I see people list "The Bible" in their favorite books, it just seems like they're making a point of saying how Christian they are. I've read the Bible, but I wouldn't say that it's a favorite work of literature to me; I would just say that it's very essential reading for anyone who ever wants to find out what Western Society is talking about most of the time. If this was a list of Most Influential Books, then the Bible would be at #1. Also, I'm a little bugged that it's just "the Bible" and not something specific: King James Bible, New Testament, Old Testament, and so on. Also, look at the books that beat it.

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
I don't know what to say about this. Wuthering Heights is the most dull, insipid book that I've read and I will never understand why people love it so much. Do you get me? It's like the 19th century's precursor to Twilight; it's nothing but a book about people who love each other so passionately that they will ruin the lives of nearly everyone in England just so that they can die in the end and haunt their children.

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
Blah blah blah social commentary. Orwell did a damn good job of scaring the pants off of me, as well as most other people in the First World, when he came out with 1984. Orwell's novel is suspenseful and well-written, but I find it to be heavy-handed and, over fifty years later, pretty terribly dated. Like the Bible, I would place this close to the top of a Most Influential list, but I'm not sure that it's top 10 material.

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
I love these books. I love the characters. Philip Pullman is a better writer, to me, than Tolkein and Rowling. What bothers me most about this inclusion is that, besides the already obvious anger at snubbing dozens of other wonderful works of literature, they include His Dark Materials while at the same time no one thought of the literary masterpiece that serves, more or less, as Pullman's source material: John Milton's Paradise Lost. But hey, it's only the most influential and beautiful work of poetry in the English language, you don't have to read it.

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
This is the first of what appears to be hundreds of Dickens novels on the list. At least they chose the best one of the bunch. I'll go off on a tangent about this: I don't understand what's so great about Charles Dickens. When I was studying in England, I realized that almost everyone had read Dickens, while I was hardly ever introduced to his writing growing up in the States. In the same vein, the only way that British children seemed to be familiar with Mark Twain was to take a literature class that specialized in American Lit. That might be a misunderstanding on my part, of course. But maybe that's why I just can't get into Dickens: he wrote nothing, as far as I can tell, that has any remote interest to the American reader; whereas Twain practically invented the American Reader.

Let's take a moment and look at the original list, the BBC's "The Big Read". Here are the top 10 books from that reader poll:

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë

Oh god damn it. Is this really all that people aspire to read? At least they only named one of the Harry Potter books (don't worry, there are at least five more on the rest of the list). I'll count His Dark Materials as a single volume, since it works best if read that way anyway. Why do people love The Lord of the Rings so much? If these lists are proper reflections of the population of the United Kingdom, I'd say that everyone in the UK is fifteen and simply listed the only books they have ever read.

In order to make this fair, here's another Top 10 list, this one compiled by the apropriate Best 100 Novels website. Once again, I've X'ed the ones I know.

This is a little better, in terms of what I would consider important literature. Am I happy about the order? Well, not really. Once again, of course, this is a popularity list (people sign onto the website and submit their 10 favorite books), but it looks like the contributors included more than just British Housewives.

TIME Magazine created a list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century. I like this list for a few reasons: first of all, it's a narrowed-down selection, which means that it's a bit more fair (the earliest published novel is 1923, which can more or less be called the kickoff for what would define 20th century literature). Second, it was compiled by only two people, editors at TIME itself, meaning that they know what they're talking about, and the novels didn't just arrive on the list by overwhelming vote. Finally, the list is alphabetical and not done in a best to worst sort of way. This makes the books even in their heft on the list, which makes sense: after all, can you really compare science fiction, modernism, and fantasy in the same way?

The last list that I'll mention is the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels. This one's a little skewed, after all, the only eligible books are ones that have been published by the Modern Library, which means that it's sort of the Critereon Collection of books. Still, it was compiled by a board of literary experts, and is pretty formidable. You should go check it out, if only to see how many scientologists contributed to the Reader's List (that's the one on the right, with all the Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard).

So what is it that makes the best novels of all time? Obviously, polling people won't produce the right answer. On the other hand, simply relying on the Literati to produce the answer alienates most people who read for the sake of reading. Of course, in the end, the "Best Novel Ever" doesn't exist, at least not objectively. What would make me happy would be something like TIME's list, more of a survey of great literature, but divided by era, genre, etc. What people fail to realize all too often is that literature is as complex and interesting as music. What the Guardian's list clearly shows, to me, is the general ignorance of this fact, the ignorance that leads people to believe that something like The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy is more worthwhile than Dante's Inferno, Joyce's Ulysses, or dozens of other books that were ignored for the sake of a book-club populist grouping of literature that is choked by novels that, in twenty years, will lose any sort of relevance.

The solution? Easy. Let people know that they can and should read better books. They also can and should see better movies, while we're on the subject. People go about their lives ignoring some of the best artistic experiences that they could have for the sake of something that is "easier" or "more accessible", when the truth is....it isn't. You can go to MacDonalds and get a Big Mac meal for the same price that you could probably make a healthier, more delicious sandwich at home, you just have to be willing to put in the effort. The tragedy is that, the more attention that gets paid to mediocre talent, the less and less gets paid to the better, rarer works of literature. And true, reading something like Joyce or Woolf isn't easy, but I promise you that its worth it. And the more people read better things, the more their vocabulary and their world view expands and blooms. Reading great literature is, to me, not a requirement (like Summer reading), but is essential. I only wish that I could share that idea with more people, and that I could open up that understanding. I'm not going to give you my Top 100 novels, but I could always try...for now, though, I have too much left to read before I can feel happy with my understanding of it all. No matter how many great books you've read, there will always be more.

Get your Google on

2009-06-27T12:44:00.001-07:00

Or Wikipedia. Whichever.

I don't know how many of these I'll do, but these are a couple people whom I believe the Googling of and knowing about would probably do most people good. I've had them all on my mind for a while, but now they are true, because they are blogged.

1) Clara Bow. Hollywood's first sex symbol, "it" girl, flappper, took a terrible life and enchanted the world.

2) Zelda Fitzgerald. Wife of F. Scott, gifted and troubled, remembered more for her insanity than for her own writing.

3) Franz von Stuck. German Symbolist painter extraordinaire, almost forgotten outside of Munich, many paintings border on erotica, designed his house from the floor to the dome.

4) Ralph Ellison. Wrote a novel that fits between DuBois and Dostoevsky, blew Faulkner away, and made Jazz work on the page like no other.

5) The entire cast of Amadeus. Despite having three hours worth of incredible performances, no one really did anything after this film, find them and bring them back. Seriously, only three members of the cast have pictures on IMDB, and two of them are pictures from Amadeus.

Also, I want to say something about True Blood. After every episode of True Blood, I feel as though I've been beaten over the head with a Stupid Stick, that is also full of heroin, and thus I keep doing it. Luckily for me, I now have a membership at Movie Madness here in PDX, which means that I can just grab Nosferatu or Christopher-Lee-As-Dracula anytime I need some real Vampire shit.

Can anyone ever do Vampires right again? Should I try? I don't know.

Lovely Painting Break

2009-06-22T00:47:00.000-07:00

I'm wasting my evening watching The Da Vinci Code on TNT, which means that I'm watching a combination of watching the movie itself and late-night infomercials, for things such as "Ultimate Love Songs" (in two volumes!) and RePhresh, which relieves "feminine odor and itch...forever!" (use it after your period! Rephresh! After intimacy! REPHRESH! After doucheing! REEEEEEPHRESH!)

And I should say right now that I enjoy watching The Da Vinci code, not because it's particularly good, but because it relies heavily on something I loved as a youth: hostorical re-enactments with narration. I grew up with The History Channel before it was all about technology, and The Discovery Channel when it was more about haunted places and less about blowing things up. And it's impossible for me to hate anything to have to do with Tom Hanks. Oh, and there's a little of this in it:

Anywho, here's what it led me to: a lovely painting of The Penetent Magdelene, as painted by Francesco Hayez:

Now I'm back to discovering the secret codes of stuff and learning where to call to meet lots of local singles!

The Ten Dumbest Things To Do On Facebook

2009-06-18T23:33:00.000-07:00

Now that Facebook has pretty much destroyed every other social networking site (though I'm looking for a literature themed one, a la last.fm, and if it doesn't exist, then I will call it BookBook), it has become the haven of everything that you can possibly imagine. Everything that we hate about the internet is there now: old people, fandoms, forums, personality quizzes, and the people that, in truth, you once used the internet to avoid. Still, it's the best option out there; less garish than Myspace, less whorish than makeoutclub (or any of the dozen other sites like it), less elitist than last.fm, and more useful for the billions of forums out there. I've had my Facebook page for four years, was there when it let in high schoolers, then corporations, then pretty much everyone, created groups, a newsfeed, applications, games, and fan pages. This means that I witnessed the backlash against every single one of those things because the truth is that if you give people something for free, they will find reasons to hate it. I've avoided joining most of the backlash discussion, since the majority of the time it's pointless. The real problem with Facebook isn't the website, it's the people who use it and often abuse it. And no matter what I do, there's nothing that can keep these things from clogging up any sort of unfiltered News Feed, so here is my list of What Not To Do when it comes to Facebook:

The Ten Dumbest Things To Do On Facebook

10) Treat your Facebook like a Twitter Feed
Twitter, if you care, is meant to be the future of social networking, which is code for "in three months, no one will care about it". The idea is simple: a user writes about their lives in 140 characters or less. I have one. It's a fun experiment, like when your English teacher tells you to write a story without adjectives. Also, famous people have Twitters, so you can feel like you're best friends with, I don't know, Al Gore. Facebook changed their News Feed layout shortly after Twitter's rise in popularity, making it apparent that the creators of Facebook really didn't want Twitter to steal their thunder, in an internet game of "anything you can do, I can do better". Facebook had already had status updates for a while, now they just spiffed them up with the option of "sharing": posting links, pictures, whatever. While the idea of this is decent, it is the root of most of the clutter problem with the News Feed: people do share, and they share a lot. Hey, I liked a movie. Let me tell you about it. I had a test today. Here's how I feel about it. I took a quiz about what "Twilight" character. Let me tell you how surprised I am! Thankfully, one has the option of NOT sharing every last detail of their life on Facebook, but people either don't use that or they don't want to. The result is a News Feed clogged with a billion off-key rusty horns blowing a billion innane songs at my face at the same time, which takes me right from "being interested" to "hoping you will die and not update about it".
Where you can do this without repremand: Twitter

9) Join/create groups that are numbers
This is on the way out, since groups are also on the way out in favor of the simpler pages. Still, you see tons of these all around the 'book: "1,000,000 Strong for Barack Obama" "2,000 People Against The Golden Compass" "A Million Christians on Facebook", and so on. And after that you have the second type of number groups, the result number groups: "For Every Person Who Joins This Group I Will Send $1 to Darfour" "If 2,000 People Join This Group, Doug Will Eat Dog Food For A Week" "If 4,000 People Join, I'll Lose My Virginity". Sure you will, kid. If Facebook says so. The entire message behind these groups isn't "hey, look, there are thousands of people who are like you!", because you could easily find that out...just by looking the number of people in the group. What it really says is "let's see how many people we can rope into thinking this is funny/clever/relevent! I'll bet it's at least 1,000". The worst part of this is that the groups seldom reach the level that they intend to, and still, people join. They love doing it. The worst offender of them all? "If 1,000,000 people join this group, nothing will happen", or as I like to call it, "If 1,000,000 people join this group, then we will have evidence that there are at least 1,000,000 douchebags on Facebook."
Where you can do this without repremand: On some forum that is tucked far away from the world so that I can't see it.

8) Post profile pictures that are not of you
First of all, it's dishonest. People want to see what you look like (even if you're ugly. We need a warning). Secondly, it's immature, you're making your Facebook profile, which you plan to use for "Networking" or "Random play", the same as your gamer profile on XBox Live. Third: it's generally a dickish and pretentious thing to do. What, you really think that you're just like The Terminator? You want to put up some cubist painting to say, what, "I'm too artsy for my face"? What's that? A LOLCat? Man, those aren't even funny by themselves after ten seconds.
Where you can do it without repremand: Myspace

7) Post vague, self-involved status updates
I know, I know, everyone's a poet. We all love the idea of saying beautiful and profound things, and on Facebook, you have the ability to say them to hundreds of people at the same time, and then wait on edge to see if they will Like it or Comment. Let me put this simply: Facebook is not a place for poetry. Actually, most of the internet isn't, as most people learn by the time they're 16. Still, people post sentences that are not sentences, usually having to deal with breaking up with someone or hating someone or sunflowers or how they hate someone they broke up with, but the updates are so vague that it's like they're wanting everyone on Facebook to comment enthusiastically, "what do you mean? My god, tell me, you're so mysterious!" No you're not. Stop trying to be artistic on Facebook. Remember: you're on Facebook.
Where you can do it without repremand: LiveJournal

6) Randomly friend people
On Myspace, the idea was to have a thousand friends; not really to talk to them or find out what they were doing with their lives, but to just have them, like a collection of action figures. Occasionally, you friended someone you actually knew. Rarely, you met someone on Myspace and met them in real life (presumably for sex). The beauty of Facebook is the exclusive feel to it. It started as a place where you could only add other people who were in college, and even though it grew from there, the idea was generally the same: only add people that you at least know personally in real life. This is mostly due to the limited profile that Facebook shows to anyone who doesn't know you. It keeps Facebook clean, for the most part. Still, though, there are plenty of people with hundreds of friends, and this seems to be for no other reason that they just decided to blanket friend everyone they could have met in their lives. And true, I could say no, but still, I hate the idea of having my Feed clogged with updates from people who are, at the very least, strangers that I don't feel scared around. The way to solve this? Ask someone if they're on Facebook first. And ask to friend them. At least there will be some real world interaction...
Where you can do this without repremand: Myspace

5) Create/attend events that are not really events
This is what an event is: an event is a party. It is a party for people to get together at. Here's what an event isn't: a place where people can give someone their phone numbers. A vague reference to something, such as "Mary is attending the last day of school." And it's not really a nation-wide thing, either. You don't "attend" the first presedential debate on TV. You don't "attend" voting in American Idol. It just doesn't make sense; it's almost the same as one of those pointless groups, only it seems immediate and important. I remember a time where I was invited to FOUR events where someone had lost or gotten a new phone, and needed my phone number. How do you RSVP to that? Why not just send people messages?
Where you can do this without repremand: Eh, nowhere really

4) Make groups/pages about what pisses you off on Facebook
If sayings were literal, then Facebook is a big giant gift horse, and there are hundreds of thousands of people clamoring into eyesight of its mouth. Every day people join more and more of these groups. Facebook, in the beginning, was so popular that every small development was noticed by more and more people, generating more and more of a backlash against it. It started when Facebook opened it's e-doors to high schoolers and then the real world. People hated it. Then they created the news feed. People hated that. Every single formatting shift, every tiny change in the site's design, hate hate hate. Most of the time the changes didn't really effect the overall accessibility and use of Facebook, and I've yet to hear of someone destroying their Facebook because they moved the wall from one side of the screen to the other. And if it isn't things that Facebook is doing wrong, it's things that people think the site would die without: colored themes, music, HTML coding (basically, everything that Myspace has). Facebook, of course, has never taken any of these suggestions to heart. The new popular one is the idea of creating a "Don't Like" button as a contrast to the "Like" button, which is sort of a symbol for Facebook in general: we want the option to hate what we're getting the priveledge to see. Now, you could say that I'm doing the same thing by harping on it right now, but rest assured: I'm not making a group about it. The whole thing reeks with what I call the You Think You Know Better fallacy: for example, when you're at a store and someone says that it's organized wrong, or that the computer should work in a different way. It's the idea that the system isn't broken, the system is just stupid, and thou art the bearer of common sense in a mad world. The truth is that, most of the time, things work pretty well, and are pretty well designed, and if there's a problem, you aren't the only person who knows about it. If the designers at Facebook thought that customized profiles and Don't Like buttons were good things to have, then they would put them up there. The flipside of all these groups are the conspiracy ones, the "join this group if you don't want Facebook to cost money/be racist/give information to the government". These, of course, are fed with a nice thick slice of bullshit pie.
Where you can do this without repremand: Anywhere in Boca Raton

3) Becoming fans of things that are concepts
At first, pages were a great idea: it's like a group, except that it's consolidated (for instance, instead of having thirty groups that are Virginia Woolf fan clubs, you could just have Virginia Woolf herself). During the presedential elections, Obama and McCain groups could use their wide Facebook audience of "fans" to send out notifications, news items, etc. They were a sort of addition or substitute for your Interests, a more colorful way to show people what you cared about. But, like anything that a million people are given influence over, the Pages were led astray. Now you can become a "fan" of cuddling, morning sex, summer vacation, sleeping, waking up, playing video games, driving a car, speaking french, eating meat, being vegetarian, kicking puppies into the faces of babies, etc. The problem with this is that it's stupid: you end up with tons of pages that aren't of actual things, but just concepts. I suppose that people think that they're being clever, it's one of those phrases that I can see the Cohen Brothers giggling over five or six years ago. The truth of the matter is that saying "I'm a big fan of cuddling" wears out its welcome the first time, and finding out that there are a thousand "things that are not things" to "be a fan of" makes you sort of want all that 2012 stuff to come true.
Where you can do this without repremand: Nowhere. We're getting into no man's land here.

2) Add applications like it's going out of style
Do you play Mafia Wars? Put "flair" on your wall? How about bumper stickers? Got any fake pets? Wanna write a movie review? Show off every bit of "Office" trivia that you know? How about a quote generator? A LOLcat generator? How about give a gift? Or a poke? Or a hug? Or a fake trip to Tahiti? How about a hatching egg? Growing flower? Free gift? Rank your friends? I know! Do all of those things, and then send me invites to do them as well, because everyone is interested in those things. Everyone wants to join the "I'm gonna clutter the fuck out of my Facebook page" group! Or they can be fans of it? Yeah! We can be like those people who get so many tattoos that you forget that they're someone who has feelings or, you know, a life. Who needs a life? I'm playing Risk!
Where you can do this without repremand: Nowhere

1) Quizzes
These just need to stop. Unconditional surrender. Quizzes are not only applications that you have to add that plaster themselves all over your page, but they also take up plenty of space on the News Feed. And there are quizzes for everything, which means that there are thousands of people taking them and dozens of them posting them on my home page. And to what effect? Are they bragging? Do they think I'm interested? I get that it's fun (which is why people plastered Quizilla results all over their myspaces back in the day), but must we do it all day? Facebook is meant to be a networking site, not a place for wasting away trying to learn what sort of disney villain you are. Not only are the regular quizzes annoying and pestering, but now people have gotten the idea of creating quizzes about themselves, with a "how well do you know...." title. To which I kindly say: you are not that important. Please grow up, at least a little bit. The Quizzes have become terribly unsightly and second-hand embarrassing, and reduce the Facebook news Feed a little closer to the level of Blaring Myspace Page. And no one wants that again.

Let's see what Picture Picture has for us today

2009-06-17T01:00:00.000-07:00

Here we go: pictures, captions. Life as a photo. Hooraaaaaaaaay.

After months of difficulty, I was finally able to perfectly flip an omelette. I mean, look at that shit. and that's nothing compared to what's in it: egg whites, cumin, salt, pepper, oregano, jack and cheddar cheese, and a slice of avacado right in the middle. Behold!

This here is one result of a shopping trip today: conté crayon! In sanguine, not sepia! The color that I wanted! Not only that, but it's not a bad picture. It's called Tightrope, and you can see a better resolution image of it over here, at my DeviantArt page.

There you go! Pictures pictures pictures. Except that I have one more beauty to show you all: the cover to Bits of Paradise, a book that I was excited to find (for cheap) at Powell's, that's a collection of F. Scott and Zelda Fitgerald's short stories, which all seem either very silly or very sad. Also, I love Zelda Fitzgerald in all her craziness, and it's been nearly impossible for me to get a hold of Save Me The Waltz, or at least a poster of the front cover (please, Gods of Publishing, reprint that book. It is such a loverly book), so I'm tickled to have her on my bookshelf. Anyway, here's the cover, painted by Charles Moll, in 1972:
Apparently, Zelda Fitzgerald invented hairspray. I'm sorry that the resolution is too poor to properly show you Scott's blue-and-teal polka dot tie.

Summer Reading Reviews: Part Three

2009-06-15T16:51:00.001-07:00

William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury

I have to admit, I got a little gung-ho about Faulkner. After reading three short novels by him (Spotted Horses, Old Man, and The Bear), I went ahead and blew away a few more dollars at Powell's to get an almost-complete Classic Faulkner collection. For those of you unfamiliar with Portland, Powell's is a giant bookstore that sells used books for very low prices which is why, for less than $8, I managed to get myself The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Light in August. The Sound and the Fury was the first one that I got into, and boy did I get into it.

Let me preface the body of this review with a warning: make sure that, if you loan or buy this book, to get a copy with the Appendix at the front (my old Vintage edition has it). After Faulkner finished The Sound and the Fury, he wrote the Appendix, which is a more straightforward history of the characters, though it doesn't reveal too much about the actual narrative - it's more like how the menu describes the food but doesn't change how it tastes. Anyway, you're likely to be at a loss without it, so pick it up; if nothing else, it's in The Portable Faulkner.
The Sound and the Fury is a family drama, at its core: Faulkner's narrative is attached to the downfall of the Compsons, a well-bred and formerly wealthy family living in Mississippi. The last generation of Compsons are the main characters and narrators: the oldest, Quentin, then his brothers Jason and Benjamin, and finally the one girl in the family, Caddy. The novel is divided into four sections and with the exception of the final one, each is narrated by a different brother: first Benjamin, then Quentin, and finally Jason.

I should tell you right now that just typing that paragraph took me forever to do. The novel's weight is not in the story that it is telling, but of the men Faulkner creates to tell it. Benjamin, called "Benjy", is the youngest and also mentally challenged (what his exact condition is is never explained), and his narrative is the most well-written mentally challenged character I've ever read. Usually, novelists tend to either write such characters as being too dumb or too poetic; in the end they come off as either disrespectful or pretentious. With Benjy, Faulkner creates a silent man who, though not very intelligent, manages to convey the world that he sees in an understandable, real sort of way. For example, when Benjy talks about a door opening and closing, he says that "the room went away" or "the room came back". It is the narrative that would result if one could watch the world through the eyes of a child, but lacks any sort of cuteness or moments where Benjy is made superior to those around him, the whole "he has a gift of seeing the world in a beautiful way" thing. Anyway, Benjy's narrative focuses on the present, which for Benjy is April of 1928. He is in his 30s, walking along the outskirts of the golf course that used to be the field where he played when he was a child. Throughout the day, Benjy's memory flips back and forth through time, as he remembers playing with his sister, Caddy, who seems to be the only one who loves him. His memories are written with an undefinable tragedy, as the Appendix has already told us, Caddy was disgraced and left a bastard child (a young girl, also named Quentin) for her mother and Jason to raise, their father has died from Alchoholism, and Quentin has killed himself. Yet Benjy continues with little outward understanding of change - the servant that he is walking with is the last of many to take care of him - he is the silent witness to the family's demise. For those of you who aren't familiar with Stream of Consciousness technique, be forewarned: this section is a tough one. The best way to read stream of consciousness, though, is just to read it; and if you do, there's no doubt that you'll enjoy it.

The second section skips backwards eighteen years, to the day of Quentin's suicide in Boston. Quentin's narrative is less sensual than Benjy's, but is still stream-of-consciousness for the most part, most primarily in memory. Quentin, like Benjy, is pulled back into the past through memories of Caddy, who is getting married to cover her illegitimate pregnancy. Quentin, who has a chivalric sense of duty to his sister, tries to convince his father that he is the father of Caddy's child, hoping that he will be able to bear some of her disgrace and continue to protect her, but Quentin's father lectures him on the myth of virginity, on the place of men in society, and various other things that avoid the point Quentin is trying to make: that he loves his sister, and he will do anything to protect her and, if he cannot, then he will suffer and die for her.

Defeated and hating his life at Harvard, Quentin resolves to forsake his family and throw himself into the Charles River. The rest of his day is spent trying to do just that; yet he is constantly stopped by teachers and friends, and has a long and almost adorable adventure with a young immigrant girl, which leads to more distractions by friends, which almost completely derails Quentin's plans. Quentin's memory is mostly full of guilt over what has happened to his sister: his oath to protect her, his unsiccessful attempt to kill the father of her child, his hatred of her new husband. Quentin, like Benjy, seems to be suffering from silence: though he is not mute as his brother is, Quentin is silenced against speaking up for Caddy and protecting her, as he feels so obligated to do, and is driven unwillingly away from his family by guilt, since his stay at Harvard was bought with the sacrifice of his brother's field.

The third section, the final one told in first person, is from the perspective of Jason Compson. Jason, being the only person in the family who seems to have any sort of coherent thought, tells his story in strictly straightforward prose. His flashbacks are well-introduced, his memories have a beginning and an end. This section takes place around the same time as Benjy's, and rotates around a day where the circus comes into Jefferson, and Jason's aversion to it. Actually, Jason is averse to everything and everyone around him, he might be the cruellest character that I've read in a long time. This may not just be because of his character, but because his storytelling - so different from the fluid and passionate voice of Quentin or the simple sensualism of Benjy - is itself cold and emotionless, and offers no excuse, no sympathy. My deep dislike of Jason made the section hard to get through, but I would never say that it was poorly written. Like any good villain, you cringe, and you love it.

Finally, Faulkner steps back and offers a third person account of the Compsons, or at least what's left of them. Taking place around the same time as Jason and Benjy's section, this ultimate chapter follows Dilsy, the family's cook, through her day. The section goes quickly - really, all that needs to be said has been said - and serves as a fine bow atop the gift that Faulkner has so delicately and powerfully wrapped for us.

And then? You put the book down, you step away, and you feel uniquely satiated. The truth is, that was the hardest write-up of a book I've ever done. The Sound and the Fury is a powerful and poingant book, and any sort of summary is, if nothing else, ill-equipped to explain the story, and I probably made it sound boring and pointless. But trust me: read it. It's worth all the time you've got.

Quick thoughts of the day

2009-06-14T23:54:00.000-07:00

Just saw Up, cried my 3-D glasses covered eyes out. So, as a quick thought to round out the day, here's my list of Pixar films, worst to best:

10. Cars
9. A Bug's Life
8. Toy Story 2
7. Monster's Inc.
6. Up
5. Ratatouille
4. Wall-E
3. Toy Story
2. The Incredibles
1. Finding Nemo

Back in the saddle again

2009-06-13T00:24:00.000-07:00

Be forewarned: this post has very little to offer to anyone who has no idea what the hell I'm talking about.

I'm writing a novel (really, who isn't these days?), and one thing that I haven't done yet is write down exactly what my novel is about. I often think that I have a good reason for that: after all, isn't that what Cliff's notes are for? Why should I be writing a "theme", shouldn't the theme simply present itself based on what the story is at it's heart, which is to say, a subconscious part of my spirit as a writer that I cannot control or define by myself, thus is must be understood by someone outside of my own head?

Alright, fine. What if I just give a brief plot outline and then talk about the themes that the story explores? I'll do that.

Clockwork Mouse: Plot Summary

Set in the midst of the Roaring 20s, Clockwork Mouse is the story of Bridget Ford, a young runaway who becomes a stage assistant to Alexander Gimbal, a stage magician and illusionist. After Gimbal moves his show to Atlantic City, he disappears and leaves Bridget in charge, and she finds incredible success, but after a crisis of conscious, decides to leave the show as well. She stays in Atlantic City and forges a relationship with a former beauty queen named May Stowell, who, after a time, convinces Bridget to return to the stage. The show that Bridget perfoms nearly kills May, and plagued with guilt, Bridget runs away from Atlantic City, setting off on a trip across the country. She visits her family, who she has abandoned for three years. In Reno, she finds Gimbal, who is despondent and drunk, and though she helps nurse him through pneumonia, he eventually dies, after telling Bridget the reason why she is so successful at stage magic. In short, Bridget's belief in the reality of the magic makes it real and not an illusion, a fact that she was not aware of, but that made the tricks all the more authentic. Now understanding her capabilites, Bridget tries to master her power and moves to LA, where May has become a film actress. They both find success in the movies, May as a star and Bridget in the new experiments with sound and color. Bridget, still afraid of her abilities and afraid of hurting or killing someone again, decides to once again run away, but May stops her, and Bridget agrees to try and live with her problems and not be alone.

There, that was about 400 words of plot. But what about theme?

There are two main themes in the story that I can identify now. The first is the theme of responsibility. Much like so much of fiction revolves around secrets that are not revealed, Clockwork Mouse is a story that is built by irresponsibility, and the consequences of such. Bridget is afraid of taking real responsibility for her actions, which is why she is so apt to run. She, and Gimbal as well, are more than willing to accept anything bad as an insurmountable crisis, and unwittingly refuse to change or fix the circumstances.

The second is the theme of magic. In Clockwork Mouse, magic takes two definitions: one is simply a phenomenon that you observe, the other is a phenomenon that you believe in. Gimbal explains to Bridget that her gift is simply her ability to believe in real magic, and that things work more by willpower and belief than by any sort of logical reasoning. It is this ability that makes Bridget's magic tricks legitimate, and helps her to make more impossible things: color print on film, a tree, a rainstorm. In this case, magic is not a power that involves incantation or skill, only the power of imagination and the trust that it will work. Bridget's imagination seems to be the most capable of such creation, though when she is afraid or cynical she loses her ability and things can go haywire. Magic is also tied into the power of love and emotion; the idea here being that knowing your feelings to be true makes them stronger than evaluating them.

The motif, as I can see it so far in the story, is abandonment. Bridget abandons her family twice, she abandons her work, abandons May and Atlantic City, and tries to abandon LA. Gimbal also abandons Bridget in Atlantic City, and later abandons her in a sort of way with his death. Abandonment in Clockwork Mouse always has to do with self-discovery as well as irresponsibility, as the abandoner often forgets that they always abandon loose ends, and almost always they have to reconcile with these sooner or later.

That's all I can think of for now. Will there be more? Eh, who knows. Right now I'm just focused on writing, but it's hard to do when I just started watching True Blood, and it's such an awful show that I can't stop. Really, it is just trashtarded.

Where does this mean world cast its cold eye?

2009-06-08T02:39:00.000-07:00

Random thoughts, too long for Twitter. Here we go:

Saturday I went to Oregon Ballet Theater's newest production, which was also my favorite program so far, with a great selection of pieces. (nothing, however, will beat watching The Rite of Spring that they did ealier this year). Seeing the ballet has actually become one of my favorite things about Portland, so if you're reading this blog and you have half a million dollars sitting around, please send it to them. Otherwise they won't have a season next year. Also, when you've done that, go ahead and send me a few thousand.
Is it wrong to feel so so so happy when you discover that your ex is dating a person that is much less attractive than you are, even on your worst days? Because I am feeling that right now. I am feeling so so so happy, and I have been for a while.
Thing that I love: an orchestra tuning up. I love it because, no matter where you go, it sounds completely random and yet still the same everywhere. I would like to have the sound applied to other things: heating up the stove, starting a car, what I hear when I turn on the shower. It's the best sort of warm-up music available, to be sure.
I've begun working on Secret of the Clockwork Mouse again. Not only have I begun to write where I left off, but I've also designated a section of my wall for the book: I have a map of the United States with stickies all over it and a chart of one of the novel's sections, tomorrow, along with more writing, I will print out a collage of pictures that would be relevant to what I'd be describing, as well as a time line for the novel, a time line for actual historical events that correspond with the story, and some character sketches. It's been over a year since I started to formulate the idea, so it's about time that I treated it with some respect.
Possible other titles for the novel: The Heart in the Clockwork Mouse, or some variations of that. The truth is that I can't get the phrase out of my head: would it be best to just go with The Clockwork Mouse?
This is the fourth night in a row that I haven't been able to sleep until 4 or 5 (it's still 3, but I don't have high hopes).
I downloaded the first twelve chapters of Midnight Sun, which is apparently the fifth book in Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series. And oh my god. This is so bad. Like, I don't know how she could not know that this should be better writing. Actually, I'm strangely obsessed with the series in all it's terribleness; perhaps it's from my need to know that I'm better than something (see above: ex's new ugly partner), or because it gives me inspiration: I must write, so that people can know that there are good books out there that can be read.

Summer Reading Reviews: Part Two

2009-06-06T11:26:00.000-07:00

I'll try to fit a couple into this one, since I'm more or less doing this out of order. I mean, I read The Sound and the Fury and Go Tell It On The Mountain, two books that are definitely, definitely on the walls of Barnes and Nobles all over the country, and yet I can't get around to writing significant posts about them. However, I finish reading The Time Traveler's Wife, and I can't wait to talk about it. This might be for the very simple reason that, while Faulkner and Baldwin were wonderful, stirring reads, Audrey Niffenegger sort of irritated me, and people are programmed to hate before they love. Don't get confused though, that's not why I reviewed Peter Pan first, I actually finished that book before I finished any other ones. This is not a "which book does Meg hate today?" list.

Anyway, in this episode, I will review The Time Traveler's Wife, as well as Lauren Groff's The Monsters of Templeton; since both are relatively recent books, and then I can get on to the more classic stuff, before having a nice clean slate for The Master and Margarita and Anne Sexton. We cool? On with the show:

These books seem well worth the comparing: both were written in the past couple years, both are written by a woman and is the author's first novel, both have similar overriding themes: family history, memory, pregnancy, first person narratives. After that point, though, the stories diverge:

I think that I was possibly pre-disposed to like The Monsters of Templeton: much like an ongoing project of mine, it is mainly about a re-imagining of American history, an odd combination of myth and literature and fact and scandal. One morning, after being run out on a rail by her archeology professor's wife due to a disaterous affair, Willie Upton arrives back at her childhood home of Templeton. That same morning, the body of a white, strage monster surfaces in the lake beside the small, upstate town. Not too long after that, Willie's mother tells her that her father is not one of the four San Francisco hippies Vi claimed it to be, but someone who Willie has known her whole life: a man from Templeton, who's family is as old as the Uptons'.

These are the events that kick off the book; and those that connect the various perspectives that Groff introduces through the story. As Willie explores her family's past, trying to catch the missing link that leads to her father, she learns more than she possibly wanted to, about the lives her ancestors led and the skeletons in their closets. Soon, her family - once beloved for being the descendants of the man who founded Templeton - are just as monsterous as the title suggests, and Willie's history is muddled with betrayal, bastard children, murder, rape, and James Fennimore Cooper characters. This can get grating at times; but Groff keeps it interesting by skipping between historical records (which Willie knows) and narratives (which Willie is no aware of) of all the persons that are investigated, as well as portraits of the various Templetons and an ever-expanding family tree.

Willie herself is a decent enough narrator; and thankfully I really start to like her towards the end of the novel. I should note here that I have never really liked first person narrators, they seem to talk too much, and Willie is certainly the endless-tangent type, and her anecdotes that go back to her relationship with a sickly best friend are some of the weakest parts of the narration. Honestly, will there ever be an end to "I have to deal with a loved one who is sick!"?

What I really loved about the book was the creativity that Groff exudes; even if she is not completely engaging with her narrative style, the way in which the mystery unfolds and the plot twist that reveals Willie's paternal side is, towards the end, exciting. And the monster! The monster, a potent symbol and one of the most believable science-fiction elements that I've read lately, might just have been my favorite part; "Glimmey" is more or less a giant seal who only needs to surface every few dozen years, a powerful symbol of the everlasting mystery and wonder that so many people associate with their homes; and when it is found to be real and dead, the town is enveloped in sadness and despair for their lost myths. This is repeated in the loss of Willie's idyllic understanding of her ancestors, and in the many falsehoods in the relationship she has with her professor, as well as with the baby she bears with her into Templeton.

But, instead of choosing to tear down fantasy to erect truth, Groff chooses to keep the myth and magic of Willie and Templeton's history alive within the truth that she reveals, and the result is uplifting, without feeling too schmaltzy. True, there were a lot of sections in the novel that dragged on far too much, and there are some characters who seem strange or superfluous in the modern parts of the story, but as a summer read it's great, and as an academic read it satisfies.

Likewise, I feel that I was pre-disposed to dislike The Time Traveler's Wife, if for no other reason than I really, really can't stand most star-crossed lover stories. In these instances, love seems too easy, there's no struggle in it, the only strain on the relationship seems external; whatever it is in the world that dares to tear the two lovers apart, but it most likely won't, since true love will always win, at least until someone dies. In the case of Audrey Niffenegger's novel, the Thing That Will Tear Us Apart is, as the title suggests, time travel.

Henry DeTamble, a stupidly handsome, dreamy, sexy, smart, bookishly intelligent, Rilke-loving multilingual son of a famous violinist and a famous opera singer who describes himself as an "Egon Schiele look-alike", is cursed with a genetic disorder that causes him to time-travel inadvertently. Where he goes, when he goes, why he goes, how long he is there, and when he comes back are random factors; the only thing that is constant is that Henry travels to moments and places familiar to him, and that when he shows up he's naked, completely exposed to the elements. He gets used to this, learning how to fend for himself, and tends to sedate himself with a hard and fast lifestyle of sex, drugs, and alcohol, all the while keeping a perfectly respectable job as a librarian in the Newberry Library in Chicago. Right.

One afternoon, Henry is confronted by Clare, a stupidly gorgeous, artsy, music-loving, creative woman with red red red silky silky hair, who tells her that he has known her all her life, and thus they are in love. The rest of the tale focuses partly on Henry's sojourns into his and Clare's past and future, and mostly on how deeply they love each other, which is to say, really fucking deeply. No lie. Oh, and punk rock, because Henry loves punk rock (but he hates Joni Mitchell? Really? Like 'yell at my wife' kind of hate? But he loves opera?)

Niffenegger is familiar to me through her illustrated stories The Three Incestuous Sisters and The Adventurers, which each have a creative, dreamlike, mystical feel to them, so I expected something similar with The Time Traveler's Wife: a close-to-the chest, bare and poignant story about the things that we do not understand, of love and destiny. In many ways, you can read the potential for that in the novel, but there are so many short steps that Niffenegger takes that, honestly, I didn't expect, and the moments of cataloguing that either narrator uses seem not so much nuances of character, but instead seem to be covering up for the author's lack of a deep and luscious mood that the story seems to deserve: it's like she talks too much when she should say nothing, and stays silent when there's so much that she could do about it.

The characters who are not Henry and Clare are barely developed stock personas (there's even a Mammy-like cook and a Korean housekeeper, both of them speaking in almost insulting dialects ("Ooh, boy, you been eatin' your Wheaties!" and "Hey, you guys got baby now?", respectively)), and Henry and Clare themselves seem to have very little about their personalities to be interesting. They both suffer from Cool by Association; their lives are described by their taste in food, music, film, clothing, home design, modern art, political theory. Furthermore, the Time Traveling problem that Henry has seems to actually cause him little lasting harm until a point near the end: he is always able to find clothes, he is only gone for a few days at the most, and if someone is astounded by Henry's disappearances, he easily explains it to them. He would make a shitty superhero (there's even a Superman/Clark Kent reference in the book, too!).

Clare, despite being what we can assume is supposed to be a model for the perfect young independent woman, lives her life almost dependently on Henry: she saves herself for him while he fucks half the women in Chicago, she is never enraged by his disappearance or by his former behavior, she puts her art aside or picks it up only if he is there to enable her. In short, she is very much what most Harlequin heroines boil down to, sitting and pining her life away, waiting for the one man she can only love. Even when Henry insists that she live her life to the fullest and enjoy it even if he isn't there, she presumably goes nowhere, does nothing, and waits. For fifty years. There are some soaring moments in the book, though: the relationship that Henry has with his mother's death, as well as the future one that he has with his daughter, are sweet and subtley beautiful, and Henry's trips into his own past are the most revealing of them all.

What irks me, I suppose, is that here Niffenegger is introducing a somewhat brilliant concept, and instead of taking it in a direction that would make it a better, possibly wonderful book, she seems to be settling: there are no long-term consequences for anything for four out of the book's five hundred pages, there is never a moment where either Henry or Clare question themselves or each other to the point of destroying their relationship; they simply accept that they are in love, and stay that way. The best love stories are the ones where people learn to fall in love, those that take the time to explain what it is in each character's personality that makes them inevitably drawn to their soulmate. In this story, Clare arrives and tells Henry that he loves her, but only because, when she was a girl, Henry time-traveled to her to tell her the same thing. And though this does make for a good discussion of fate, the persons involved are so flat, and there are so many irritating things about them that are never confronted or resolved, that I didn't really care to see that happen.

The Monsters of Templeton actually lacked any sort of coherent love story or background; most of the relationships involved within the plot seem to be loveless and, in some cases, spiteful. And though I am coming off of that tirade against The Time Traveler's Wife, that does not mean that I am not a romantic. Trust me, I'm more than willing to play the whole "we were meant to be! I cannot live without you!" song until the record's thin, but that's not the story of my life. I have aspirations of my own, and I want to make sure that I live my own life as my own person, even if I'm in the most perfectly loving relationship. But if that perfect balance were to be the equivalent of, say, tea with just a spoonful of sugar, then The Monsters of Templeton is bitter (but with a little lemon, maybe), and The Time Traveler's Wife is very much tea-flavored syrup. Though I was told over and over again that they were in love, I came to realize that Henry and Clare really weren't that stirring. With Willie and her repetoire of Templetonians, I learned very little of love or personal feelings, but at least they were damned interesting.

I'm not employing any sort of rating system into my reviews, I think it would be unfair, besides, I'm not the best expert on whether a book is good or not, just how much I do or don't like it. That being said, here's what I can tell you: if you want a good summer read that's not too long and not too dumb and not way too deep and yet still smart, hit up The Monsters of Templeton. If you're a romantic who just wants a sappy love story that is, at times, the equivalent of a Harlequin Romance novel for the intellectual Elite, then pick up The Time Traveler's Wife, especially since the movie is set to open in August, with Eric Bana, Rachel McAdams, and the guy from Office Space as Gomez, who is the most unexplainably dickish person ever to be the BFF character. Anyway, get those nose in them books!

i'll do my few years, and then just shit out the guilt

2009-06-05T23:32:00.000-07:00

Tonight my mother and I went to her first and my fourth Neko Case concert at the Crystal Ballroom, here in drizzly Portland. Since I have seen her and her wonderful band so many times, I am perfectly fine with saying that, though this wasn't the best experience, it was altogether pretty wonderful. A word to those who might be seeing her soon: you'd better like the new album, she played all but one song off of it (before the show they even played a couple minutes of "Marais la Nuit", which I had the pleasure of hearing everyone around me mispronounce).

This was the first concert that I've been to in several months. Every time I go to a show in a venue like the Crystal Ballroom (standing-room, general admission), I'm reminded of the horrors of Concert Etiquette, which, much like Drivers Etiquette, is something that only I ever seem to notice or pay attention to. This might be bitchy of me to do, but here's my quick, handy, bloggy guide to how to act during a show, or, how to not have the people around you call you an asshole:

Standing and Moving

At a ticketed show, standing is a pretty simple thing: you have a seat, you stand in front of it. The guy next to you does that too. It's like driving in the lanes. At a general admission show, it's more like a NASCAR track, except that it's stuffed with cars of every shape and size, and some are really zippy and some just stay right where they are. So where does one stand? How does one stand in a way that is as beneficial to others as possible? (after all, we are all here to listen to the music. There! We have enough in common to form a Facebook group. So be fucking polite) In this category, standing has to do with the size of your party and the height of everyone in the group.

Big Groups

As far as size goes, if you have a big group and you really want to be close to the stage, get there early. If you show up when the opening group is winding down and you spot an empty space that's about two feet by three feet, don't drag your elephant chain of seven friends through all the people who have been standing there for thirty minutes and try to squeeze them in. Number one, they won't fit. Number two, don't make the mistake of thinking that people left that spot open becuase they wanted to be polite to the hypothetical ten people behind them. Maybe they have someone getting beer. Maybe they just wanted a little bit of breathing room. Either way, if you show up late, you're stuck, unless you split up the group into more manageable pairs or singles. And on that note: if you decide to send someone on a beer run, don't do it during the show, and don't do it after things get crowded. He/she will spill most of the beer on other people and likely get split from the group for good. This takes us to the other side of the size question:

The Single Concert-Goer

First of all, we feel your pain, man. You most likely have dick friends who either don't like your band or are out of town, and we respect your dedication to shelling out $25 on a show. Single concert-goers have a great advantage over groups and couples; like a motorcycle in a James Bond movie, they can duck and weave through the throngs of people, until they can successfully plant their toes at the very edge of the stage, fulfilling their dream of looking up Neko Case's nose. However, like the Force, this is not a power to be abused. Before you serpentine your way up to the front, consider: how much do you really need to be that close? Even if you're just one person, you could be blocking or displacing a bunch of other people that care more, and you could enjoy the show from a few feet back. And don't forget the rule about the empty space as discussed above: it's not a magical space that no one noticed because some divine power wants you to stand there. Read the area, if no one seems to notice and standing there won't end up with you or someone else being felt up, stand there. If not, just deal with it. You have a pretty decent experience anywhere, right? Well, this question brings to mind the importance of:

Height

Okay, sorry men. This one's just for you, unless the WNBA got tickets to the show as well. standing behind a tall person sucks. It sucks a whole lot, and no one wants to be there, and no one wants to tap you on the shoulder and tell you to move. We short people are in a conundrum: are we mad at you for being tall? Should we be like that kid Curtis in the comic strip who spends all of church talking about how big the women's hats are? Truthfully, the flat, compressed general admission floor is not the place where the Big and Tall are really welcome. Not that we can ask you to hunker down or anything. So if you are tall, you have an advantage, you can see the same view from pretty much anywhere. So, like the single concert-goer, you must ask the question: how much do I need to be up-front? If this is a life-changing event, if you are buzzing inside with happiness at the opportunity to see this group that has so far evaded you, okay, you get a pass. You just have to prove to people around you that you're into it. If not, if you're one of those "stand and do nothing" people, well, give the rest of us a chance.

During the Show

So the lights are dimmed, the band has taken the stage, someone mutters "thank you" in the microphone. The concert has begun! Not only that, but you're ass-to-ankles with about two hundred people. How do you act in this crowded, fire-risk environment?

Take Cues from the Band

There's a spectrum in rock shows that has Smog on one side and Jonas Brothers on the other. If the person on stage is still the whole time, crooning something about haystacks or rain clouds with their eyes closed so that they just look like they're sleep-singing, don't dance. Fold your arms, sway a little bit (not too much), nod your head. But if the stage is full of dance, heavy beats, waving arms, or punk blasts from the stage, act accordingly, dance or fight, play air guitar (this is for the shittier bands, mind you). If the song they are playing is an anthem and you are in an arena full of people who most likely also know the words (see: Green Day), feel free to pump along to the words, especially if a band member is pumping his fist as well (see: Green Day). This also goes for raising your hands above your head and clapping, or waving them side to side. However, if none of these conditions apply, keep your hands and arms below shoulder height at all times. Why? Because it's obnoxious. For example, when I saw Neko Case this evening, the band's cues were that the music was good for swaying, singing along, and that the atmosphere was relatively relaxed. From those cues, I decided to sway a few inches to either side to the slower songs, tap my feet or shake my hips and shoulders to the more upbeat stuff, or clap my hands close to my body, directly in front of me. I was able to express my love of the music without bothering anyone else around me.

On the other side, you have the standing-still and not doing anything people. Acting this way is not inappropriate, it just weirds people out that you're so damn stoic. This goes back to the tall person/single concert-goer thing: if you stand in front of someone who is dancing and you're standing with your arms crossed like you're too cool to care, you're just being a jerk.

Singing Along/Shouting Out Loud

This is a lot like the taking cues from the band thing. If the band is playing a song that is anthemic (see: Green Day) or turn their microphones to the audience, even touching their ear to indicate that they want you to sing (see: Green Day), well, belt whatever it is out loud. If it's a quieter show, singing out loud with the song is a bit weird. There is an exception for phrases; you can sing a few of the nicer words out loud, but if you end up singing the entire verse, this gets tiring to those around you, and it just seems like you're bragging about how many words you know. Also, keep in mind that people are here to hear the band play, not you. And if you're yelling the words at the singer like you're having some sort of communiun with them, no you're not. Stop yelling at the back of someone's head. However, you are allowed to sing along at a reasonable volume; that is, you mouth the words to yourself, or sing at a volume relatively lower than the music that's playing. The most important thing to remember here is that most people, when they can't hear themselves singing, are completely tone deaf. Keep this in mind: yes, you know all the words, but you sound terrible. And a note on shouting: don't shout requests, unless the people on stage ask for them. They have a set to play, the lighting, sound, and band have a set to play, they won't stop for you and play whatever the fuck you want. Yelling tends to be a bad idea, too, especially if it just ends up with the person in front of you cringing. "I LOVE YOU!" do you? Duh. You bought a ticket. Most importantly, never, ever, ever yell "Freebird!", because then you may as well have the word "douchebag" written on your forehead for the rest of your life.

Couples

Alright, you're in love. Kudos. This is a big night for you two, you really wanted to share it with each other, mush mush blah blah. You are also sharing this magical night with the people around you, who don't really want to be happy for your happiness, they just want to enjoy themselves. Can you hold hands? Yes. Can you hold your girlfriend from behind? Yes. Can you grind while doing it? No. Can you slow dance and make out and make sexy faces at each other the whole time? No. You are in at least ten people's line of vision, and the last thing anyone wants in their line of vision is some chick tonguing some guy's ear. This is big with the personal space issue as well, I don't want your arm that's groping your girlfriend to be rubbing along my back. Gross. Again, I would suggest standing further back where there's more room and privacy, or perhaps going up to the balcony. This rule of etiquette is directly related to the Tall Person rule, since the combination of a tall guy and a woman's tongue in his ear is especially deadly. Now, I'm not trying to say that couples must be stoic, and kissing is certainly allowed (limitedly), but if you are so happy together, then you can do just as much at home, and there you don't even have to wear clothes! Also, and this is very important: men, do not ever, ever put a girl on your shoulders.

Talking

My friends and I do this all the time, commenting on the people around us, the band playing, how much we really have to pee. However, talking tends to be a no-no at a show; after all, you're here to listen to the music, not to yak. If you're back at a table, though, or if it's between songs, then talking is perfectly acceptable. But during a song, you have to be careful. If you're too loud, it's rude and distracting. If you have to lean over to talk to someone, then you're needlessly obstructing the view of those behind you, and if you do this, your face is on a fast track to fist town. The best way to talk is to mimic the couples doing their face-forward hug, and you can easily lean back or forward to whisper sweet nothings in each other's ear. If this doesn't work, then at least stand close enough together that people can't see anything between your heads anyway.

Drinking

Beers are great. If it's in a bottle or a breakeable glass, it might be best to enjoy your beverage back at the bar. Cuts are bad. If it's in a plastic bottle or a cup, keep it in your hands, not on the floor. And be careful not to spill it all over people. If this is a dancing show, then stay back until you're full of nice, frosty beer.

One Last Word

Somewhere I can hear someone saying "Come on, Meg. Stop being a bitch about it, people should be allowed to enjoy the experience however they want!" Yeah? Well, you know that rule in sex, where you can only go as far as you are both comfortable? Concerts are like that, only with a lot of people. You can't be rude for the same reason you can't start screaming in Starbucks, or you can't walk all over the desks in the classroom. "But that's just what society wants you to do! Fuck that!" No, fuck you. Rude is rude, and no one wants their concert experience dulled by someone who just doesn't give a shit about anyone else. On that note, though, the reason why concert etiquette is so rarely followed is because people don't speak up about it. Just like people don't get mad at the tall people, they don't get mad at the giant groups of people, those who push them out of the way, they don't tell couples to stop slobbering all over each other or tell that guy who keeps talking about how his "friends are up front, man, just let me get by!" to stay where he is. This is because getting outwardly mad is the last thing you want to do, it more or less ruins the show for you, them, and everyone who has to watch. And the whole point is to make sure that everyone has a good experience. The only way that we can have good concerts is to spread the word outside of the venues. Tell your friends and loved ones, plainly and simply, that we're all here to enjoy ourselves. Don't be a dick.

Summer Reading Reviews: A quick update before going back into it

2009-06-04T13:39:00.000-07:00

Fact is, I've already got plenty of the reading done, it just depends on the energy I have and the time I have to review the books, as well as have other ones waiting in the wings to finish. So, in a way of keeping myself organized, here's a list of the books, and how they're coming along:

Already Read:
J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
James Baldwin, Go Tell It On The Mountain
Lauren Groff, The Monsters of Templeton

Currently Reading:
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife
Anne Sexton, Selected Poems

Still to Read (presumably):
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
Larry McMurtry, The Last Picture Show
D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

There are still a half dozen other books on my bookshelf which I will probably try to stick my nose in at some point, as well as other works that I haven't read (one, for example, is Glen David Gold's Sunshine, a follow up to Carter Beats the Devil, which I loved). So we'll see where we go from there, right now my goal is to have twelve more reviews up here by the end of summer.

Summer Reading Reviews: Part One

2009-05-29T15:34:00.000-07:00

J.M. Barrie: Peter and Wendy

A lady-friend recently wrote her honors thesis about this book, so I figured I'd take a look at it; after all, she'd written some pretty deep shit about it, and it is one of those classic works of childrens' literature that I'd somehow avoided so far in my life. A plot summary is more or less pointless; even for those who haven't read the book, there's still the many film adaptations and Barrie's play Peter Pan, which predated the novel. But in case you're reading this from a far away world where The Boy Who Never Grew Up doesn't ring a bell, here it is: the three Darling children (Wendy, John, and Michael) are swept away one evening from their London nursery by the impish, half-boy-half-Puck Peter Pan, along with his fairy, Tinker Bell. Peter flies the children away to the Neverland, an ever-changing island of childhood fantasy, populated by Redskins and Pirates and fairies and the deadly Crocodile, where Peter and his troupe of Lost Boys never grow up. The story focuses on the Darling childrens' (especially Wendy's) adaption to their new home, and to the ever-deadly war between Peter and the pirate captain, Jas. Hook.

Barrie's prose is flush and descriptive, and there are many parts where, as the thesis writin' ladyfriend would say, he "just gets it." Barrie, a sort of man-child in his own right, understands the nooks and crannies of a child's mind; and the best parts of the story lies in Barrie's poetic description of the Neverland itself:

"There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a card, and these are probably roads in the island, for the Neverland is more or less an island, with astonishing splashes or color here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with six elder brothers, and a hut going fast to decay...there is also first day at school, religion, fathers, the round pond, needlework, murders, hangings, words that take the dative..."

And so on. There are moments in Barrie's story that are poingant and tense, indeed, yet there were also disappointing moments. Wendy was much more one-dimentional and absent than I hoped, while the boys are off having adventures, she is happy to sit by the fire and darn socks, likewise, Peter is often cruel and a few times is blatantly unlikeable. The tale is also much darker than the films would suggest, perhaps my stomach is too weak for it, but the continuing gruesome deaths of the various pirates are treated with lightness and humor. This, of course, points to the story's origin, the result of Barrie's friendship with the Llwellyn-Davies boys, an extended game of make-believe made real. This also accounts for the many fast saves in the novel, which often stand out like sore thumbs; for example, Wendy and Peter's rescue at sea by, first, a kite which had not been mentioned at all but had existed for a good deal of the novel, and second, by a bird who arrives at the last minute to pull Peter away. These events ensure that the endless world of Neverland continues, but they were too sloppily added into the narrative. Overall, though, the world that J.M. Barrie created has become a part of every child's Lexicon, and after reading the novel, or seeing one of the films for the first time, what child doesn't wait with bated breath every night for the endlessly wonderful and cruel Peter to take them away from the world?

The ABCs of Meg!

2009-05-04T12:16:00.001-07:00

I think that I am creating a new internet meme? This is because I am bored, and that is how they are created.

A is for Americana
B is for Books
C is for Castles
D is for Disney
E is for Eating
F is for Florida
G is for Grande Soy Latte
H is for Hawaii
I is for Imagineering
J is for Jokes
K is for Kites
L is for Lake Merwin
M is for Mythology
N is for Novels
O is for Omelettes
P is for Peaches
Q is for Quentin Compson
R is for Road Trips
S is for Stream of Consciousness
T is for Travel
U is for Unspoken
V is for Virginia Woolf
W is for Writing
X is for X-mas lights
Y is for Younger
Z is for Zelda Fitzgerald

And just because I am a dork:

2009-04-25T15:14:00.000-07:00

Here's a mathematical assessment of my last semester, based on how much I enjoyed/benefited from certain aspects of each class.

Final Semester Statistics

Fem Lit:

Reading avg.: 3.5/5
Classmates: 3.5/5
Prof: 4/5
Assignment ease: 3/5
Worth showing up: 2.5/5
Class avg: 3.3/5 or 66%

Can. Lit

Reading avg: 2/5
Classmates: 3/5
Prof: 3.5/5
Assignment ease: 3/5
Worth showing up: 2/5
Class avg: 2.7/5 or 54%

Amer. Lit:

Reading avg: 3.5/5
Classmates: 2.5/5
Prof: 5/5
Assignment ease: 4/5
Worth showing up: 4/5
Class avg: 3.8/5 or 76%

Milton:

Reading avg: 3.5/5
Classmates: 2.5/5
Prof: 1/5
Assignment ease: 3/5
Worth showing up: 1/5
Class avg: 2.2/5 or 44%

Brit. Lit:

Reading avg: 4.3/5
Classmates: 3.5/5
Prof: 4.5/5
Assignment ease: 2.5/5
Worth showing up: 3.5/5
Class avg: 3.6/5 or 73%

Overall averages:

Reading: 3.4 or 68%
Classmates: 3.0 or 60%
Profs: 3.6 or 72%
Assignments: 3.1 or 62%
Worth showing up: 2.6 or 52%
Overall term average: 3.14 or 62%

Congratulations, term 2, you get a C- by me.

Bum Bum Bum, anutha one biteseeh duss

2009-04-25T14:16:00.000-07:00

chika bum bum bum

I am done with my undergrad Arts classes.

Now I have to say it that way, since I still have to take a bogus elective class to fill my degree requirements, but now I can look forward to a life where I can read all the books I want to read and not write a damn thing about any of them. No more all nighters! No more MLA! No more booklists that I can hardly tolerate! No more due dates, or midterms. Why do people read literature that was once interesting but is now irrelevant? I no longer have to care.

So, as I ought to do, here's a quick review of the books that I read this semester, by class, with a rating out of 5 and a one-sentence opinion.

Twentieth-Century Feminism:

Kate Chopin-The Awakening (4/5) Loved this book, would gladly read it again.
Virginia Woolf-To The Lighthouse (3.5/5) Also wonderful, though not my favorite by Woolf.
Sylvia Plath-The Bell Jar (5/5) Changed my life in high school, so I can't say no.
Margaret Atwood-The Edible Woman (2/5) Screw Margaret Atwood, she doesn't give me anything to care about.
Gail Godwin-Violet Clay (3/5) Meh.
Jeanette Winterson-Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit (3.5/5) Not that bad, but not that amazing either.

Canadian Literature:

Joan Macleod-Homechild (1/5) Blurg.
Wayson Choy-All that Matters (2.5/5) Redundant and incredibly boring.
Miriam Toews-A Complicated Kindness (3.5/5) Not really a bad book, though it does leave something to be desired.
Eden Robinson-Monkey Beach (1/5) More like Monkey BITCH.

American Literature:

Joan Didion-Slouching Towards Bethlehem (5/5) Pretty damn well written assessment of the U.S.
J.D. Salinger-Nine Stories (2.5/5) Sorry but I can never really get into Salinger.
Donald Barthelme-The Dead Father (4/5) Freudian explosion!!
Nicholson Baker-The Mezzanine (4.5/5) Left the cockles of my heart warm and satisfied.
Tobais Wolff-In Pharoh's Army (2.5/5) Not really as well written as I would have hoped.
Anthony Swofford-Jarhead (2/5) If you are a guy, then you think this book is profound, if you are a girl, you kind of want him to stop yelling all the time.

Milton and the 17th Century:

Milton-Paradise Lost (5/5) I shouldn't have to explain why.
Milton-Areopagitica (2.5/5) Interesting ideas but terribly written.
Milton-Samson Agonistes (1.5/5) Seriously; the only good thing that he ever did was Paradise Lost.

20th Century British and Irish Studies

Wilfred Owen-Complete Poems (3/5) Good, not great.
Virginia Woolf-Mrs Dalloway (5/5) Now THIS is my favorite one of Woolf's.
Sean O'Casey-The Plough and the Stars (2/5) Kind of stupid, really.
Frank McGuinness-Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (3.5/5) Hated it at first, but it more or less grew on me.
Pat Barker-Another World (4/5) Engaging and creepy as hell.
Sebastian Barry-A Long Long Way (4/5) It just made me so SAD.

So there you have it; my last semester at school. I am selling a lot of these books back, as you can probably tell.

I am quite sick still, though I'm feeling better, I don't look much better. Also swallowing is difficult. It took me thee minutes to eat a small slice of pizza.

But at least I go home on Monday! That will be nice. A whole house full of soup and ice cream, just for moi.

For some reason this whole fiasco makes it easier to get Kate Bush stuck in my head

2009-04-18T08:43:00.000-07:00

So I'm brushing my teeth yesterday evening, minding my own business, when all of a sudden my mouth fills up with blood.

Spitting up about a teaspoon of red toothpaste, I stare into the sink for a minute, then look at the mirror and open my mouth. A small man in a blue waistcoat and a top hat is swinging like Tarzan from my uvula, kicking my tonsils with every upswing. When he notices that my mouth is open, he hops onto my tongue, wiping a little excess blood from his shoe off on his pant leg.

"Ah, good." He says. He shrugs his lapels forward and sighs happily. "I was hoping that would get your attention."

"Whaa aweeo eooou ooingk?" I ask, impressed that he managed to stay erect on my gesturing tongue.

"Well I had to do something. Honestly, my dear." He hops onto my lip and from there onto the faucet. "The only way to get you to see a doctor about anything is to kill you. You'll probably spend more time with a mortician than any physician."

"What do you mean?" I spit again. Not so bad this time. The little man sits on the rim of the sink while I rinse out the blood and fill a glass of water.

"Well, Meagan, look." He crosses his tiny, tiny arms. "You've had trouble swallowing for over a week now. The glands on the side of your throat, the ones that swell up to let you know that you're sick, have been the size of golf balls for a week. And you haven't seen a doctor."

"But there aren't any white spots and I don't have any other symptoms. It's not strep."

"Your tonsils are bleeding. You hit your tonsil with a toothbrush, the most un-knife-like implement..."

"No, you were kicking me."

"I am not real. You are imagining me. You hit your tonsil with a toothbrush, and now you look like someone in a Brian De Palma movie."

"Or Lavinia in Titus Andronicus."

"Or Lavinia in Titus Andronicus. Point is, that isn't good."

I shrug. "Think of all those times I've been sick before and didn't need a doctor."

"That," The man says, climbing like a gecko (in a waistcoat) up my sleeve, "is a fantastic outlook. Really capital." He strolls across my shoulder and punches me in the neck."

"Ow! That's tender! And you're not even real!"

"Go see a doctor."

"No, I...I hate doctors. Doctors are the people who tell you that you could die."

"The internet tells you that too, and you go there all the time."

"Fine. FINE. I'll go tomorrow."

"Good. You should get some rest tonight then."

"What? No. GOD no. I'm missing a birthday and dancing party tonight. I'm miserable and I miss my friends."

"You poor baby."

"I'm getting drunk. Well, first I am going for Italian food, and then I am getting drunk. Not wasted, but just drunk enough that I can cry. A lot."

The little man mutters something and disappears into a tiny tiny purple cloud that smells like self-loathing.

So yeah, I'm off to see the doctor's now. And yes, I did get drunk and weepy last night. But in all truth, I likely have tonsilitis, or strep (even though I doubt that), so I need hella antibiotics.

The Arts Deux Reading Challenge!

2009-04-14T19:03:00.000-07:00

Well, it's less of a challenge, and more of a Book Club for Smart People.

I've just recently finished all my reading and essay-writing for my Bachelor of Arts degree, and after four years of education, I think that I'm in the right place to look back on my life at University and say in all honesty that you can never really get a complete education in your Undergrad. This goes without saying (after all, that's what Grad School/The Real World is all about), but I don't just mean in terms of classes and writing papers; I mean what you're actually learning. No, I don't mean that in the "yarr kids don't learn about life in university yarrgh" grumbling sense, but in the sense that you don't really read as many books as you could to give you a wide-ranged understanding of how to learn things.

I was also lucky enough, in my first year, to take Arts One, an 18-credit course at UBC that introduced first-year Arts students to English, Philosophy, and History. The format of the course was the smartest that I've seen in a class of that kind: each section had about 100 kids who would read a different book every week. At the beginning of the week, one of five professors (or on occasion a guest lecturer), would lecture on the book that the class was reading. Then each prof would have a group of 20 kids in a seminar that discussed the work for the week. Every two weeks, each student would write a 5-7 page paper on one (or both) of the two books that they had read, and late in the week, the professor would split the seminar into five-person tutorials, and the students would read and comment on each other's essays. The class not only taught me to read and work at a faster pace than in high school, but how to read critically, and how to write a university-level paper. I certainly peaked early, there hasn't been a class since then that I think compared. The reading list was exceptional, many of the works that we read were far and above our reading level. The two-week sessions were staggered, too; we read Rousseau with Descartes, and later, Nietszche with Hamlet.

Also, I should note that the inspiration for the name of this blog, Arts Deux, came from that class: the idea is that it's a place where one moves from the Arts One setting. Even though I've steered it in the wrong direction many times, I hope to get back on that track, now, by creating

The Arts Deux Reading Challenge

How about we create an Arts One-style reading list, but with my post-undergrad knowledge? The following is a list of recommendations that, even though they will most likely not be taught at the undergrad level for people seeking a BA, will nonetheless help broaden their understanding of what the Arts is all about. My Arts One course was called Reason and Madness, and I am calling this one The Imagination and The Self: it will cosist of ten two-book sections, each focusing on a different aspect of how the concept and use of the imagination feeds into a persons self-awareness and identity. The readings will deal with psychology, racial and sexual identity, introversion, and the impact of societal practices (such as war and the societal identifying of "the other") upon self-identity, as well as nationalism versus individualism. Of course this is the tip of the iceberg, make of the readings what you will. I recommend that you read these books in the order that I've placed them, I think that they'll complement each other best this way.

Part One: Symbolism

1) Carl Jung: Man and His Symbols
If you're going to start somewhere with symbolism, it might as well be here, the foundation of how we understand the meaning of symbols today. Symbolism, I have noticed, is strangely ignored by a lot of undergrad profs as a serious means of interpretation; still, having a strong foundation in the importance of symbols and, more importantly, why we use them, changes the way that one reads books, looks at paintings, or even understands the day-to-day life.
2) Kate Chopin: The Awakening
The book that ruined Chopin's career, The Awakening is now seen as one of the founding works of feminism. Written on the cusp of the twentieth century (1898), Chopin's book is not only about a woman's sexual awakening, but her more personal and sensual understanding of the world. The symbolism in apparent in the book, and it also contains several themes which will be expanded upon later on in the list.

Part Two: Sexuality

3) Sigmund Freud: Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex
The criticism that people who don't read Freud make of Freud is that he "makes it all about sex", meaning that Frued perverts every aspect of life in order to fit it into his theories; the Oedipal Complex being the most famous of these stereotypical arguments. In fact, what Freud was doing was not encouraging or obsessing over sexual deviance, but simply using the growth of natural human sexuality in order to explain many aspects of the human condition. The reason why people think it's dirty is because they shrink so easily away from any mention of sexuality (a reaction that Freud explains herein). Nonetheless, by being comfortable with the sexual aspects of out existence, we can start to look at our individuality in a more comfortable light.
4) John Barth: Lost in the Funhouse
Barth's collection of short stories, aside from being a brilliant treatise on the meaning and format of writing itself, is a wonderful companion to Freud, in that it follows a family through periods of sexual confusion and misunderstanding, focused on the young son, Ambrose. Ambrose's isolation and his sexual awakening is heartwarming and, without the Freudian interpretations, the book itself is a good read.

Part Three: Art and Death

5) Friedrich Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy
One of Nietzsche's earliest works, The Birth of Tragedy introduces two key terms for understanding art: Apollonian and Dyonisian. These two types of tragedy, which Nietzsche outlines in depth (so I won't explain them here) play into many of the tragic works that appear on the list, as well as bring up heavy philosophical questions (one of which had me and my fellow Arts One-ers arguing at a lunch table for nigh on two hours). As a bonus, by the time you finish reading the book, you'll be able to spell Friedrich Neitzsche in your sleep.
6) Thomas Mann: Death in Venice
The story of a failed novelist's last days on a resort in Venice is one of Mann's most poingnant novels. It's a perfect ending point to the three works of psychology and philosopy that have been on the list so far, dealing with heavy symbolism, questioning the morals of homosexuality, and ending with prose that Nietzsche himself could have based The Birth of Tragedy on, if he hadn't been so obsessed with Wagnerian Opera. Also, this is one book where I'd recommend some extracurricular reading (though not much): Euripides' The Bakkhai, and Freud's work on Eros and Thanatos.

Part Four: Mysticism and the Family

7) Isabel Allende: The House of the Spirits
Magical Realism tends to get overlooked for the sake of stupider (in my opinion) genres, like Postmodernism. That being said, Allende's novel about the rise and fall of a family in Latin America is poingnant as it is creative, haunting, and funny. Most people recommend Gabrial Garcia Marqez's One Hundred Years of Solitude as the seminal work of the genre, but I prefer Allende's (even though the books are so similar you could probably exchange one for the other and still get a good feel for it).
8) Toni Morrison: Beloved
Beloved is, hands down, one of the most beautiful work's of American Literature. Like Allende, Morrison deals with family, but her mysticism is based more in a Southern Gothic style. Morrison's protagonists are haunted by both a literal ghost and by the ghost of American slavery, the result is both a chilling horror story and a strongly transcendental take on the most atrocious period of American history.

Part Five: The Female Soul

9) Virginia Woolf: A Room of One's Own
This one might be taught more often than the other books on the list. Woolf's famous essay was a powerful work in modern feminism, not only expressing the importance of a woman as an individual, but of a woman as an artist. It's a work that needs very little introduction, in fact, but one that is essential when approaching both political and artistic feminism.
10) Zelda Fitzgerald: Save Me The Waltz
When F. Scott Fitzgerald learned that his wife had written a novel about their failing marriage, he pulled the manuscript from the editors and cut through it, editing out sections that made him look bad, or that he claimed took too much from his own material – a travesty that Scott himself comitted when he wrote Tender is the Night his own novel on the same subject. Since then, Zelda's novel has fallen by the wayside, only being read in comparison to Scott's work. Even so, Zelda's autobiographical account of her marriage and her attempts to become a ballerina in her late twenties stands on its own as a great work of art, and one of the best examples of an exploration into the woman's soul in writing.

Part Six: The African-American Voice

11) James Baldwin: The Fire Next Time
Baldwin's essay on race is one of the best on the subject: it is written not with anger, but with an attempt to combat the problem of discrimination at its root. The essay itself is short, but illuminating, and I still think bears relevance today.
12) Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man
When accepting the National Book Award for this novel, Ellison commented that he was not trying to write another protest novel, that his book could be valued for its intellectual and experimental quality. Still, it is one of the most important novels about racism written in the United States, and stands out as an experimental novel as well; as the protagonist literally calls himself an "invisible man", who blends into his surroundings and cannot be seen by the people around him. This book also serves as a great novel to read alongside the Dostoevsky that appears later on in the list.

Part Seven: Life During Wartime

13) E.E. Cummings: The Enormous Room
Cumming's memoir of being an innocently arrested prisoner of war during the 1910s is an amusing and tragic portrayal of a wartime environment. Cumming's gift is in characterization and his irony, and, like with Cumming's more famous poetry, his innovative descriptions. Fellow war veteran F. Scott Fitzgerald called The Enormous Room the most important book about the first world war.
14) Sebastian Barry: A Long Long Way
A contemporary work about an Irish soldier during the Great War, Sebastian Barry's novel captures in beautifully frightening detail the experiences of one soldier as he fights for and against his own countrymen during the war in Europe and later in the Easter Rising in Ireland. I should note here why I have chosen two accounts from the First World War, instead of works from previous wars, or from later ones in the twentieth century. The reason, to me, is simple: first, it makes the works more available for comparison, and second, because the experience of the First World War was arguably responsible for the world as we know it today; and the personal expereince of a soldier during that time echoes in more contemporary works about the Second World War, Vietnam, or even the Iraq War.

Part Eight: The Interior Life

15) Virginia Woolf: The Waves
And now, a novel by Virginia Woolf. The Waves was her most experimental work, and her greatest triumph in free indirect discourse and stream-of-consciousness writing. The Waves chronicles the lives of six friends, from their childhood until death, and is told completely through interior monologue. More personal and artistic than her more popular To The Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway, The Waves is unfortunately under-studied, and this under-appreciated.
16) Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground
One of Dostoevsky's shorter novels, Notes from Underground details a few days in the life of a first-person, nameless protagonist. The Underground man is spiteful but also nihilistically insightful, and the book itself is a well-written piece of Russian literature. Of course, I would include Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov in this list instead, but it's too damn long. Notes from Underground could easily be written by Ivan Karamazov; the Underground Man has his sense of atheistic dramaticism.

Part Nine: Poetry and Song

17) Poetry: Sylvia Plath: Ariel and T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land and Other Poems
Sylvia Plath's Ariel poems are famous not only for their beauty, but because they were some of the last things that she wrote before her suicide. Plath's ex-husband Ted Hughes noted that the Ariel poems were her most creative, and that she wrote them without much self-editing, they sprang out of her mind fully-formed. With this, we can look at Plath's last work as possibly her most personal, and they range in their emotive power from the beautiful and calming title poem to the bitter and spitefull "Daddy". Eliot's work, on the other hand, is less emotive, but no less powerful. "The Waste Land" is the keystone of modernist poetry, meaning everything and nothing at the same time. Other poems, such as "The Hollow Men" and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" are beautifully personal, dealing with the inhumanity of the war and the loss of identity and hope in a modern world.
18) Song: Neutral Milk Hotel: In The Aeroplane Over The Sea and Okkervil River: Black Sheep Boy and Black Sheep Boy Appendix
In The Aeroplane Over The Sea is one of the best works of independent songwriting produced in the last fifteen years, and Okkervil River's Black Sheep Boy albums are close behind it. Both albums deal with an underlying plotline, and the goal here is not simply to enjoy the albums in the format that they are presented, but to look at them in terms of fiction and literature; comparing them to the works already studied. Both can, for example, be read alongside Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, or Nietzsche's philosophical work.

Part Ten: Children's Literature

19) Lewis Carrol: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
Why end the series with children's literature? Well, the problem with children's literature is that most adults assume that since the literature was written for children, it has very little meaning for anyone else. This, of course, is far from the truth. After spending eighteen weeks reading some of the best examples of adult literature, reading Carrol's work in this context illuminates the Alice stories in a wholly different way, explaining why the book has become a classic, and why it is used so often today, such as the film Pan's Labyrinth, the novella Coraline, or in Tim Burton's upcoming film adaptation.
20) J.M. Barrie: Peter and Wendy and Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens
The final book on the list is one of the most well-known stories in western literature: J.M. Barrie's classic story of the Boy Who Never Grew Up. But Peter Pan is more than that; it is not just about children growing up, but a look at childhood, adulthood, society, death, life, and the impotance of fairy tales and fantasy in our everyday lives; the importance of the Imagination in the formation of the Self.

So there you have it! Of course, if there are any other recommendations, feel free to share. What's missing? What's a bad idea? Is the list helpful? As I stated above, I would expect the reader to move at a one book per day pace, meaning that this is a five-month journey into the subject; think of it as a personally administered correspondance course. Luckily for me, I've already read all the books, but I'm more than happy to read them again for the sake of discussion.

Here's an Amazon Wish List with all the books, in order:

Portland Free Time Update

2009-04-14T15:17:00.001-07:00

A few business matters to attend to, before getting into something that I'm more excited about blogging (how sad is that?)

First off: TCM, one of my favorite television channels, has released a list of the fifteen most influential classic movies. Usually, with movie lists, I always find something amiss (especially with things like the AFI list, which just seems like studio/Oscar pandering), but I pretty much agree with all of these, and having seen most of the films, highly recommend them, it's a great way to look at film history. For example, once my film prof showed us the Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin next to a similar scene in The Untouchables, or you could look at the design of something like Metropolis and then watch Blade Runner, it's descendant in more ways than one. Check it out, do some research.

Now that I've got my movie recommendations out of the ways, here's a music one: Run On Sentence, a band that I was lucky enough to see preform briefly for Live Wire, a radio show that they tape live in Portland. The rest of the show was mostly passable, but Dustin Hamman and co. really impressed me. Of course, the trend of men with beards writing folk songs and playing acoustic guitars is on the rise today (see Iron and Wine, Fleet Foxes, or the other musical guest on Live Wire, Horsefeathers), but Run On Sentence is different, incorporating blues and latin rhythms into the music, and a more self-conscious, unpretentious feeling to the lyrics. Also, it's a band name that doesn't incorporate animals, metal, wood, or anything else that can be blindly pulled out of a page of Leaves of Grass.

And speaking of radio, here's an interview with Terry Gross that Drew Barrymore did in promotion of the HBO adaptation of the wonderfully disturbing documentary Grey Gardens. It was entertaining, and as a girl who isn't afraid of modern romanticism, I gotta say that I pretty much love Drew Barrymore in anything, and for the first time I am very sad that we don't have HBO at my house. Also, Jessica Lange plays big Edie Beale, so that makes it doubly great.

Grr, rawr, and so forth

2009-03-23T15:36:00.001-07:00

Today I am exceptionally angry. This isn't the directed anger of the normally rational person, but the general, all-over suntan lotion anger of someone who is liking where they are at less and less who unfairly gets plonked right in the middle of Monday afternoon, where it is raining and she is surrounded by people who will never have the absolute joy of listening to themselves talk. Here are a few things that I am not partial to:

Potheads. Now, I am not impartial to getting high, though I'm the boring type who doesn't get much out of it (not even the nasty paranoia stuff). But people who a) seem to regard it as an admirable part of their life, b) bemoan how it is poorly depicted as being a drug that makes them boring and stupefied, or c) smoke it in front of me while I'm walking to school when I am damp from the rain and crabby from no coffee and sick from hangover all seem to give me pause. That being said, I'm perfectly ok with the idea that legalizing pot and taxing the crap out of it would make our financial woes go away a little bit, but honestly. Yes, I do drink a lot, but at least I can do that in a way that tastes good.
The nasty nasty smelling food people are eating in the SUB. I'll never understand how people in Vancouver took the idea of "Pizza" and translated that into "Whole wheat crust with watery ketchup, cheddar cheese, leeks, and bok choy with chicken sprinkled on top".
All these tiny people who look like they're 12 but are really 17 and in their second year
The weather in Vancouver that can't decide whether it's raining, snowing, or just doesn't want to be my friend. "Ok, Meg, you can have sun, but it will be the coldest, windiest day of the year".
Impoliteness. Or at least a lack of understanding of social etiquette. And then saying that, no, actually, I'm in the politest city in the world eh dontcha know. This is how it works: you hate me on the inside, but if I look like a wet mop and you have an umbrella, then it's alright to offer me a seat on the bus, or at least not push me out of the way.
The bullshit system that's keeping me from graduating for a reason that is, fundamentally, dog fodder.
That guy who eats bologna sandwiches in my Canadian Lit class.
People who don't brush their teeth. Again, this is a bus problem. And not just morning breath, they have full on week-long not brushing teeth and eating boiled spinach breath. I don't like having to stare into the face of someone that seems to be holding a quart of stale milk in their lungs. And no, this isn't just a homeless guy thing (I don't even know what that smell is and have taken it to calling it "that homeless guy smell"), but a student thing. People who are being trained to lead the free world. And can't even master basic oral hygiene.
Another bus one: bus sleepers. Actually, public sleepers. They sleep on the bleachers at the pool, next to me in transit, and seem to sleepwalk in front of me when I have to get to class. What do they do all night that makes them so exhausted that they need an entire 20-minute bus ride to drool and fall on whoever is sitting next to them? And so many people do it; I'll get on the bus and of the fifty or so people on it, maybe four will be awake, and they don't look so good. Is it like that thing with babies where as soon as you put them in a car they fall asleep? Are so many people still mostly of a baby disposition? does this also explain the breath problem?
The things that are in pots that Amanda's housekeeper uses. Like fish heads. Hey look, I'm cooking dinner, what's that? AN EYEBALL IN A POT OF GREASE. Boo. No. Ew.
How I can't get anything done even though I really want to. Mostly this is because of schoolwork and because there's a lot of roommate drama, but I think that there's something stunting when you're trying to work in a space that isn't YOUR space. It just makes me care less and go on YouTube more.
People who ride their bikes on a crowded sidewalk.
People who ride their bikes and think that they are immune to the laws of traffic.
People saying that MLA is important when I think it was only invented to make things harder for us (I mean really, a citation is a citation. You have a doctorate. Non-MLA stuff shouldn't confuse you.)
When people say things like "In the 1980s the United States supported the Taliban." No. Ronald Reagan supported the Taliban. Don't act like everything in US history is inherently hypocritical.
Vancouver being much more expensive than it needs to be.
Gutter punks who are younger than me and act like it's my fault that they're homeless and have drug problems, AND they make poor dogs a part of their lives.
Vancouver self-righteousness. Acting like you are the only person who is saving the world when you ride a bike, carry a grocery sac, compost, buy organic, or wear things that make you look like you wish you were in Tibet. In this category I'll also put the Vancouver hipsters, who dress exactly like the people who I knew in high school in the month after they first discovered Value Village and who wear glasses that were stolen from unmarried forty-something secretaries in the 1980s that aren't really that good looking.
Emily Carr University.

I would say more. More comes to me every day. Right now, though, I'm focusing on moving out of my sublet and into two places: my friend Aletheia's, for all my stuff, and Amanda's, for my actual self. This will go on for ten days. How this all came to be is also something that should go on my list, but it's stressful enough that I would rather put it behind me, at least, in a blogging sense.

I went from musty to musky and y'all cant mush me

2009-02-26T20:28:00.000-08:00

So I've been dealing with a long list of things that are not good lately, and despite all that, schoolwork and other things keep coming. So I need something to lift me up out of the uncomfortable muddling dreck that my life tends to be these days...and what better way to do that than by also sharing with people? After all, we are all having to deal with a winter that won't go away, and finals and papers and midterms that are either breathing down our neck or biting off our heads. So here's a little music mix that I made, composed of songs that make me a happy, dancey, not-focused-on-moping person. And even though listening to the music doesn't make my life not difficult or sucky, at least it makes it tolerable in a nice way, like breaking your leg and then sitting on a really comfy couch to rest. Anyway, it's a decent mix of hip-hop, soul, pop, and some older stuff. Enjoy, it's free!

Up-ish Music

01. Chelsea Morning (Joni Mitchell)

02. I Gotcha (Lupe Fiasco)

03. Where D'You Go? (Jamie Lidell)

04. Reach Out, I'll Be There (The Four Tops)

05. Benton Harbor Blues Again (The Fiery Furnaces)

06. (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes (Elvis Costello)

07. Homecoming (Kanye West ft. Christ Martin)

08. Cool To Love Your Family (Feist)

09. This Is Not A Test (She & Him)

10. Get On The Good Foot (James Brown)

11. D.A.N.C.E. (Justice)

12. Sausalito (Conor Oberst)

13. Dream (Dizzee Rascal)

14. Say Hello To The Angels (Interpol)

15. Sadie (Joanna Newsom)

16. Doo Wop (That Thing) (Lauryn Hill)

17. Untitled (The Fiery Furnaces)

Here's the download link ------------> SendSpace

in SO many ways!

2009-02-23T00:10:00.001-08:00

I tend to enjoy most of what Married to the Sea/Natalie Dee/Toothpaste for Dinner has to offer, but this has a special place for me:

www.toothpastefordinner.com

Progress

2009-01-30T00:23:00.000-08:00

So I am four months away from graduating, and I gotta say, it has been a long and interesting road. But I came across a picture of my from my first year that helps more to explain what happened to me; so here's a retrospective of my wacked-out face with sometimes stupid hair over the past four years, complete with my rating of it on a 1-10 scale:

First Semester, First Year (September 2005)
Rating: 2/10. The HIGHLIGHTS. The stupid Myspace angle. The shirt. What shirt is that? Did I own that? why does one eye look like it's being sucked into my brain?

Second Semester, First Year (March 2006)
Rating: 7/10. This is actually a decently hot picture of me, despite the lip ring, the auburn hair dye, and the off-the-shoulders shirt. And my paleness, which doesn't go away. Actually, you know what, 6/10.

End of Second Semester/Summer, First Year (May 2006)
Rating: 6/10. Okay, so again we have the shirt thing going on, plus my over-decorated first-year dorm room. But then again, it is Sally Bowles hair, which was a fun, if short-lived time spent on my head. And someone else did my makeup, so it wasn't that bad.

First Semester, Second Year (September 2006)
Rating: 4/10. By this point I should have realized that this was an awful angle for my eyes, as the right one seems to be gravitating into my nose. My skin looks horrible, and my hair is the kind of limp that means that, when this picture had been taken, it had been more than 18 hours since I'd showered, and there's a good inch of forehead that seems blank and afraid and alone. Makeup, Meg. Wear it.

Second Semester, Second Year (February 2007)
Rating: 7/10. True, I've got Boston in the background, but as far as the mop top look goes, I didn't look that bad... the bangs are a decent length, the color doesn't look like a sad version of red-violet, and I'd finally learned how to put makeup on my face. Also, I'm starting to look older than the high school version of myself.

End of Second Semseter, Second Year (April 2007)
Rating: 5/10. Here's a perfect example of when the mop top look goes wrong: my hair naturally parts on the left, which means that all that hair goes falling down over my right eye, and I look very, very destitute. Also: cap sleeves? No, thank you. And no points for being in black and white.

First Semester, Third Year (October 2007):
Rating: 7/10. I think that it was shortly after this that I stopped wearing the lip stud. Ok, so my hair is short but even, and though I've got high bangs they don't look as bad as they did earlier. Also, my faceis painted, which means that I was a Cool Person.

Second Semester, Third Year (March, 2008):
Rating: 7/10. Well, this is a step in the right direction: I'm in Paris, I'm wearing a beret-type hat, I'm sketching and drinking wine in a café. Hell yeah. Of course, I look sort of old-lesbian-y as well, but not so much that it's terrible. This is evidence of something rather garish: how my bangs, having gotten long and heavy, tend to fall in pieces, making my hair look thin and unhealty. I still deal with this today.

First Semester, Fourth Year (November, 2008):
Rating: 8/10 Finally, I'm facing the other direction!! It seems that I have finally mastered what a pixie cut should look like on me. Short, layered, not too long around the ears. Also, it's my birthday and I have a Manhattan! It should be pointed out at this point that, with the exception of two pictures, all of these haircuts I did myself. Propers.

Second Semester, Fourth Year (January 2009):
Rating: 9/10. Well hello, confident. I think that I've reached a good in-between for the longish hair and the pixie hair, and along the way I accidentally dyed it black, which turned out better than I expected it to. My makeup looks pretty nice now, my skin was really good then (it got worse in the past week), and I'm thinner and more fit than I was first year. How can that girl at the top possibly be the same as this person here?

The answer to that is the mystery that everyone must ponder when they leave their University.

So many bullets you'd think it was Feb 14, 1929

2009-01-19T00:46:00.001-08:00

I really want to get in the habit of waking up earlier on weekdays so that I can make breakfast. I heart eggs, though every time I try to make an omelette it comes out scrambled, which probably just means that I don't have skills. But soft-poached eggs are great, and tea and coffee is great, and as soon as I get my own address I think that having a newspaper on the table with breakfast will also be great.

You know what else is great? Booze. Here are the cocktails and martinis I love:

Manhattan
Gin and Tonic
Gin and Ginger Ale
Jack and Coke
Margarita (on ice, not crushed)
Scotch and Soda
Dirty Martini
Irish Coffee

Bourbon is possibly my favorite kind of straight alcohol. Maker's Mark on the rocks, if you will, yes thank you. I also love gin, but drinking it straight is ridiculous. I will do tequila shots, though, if you all were wondering.

I know that you were.

Anyway, this is just to say that I just got a Twitter account this evening, in a bout of sickness and boredom. So far I'm enjoying it, the randomness of the whole deal is fun, and it's always nice to customize things.

So that's just a little more organization in my life.

Places where I am online

Blogger
Facebook
Twitter
DeviantArt

What are these places for? Blogger is for long-winded thoughts. Facebook is for, like, my face and personality. Twitter is for random blurbs (tweets? I'm not calling them that) and pretending that I am friends with Barack Obama, and DeviantArt is for all my art things (and none of my deviousness, there's nothing really devious about the place). Aside from that, I've got my own personal moleskine notebook for keeping all my random, often depressing thoughts in. And I've got miss Charlottesburg (my computer) here, which keeps all my drafts in her tummy. Er, RAM.

Things I am writing that are not dead projects:

Black Sheep, a graphic novel script about immortals who are the leftovers of bygone mythologies trying to get by in the modern world
The Tiger-Eye (working title), a fantasy/speculative fiction novel about a world where witches are real and face persecution
Secret of a Clockwork Mouse, a magical realist novel about a female magician in the 1920s
The Archer Almanac, an ongoing project of 365 stories about a small town in the United States

Each of these is still in their growing stages. Honestly, I need a retreat, somewhere with no internet access, no friends or people to talk to, no television. Just me and these four projects, so that I can finish at least two of them before the year is out. I know that I always say that, but I'm graduating, so it will be important to get to the point of being published.

And your writer's block, it do't mean shit

2008-12-28T01:03:00.000-08:00

So the obligatory what-I-got-for-Decemberween:

-camera
-boots
-moleskine journals
-purse
-blouse
-sweater
-e.e. cummings
-symbol book
-two decks of blank playing cards
-makeup
-sharpie 4-pack
-camera bag
-candy
-the dark knight
-card deck of cocktail recipes
-threadless shirt
-watch
-socks
-4 bottles of unibroue

um that's all i can remember for right now! i think that's it. go me. i also gave some pretty sweet-ass gifts, if i don't mind sayin' so meself. the best part is that they can all fit in a suitcase! aw yiss!

the blank cards and sharpies, by the way, are for the tarot deck that i am designing; hopefully it'll be done by january.

(what a useless post, right?)

I know this is an odd phrase, but the facts were these. These were the facts.

2008-12-21T02:37:00.000-08:00

Let's just say that, in regard to this season of Pushing Daisies, I am suddenly both pleasantly surprised and surprisingly pleased. Though I haven't watched the entire series yet, just the first two or three and then the last few that are online at abc.com, I've found a suitable flavor to wash out the funky taste that the first impression had left in my mouth. Perhaps its because I know that it's been canceled after this season, but it looks like they've dropped the silliness and terrible CGI and added in a few nice twists and turns. Yeah, a lot of it is a bit too coincidental (I don't want to spoil anything, but I will say that the season's two themes are Family and Trust, and that they crop up in obvious but well-intended ways. However, if this series ends without resolving the problems with trust and happiness surrounding one Olive Snook, then I will be seriously upset. I was going to make a list called Five Things To Love About Pushing Daisies That Are Not Lee Pace, but it would just be Olive Olive Olive Olive Olive. In fact, as great and quirky as the show is, I don't think I would like it half as much if it didn't have Kristen Chenoweth's bubble of joy bouncing around in it.

And beside that point, what happened to Digby the dog?

But since I am in the mood for list-making, here goes:

Five Things To Love About Mad Men That Are Not Don Draper And Joan Holloway

AMC's Mad Men is no longer that sleeper hit that only the cool kids talk about liking. It's the first basic cable show to take home the Best Drama Emmy, and as far as I'm concerned, it's the best show on television. Let's be fair, though, I only watch like three actual shows that are currently running, Mad Men, Pushing Daisies, and 30 Rock. Of the three, Mad Men is the most consistently pleasing, it has two solid seasons under its belt and a promising third one to come, it doesn't seem to have any sharks to jump, and for once I've found a drama that doesn't seem to guilt me into watching another episode. Mad Men goes along at a steady pace, there are no chung chungs or cliffhangers. It's a mature show, that seems to show enough respect for its audience to earn its popularity. However, when you ask someone what's so great about Mad Men, they usually come up with something like this:

Or this:

True, those are both Hot Things. And though Mad Men could easily be balanced on the perfect chin of Don Draper or the smashing curves of Joan Holloway, they are not what makes the show great. Aside, of course, from the aforementioned pacing, writing, and plot structure (especially that surrounding Don Draper, which is safe on this side of Back Story Unbelievability), here are five things that should entice you to adore the show:

5. Roger Sterling
Where Don Draper is a womanizer and a drunk, we can forgive him. I mean, look at the guy: Don's got a face that would crumble Mt. Rushmore. Then there's his awful past, his stunted creativity....there are plenty of things about Don Draper's detached personality that would point him in the direction of philanderer. If nothing else, he does it so that he can reach out to other people, understand them, dominate them, whatever. For Don Draper, there is always something going on beneath those steely eyes.

But Roger Sterling? He is just a dirty old man. And I love him for it. Where people like Don and Pete fool around in order to feel whole or accepted, Roger Sterling does so out of privilege. He is a constant drunk, makes passes at every woman he sees, chain smokes like John Wayne, all because he is just entitled to; born into wealth that he keeps afloat by relying on Don Draper's creativity and Bert Cooper's organization. I mean, the man has a heart attack from too much horsing around with a young woman, then only three years later we see him up to the same tricks, promising to marry a 20-year old secretary once he divorces his wife. Roger is the face of the so-called Greatest Generation, but seems to hold no pride at all; a man who seems to be mostly an empty shell full of smoke and booze and lies. He is detestable at the same time as he is charming, affable an unsettling at the same time; a man who is trying hard as he can to hold on to any sort of power and privilege that he has.

4. Smoking and DrinkingAh, to live in the good ol' days. Back when Bayer was just morphine, methanphetamines weren't bad yet, and everyone–everyone–smoked like a chimney and drank like a fish. Men, women, old, young, pregnant, all of them wander through the scenes holding highball glasses and lucy strikes. Even doctors light up while conducting an examination. Now I'm not saying that I am a drunk or that I am a serious smoker, but I can't deny that the idea of living in a time where you could add that much dramatic emphasis to yourself–inside, outside, on a train, plane, bus, office, restaurant–creates a different, almost alien atmosphere, where nothing was dangerous (this is best shown in the first episode, where the Mad Men must deal with the terrible new discovery that smoking -gasp!- causes cancer).

3. Betty Draper

A beautiful face can cover a seriously tainted self, and nowhere is that more true than the slowly awakening Betty Draper, wife of Don, former model, and Perfect Homemaker. Betty, with her Grace-Kelly looks and soft, laughing voice is a character that, doubtless, every woman in the neighborhood would envy. She seems oblivious to her husband's past and his infidelities, yet we learn that she knows all about the latter. She has nervous breakdowns fueled by her inability to accept the death of her mother, with whom she had a troubled, emotionally straining relationship. She often appears to be an oblivious mother, though much of that is likely to be a sign of the times. She talks about insipid things to her neighborhood group of mothers, and at first sight seems to be elitist, vain, and prejudiced; yet bit by bit this is worn away and we can start to read the lying tone in Betty's voice, and we start to understand that, in her quest to be the perfect looking woman and the perfect housewife, she has forgotten to be herself. This one thing that ties all of Mad Men's characters together: they all have work personalities, which fit them into whatever niche needs filling, then there is the person beneath that, the personality that motivates them. Betty is a great example of this because, unlike the men who can leave work and go drink or mess around in order to blow off a little steam, Betty has to work full-time as Mrs. Donald Draper–which is why her breakdown is all the more sudden and self-destructive.

2. The 1960s
The Swingin' 60s or whatever you want to call them are a tough decade to record on film. Too often do writers or directors try to Forrest Gump the whole deal, having characters in Vietnam and marching in Alabama while also being involved in, say, the Space Race and the counterculture. Mad Men succeeds because it avoids stereotyping the 60s, presenting instead what seems to be a purely honest portrayal of the early years of the decade. They don't go the predictable route and create a Feminist or an African-American character who shakes things up and changes people's hearts. Even though that was happening at the time, no doubt, that doesn't mean that every company was affected by it. In the first season the Sterling-Cooper staff is assigned to work on Nixon's campaign against Kennedy, no one questions it or stands up for JFK. Salvatore, the show's main homosexual character, is closeted and seems to be insistent on staying that way, even when a young co-worker at S.C. comes out in the break room. Counter-culture of any kind is almost completely absent. The only exception is a young Bohemian artist with whom Don has an affair in the first season. Though Don meets with her friends and fellow bohos, he takes nothing from their movement, scoffing at her boyfriend's droll "Would you like to join us? We're going to get high and listen to Miles." and their insistence on pegging him as part of "the machine". He laughs at their hopeless radicalism and leaves, content to go back to his comfortable life inside the machine. Aside from the general treatment of 60s society, Mad Men stays almost photographically true to the look of the era, down to the button. Men tend to be a little more round, and women are more curvy. Glasses are thick, hair is slick–there are no pratfalls to draw in a modern audience, Joan Holloway looks like a sex symbol despite being more curvaceous than Jessica Alba, and with good reason. Mad Men re-creates the 1960s but doesn't re-imagine it so that it can sell out to any 21st ideal, it is what it is.

1. Pete Campbell
Pete Campbell is the perfect secondary character: at first he seems like nothing more than a piece of gum stuck on Don Draper's shoe sole, part of the secondary What Everyone Else In The Office Is Doing plotline. But then time goes on and you start to see that Pete Campbell is so much more than that, he is a wad of gum with a consciousness and a desire to do right but the immaturity to keep him from knowing how. That's Pete Campbell: he is the ultimate man-child. Not the Rogen-esque "I don't want to stop playing video games and be responsible and I like poop jokes" sort of man-child, but a more complex and sympathetic sort: Pete is a little boy in man's shoes, and he is desperately trying to get his feet to grow out enough to fit them. Out of the three main male characters–Don Draper, Roger Sterling, and himself–Pete is the only one not to have fought in a war. He is a newlywed and his infidelity with Peggy is not out of desperation like Don's or Roger's, but out of a loneliness that turns into love. Pete carries a persona of the perfect man, the slick salesman with a buttery voice, but when he speaks candidly–to his family, or to Peggy–his voice is soft and almost raspy, as though he is tired of talking. He is a bundle of male insecurities and immaturity, which is what you could say for a lot of people except that Pete, like Betty Draper, rarely has an outlet for himself. He hardly has the chance; Pete is not completely immature, much of his stuntedness comes from a lack of control. He is alway under the thumb of someone else; be it his father, mother, wife, boss, father-in-law. The only person who could have that sway over him and doesn't exploit it is Peggy, who seems to be the only person that Pete cares about. At first, of course, you hate Pete Campbell. You hate his blue suit and his slick voice, his perfect hair and boyish good looks. But then you get it: under all that façade is just a little boy who wants to be a strong and independent man, but is crushed too often by the feet of everyone in his life. His struggle, though less pronounced, is much like Betty's, and I secretly watch every episode for his sake.

Christmas cleaning! Yuletide readings! Fa la la la la oh dear I'm boring.

2008-12-12T03:20:00.000-08:00

I changed around the side bar, mostly for my own benefit. I feel all constructive all of a sudden. Also, I get to change my books into books that I don't really have to read, because except for one upcoming easy final, this semester is finito.

Anyway I've been getting in the Christmas mood lately. Well, that and I move out of this lovely hell-house on Tuesday...I swear to gosh, I have an awful landlord who seems to enjoy breathing down people's necks, and thankfully I'm getting out. I mean it's gotten so bad that I'm afraid to make myself dinner because he's always down there, ready to passively-aggressively insult me for, like, not cleaning the lint trap in the dryer. So I just stay in my room and make tea and eat cliff bars and brood. So, long story short: lots of brooding.

Don't ever live with your landlord. Just don't. He walks around in my room when I'm not here.

So that's getting over with. I'm moving further away from school, near Commercial Drive, in the most adorable basement suite (I know, right?) with only one other person. I will start cooking full meals! Of course, this means that I have to get packed up and get most of that done tomorrow, since people are coming to look at the room Saturday and Sunday. It will be fun, though! Hasta la vista, butt-for-brains.

Oh, right, the books. Well I went around thriftin', which for me means shopping for clothes but buying books. Bought my own copy of The Awakening, and then got O! Pioneers by Willa Cather which so far is lovely, Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco which is pretty good so far but like smarter than I will ever be, but I like the language, and Lady Chatterly's Lover by D.H. Lawrence, which is apparently tittilating. That, and I'm re-reading The Bell Jar since it's in my Feminism class next semester, and it would be nice to find out what it was that blew my mind so much when I was 14. To be frank: The Bell Jar was integral to my coming of age. It was my "literature can be beautiful" and "god I want to write like this". It's probably what got me started into seriously considering English Literature for formal study, and one that I'll throw on my list of things that made me want to be a writer more. But honestly, I don't remember much of it.

On top of those I've got Tess of the D'Ubervilles, which I picked up at a book sale at school (fill up a bag for five bucks!), where I also got a collection of Transcendentalist essays, a history of the American South from 1800 to the Civil War, and a history of the American Fronteir. Oh, and I'm still going through Dorothy Parker's short stories.

Plus my mother is lending me Campbell's Hero With A Thousand Faces and V by Thomas Pynchon.

And I can spend two weeks of Christmas Break reading as much of that list as I possibly can. I can feel in my bones that next semester's gonna be reading-heavy, and I want to get as much me-reading time in as possible, along with me-writing time, and sleep. And work.

Man it's like I don't ever want friends.

Oh and I started working on another writing project. What.

That effing movie

2008-12-09T20:04:00.000-08:00

Twilight

Okay, look. I know that I say, sometimes, that I'm open-minded, and that I'm glad to hear everyone out, and blahbitty blah. But look: With this movie, I am a hater. H8RZ. Here's what I remember about it:

Opening scene: Shitty narration by Kristen Stewart, who is playing the outstandingly bored Isabella Swan. Yes, that is her name. Shitty narration tells us that baby Bella has to go to Pissbucket Town, Washington, to live with her father.

Things to know about the town: small population, everyone eats in a diner. Her father, who is also boring (THAT'S where she gets it) spends his time drinking knockoff PBR and brooding about fuck knows what. Bella goes to school, where she tries to be alone and aloof yet somehow attracts the biggest collection of Cool High School Kid Stereotypes. They talk like gangstas, they talk about the school paper, and they worry about prom. And they think that Bella, whose character would make a three-toed sloth look like fucking Hamlet, is the greatest shit that has ever landed in their rainy, lonely, grey town, and all the men decide to call her their "home girl" and ask her out, though her obvious superiority and beauty makes them nervous.

Oh, by the way: even though everyone talks about how Pissbucket, WA is nothing but rainfall, you don't see a single umbrella or windshield wiper in the whole movie. This in itself is a perfect metaphor for Twilight: it always looks like either the sun is going to shine through or a torrential rain is gonna fall, but in the end it's just grey. Grey. Grey.

Enter the Cullen family. These are a group of "foster children" who go to Pissbucket High. They are all pasty white, keep to themselves, don't eat, and don't ever show up to school when the sun is out.

See, they're Vampires. And no one has clued into that in the least.

All the Cullens are paired up with each other, except for one, because he makes weird faces and looks too feminine. His nom de lame is Edward. All the women want him but he denies their advances. Then he meets Bella in Bio and Barfs (almost). Bella is moderately insulted by this and vows to confront Eddy Blahzzard about it, but he doesn't show for, I dunno, like a week. Maybe two.

Meanwhile some dude gets killed by what everyone thinks is an animal, BUT since we saw it happen we know...it was a bunch of vampires! Thanks, movies!

So Edward shows up again and he and Bella spend a whole class biting their lips and gazing at each other, then he runs off for no. Reason. At. All. Then Bella plugs in her iPod and goes to her truck (why did she need the iPod if she's just gettin in her car? Did it take that long to walk from class?) but she catches sight of Edward and stares at him so fucking hard that she doesn't notice the big fucking van that comes careening around the corner of a parking lot (parking lots full of people: the perfect place to take a curve at 55), so Edward saves her and then runs off, though really if he hadn't been staring back at her maybe she could have stepped out of the way. But there's Bella for you: since she is a female protagonist, she must be helpless and completely in the hands of this passive agressive douchebag vampire.

Anyway some boring shit happens and Edward's a total dick but she's still drawn to him (cause that's how love happens; am I right, ladies?), then she and the Sweet Valley High gang go to the beach (cause they surf more than just the web! ZING!). She asks Edward to come but he doesn't show, and this oddity is explained by her Native American Buddy. You know who the Native Americans are, because they all have long hair. So anway, the Vampires don't come to the beach cause the indians don't like them.

Why don't the indians like them? Because the local tribe is descended from WOLVES.

Do you think that Stephanie Meyer ever met a Native American? I mean, aside from the weird Mormon version of them (ZING!).

So these wolf-natives (spoiler: apparently they turn out to be WEREWOLVES! OMG, so creative! Bite me.) met the Cullen clan like a hundred years ago, when the Cullens were dressed like scenesters circa 2002 (seriously), so the wolf-man-people-clan told them to piss off, which they did.

So Bella does some Detective Googling and goes to Port Notsuchashittytown to get a book on Native Legends so that she can get to the bottom of this whole whodang. (Hey Bella: he's a vampire and he's totally a dick) When she leaves the bookstore she gets almost-raped by about seven guys, and can't do anything to help herself until Eddy shows up in his silver Prius to kick some rapist ass. He takes her to dinner, they get kinda close, then on the way home find out that another dude got attacked by an "animal". Bella talks to her dad, Capt. Boring 'Stache and he, knowing that two middle-aged men who work in big abandoned shipyards have been killed, gives some pepper spray to his seventeen year old daughter for when she is in high school.

Another bout of all-night Googling for the truth, and Bella suddenly realizes: Teh Edward is a Vampire! Holy fucking jesus balls! She confronts him about that, and he agrees that yes, he is among the Undead. Or rather, the Uninteresting. In order to show her what a monsterous, disgusting, beastly being he truly is in order that she might understand his godless nature, he rips open his shirt.

Why don't vampires go out in the sunlight? Well people usually think that this is because they will burn up or turn to dust and that it will kill them. "You dummies," Says Stephanie Meyer, "It's because they are made of sparkles!"

Glitter Vampires. Be very afraid.

Edward goes on to tell Bella that he is drawn to her and vants to suck-a her blood, cause she smells crazy good. Bella thinks this is a reason to be BFFs, or at least dating. They hang out in the forest. They hang out at school. They hang out at Edward's family's house, where everyone is dating everyone, which is not in the least bit weird. They listen to what Stephanie Meyer must have found when she googled "classical music". Edward jumps around with Bella on his back, like he's a mix between a koala and a monkey.

Then one night Edward gets into Bella's room and they start makin' out. But he stops himself before he gets too into it...after all, what if he tries to kill her?

This is what I hated about the movie (and I can presume the book as well) the most. Everyone knows that vampires are sexy; after all, Dracula was just a big shiny metaphor for Victorian sexual frustration. Put that in the hands of an uber-Christian, and what do you get? A thinly veiled message of celibacy. Because if I kiss you too much, I might want to bite you (fuck you)! And that would mean death! It is bad and we should not do it. But hey, talking is great. Just chatting about, you know, Debussy and, like, not sex. Sex is bad. Can't we just be happy without it? I hope so. I'm sure we can, so long as we love each other. Without touching.

Look, I got no problem with people wanting to wait until marriage or whatever. But don't take the ultimate symbol of human lust and sexuality and make is some wimpy guy who's happy just watching you sleep. Every night. Without you knowing it.

So then the vampires have a baseball game for no apparent fucking reason. So that they could play a Muse song? So that they could show that they are strong and fast? Baseball? What's wrong with Vampire Soccer? Or Vampire Wii? Or what about Vampire Polo? Shit, I'd love that. But baseball is just a weird choice, especially when everyone, even the bad vampires (you know they're bad cause they're dour) who show up seem to agree that playing baseball will just be the best way to end a day.

But oh no! One of the bad vampires, Shirtless, gets a whiff of Bella's shampoo and decides that he wants to kill the heck out of her. Begin the dullest chase scene ever, ending in a ballet studio in Pheonix (guess what: Vampires DO have reflections oh jolly), where Bella gets bitten, Shirtless gets killed (suprisingly easily), Edward has to suck the poison out of Bella's bite and almost loses is but he holds back from drinking her blood because he is BETTER THAN THAT. Bella survives with a broken leg (what?) and they go to prom.

At prom Bella is all "hey I wanna be a vampire so's I can like get all sexy with you and never have to leave you and the way you and your wimpy family act it doesn't seem THAT bad anyway" and Edward's like "you don't want that." And Bella's like "yes Edward you are right I don't. Please make all my decisions for me."

The fucking end.

Why are so many tweenies eating this shit up like it's chocolate? It's a terrible representation of vampires (I know, there aren't that many good representations of them anyway but still). It's got Rag Doll Brainless Bella Swan as its female protagonist, hell, as its narrator, and her obsessive and controlling boyfriend who she can't do girlfriend-boyfriend things with. In a perfect world, even if this crap had been published, it wouldn't have gotten much further than an insignificant spot on the YA section in your local B&N. You know, I actually saw somewhere online someone was like "hey, if you like Twilight you should check out Dracula by Bram Stoker", and I wanted to smack them with a Moleskine notebook. Maybe you should check it out? Dude. That's like "hey, if you liked The Da Vinci Code maybe you should check out Paradise Lost.

In conclusion: I laughed my cruel little heart out at the bad acting and thin plot of Twilight, but avoid liking it or giving it any merit. In the meantime, somebody find me a decent vampire yarn.

And no, not Anne Rice or Anita Blake.

Mid-Studying Post-Election Political Commentary

2008-11-22T23:52:00.000-08:00

For the love of everything, no.

I mean, I thought that one of the nicest things about that beautiful sound defeat of Ms. Palin and that old guy almost three weeks ago was that it would shut her up and cart her back to Alaska, where she can make mooseburgers and go hunting with Maurice Minnefield and dream of Chris In The Morning. Like everyone in Alaska does.

But talk shows? Movies? Oprah? Come on, media. Leave it alone. Sarah Palin was a bad idea, was one of the reasons that so many independents left the Republican ticket, and one of the most embarassing examples of what the old Conservatives like to call the new Conservative values, oh, and also feminism.

Does anyone sort of snort when McCain and the others call Palin's policies and so on "fresh" or "new"? I mean, say what you will, but she stands for the same shit that they've always stood for. And a New Conservative is an oxymoron. What, are you going to change even less than you already were?

And is what Sarah Palin does now really count as "Politics", or is she just a celebrity? The folksy Paris?

To her credit, I have seen a few interviews with Palin, and it seems like the first time that she's being candid, which makes me feel almost sorry for her. I mean, if she's that kind of honest when it's just the local Anchorage station, how much scripted crap did they have to shove down her throat when she got on the ticket? Though the interviews tell me that she's informed, more than she seemed before, she still comes across as a bit too small-town folksy, she gets the facts but doesn't seem to turn them into ideas.

But hey, Coulter loves her. I know, right? Nothing says "you will do well" like an endorsement from Ann "The Man" Coulter.

I'm being mean.

At least I've seen Palin back down from that stupid hockey pitbull persona that irritated me so much, and just admitted that they lost because people wanted change and she wasn't it. She seemed more tired than irate, more normal than the conservative messaiah that so many claimed that she was.

So just back off. Leave her alone. At this point I don't care if she's just like me, or the Republican me, or if her doctor is Joel Fleishman, or if she's the Zodiac Killer, or if Bristol actually got an abortion and they were just faking that life thing. Look; she's not going to run for president in 2012, she's not going to try for Ted Steven's absent senate seat. She's going to finish her term(s) as Governor, maybe become and advisor or some shit, and just disappear from the national spotlight. That's what's best for everyone; even if she stays around, doesn't it seem that this candidness that she's showing, this sudden understanding of what's going on without stumping, won't that make it obvious that she was being molded by McCain and Co., that there really was (har har) something going on with that campaign?

There's my two cents. Man I wish that I was able to write essays in my sleep, because I have two to write, one tomorrow and one for Thursday. God, one week of school left. Also, one week (exactly) until my birthday. I found out that my family is coming to visit for that weekend, so I'm starting to look forward to it, because oh my god they are taking me shopping in Seattle. Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.

Les Histoires D'Henri Ennui

2008-11-14T18:57:00.000-08:00

I think I will seriously make up a character named Henri Ennui, to be my French Existentialist asshole guy. Go me. He would sit outside cafés and smoke cigarettes and say stupid French things like

"Paris, q'est-ce que c'est? Cette un ville....des images....et des rèves....et du mort."

Which are usually the words that are used by English-speaking people who want to sound fancy, so they always title, like, their Myspaces with something relatively francophone, like "Elizabeth De La Belle Epoque", which doesn't exactly make sense next to a picture of her forehead and some eyeliner, to the tune of Fall Out Boy.

I stopped using Myspace. So glad.

Anyway, the reason that I have been thinking upon ennui, is because I am experiencing a certain brand of it:

Birthday Ennui: noun. The experience of disinterest, dissatisfaction, or relative boredom in regard to the observation or celebration of one's birthday. See also: Anniversary Apathy, Christmas Carelessness, Fuck The Fourth Of July.

So that's where I am, right now. Apathetic and self-effacing.

So I'm sitting in American Poetry class the other day, and the prof sticks me as the "leader" of the "group" that's supposed to discuss how William Carlos Williams uses American history in this one part of Paterson. Okay, fine. She always lands me with that crap, because she thinks that I'm, like, the ambassador for the United States at UBC. Anyway, this girl joins the group, claiming to be an American Studies major, and she starts railing on how crappy the U.S. is. Now, usually I can take that sort of talk from the Canucks, seeing as they always rag on the States (to which the American response has always been a bored "whatever."), but this was only, literally, TWO days after the election. So she could have cut some slack for the Capitalist Behemoth Of The World or whatever they call it up here, but no; it's all materialism, how we hate paying taxes and detest socialized medecine, how we're impolite and gross and smoke too much and cause problems for everyone else and don't ever listen to good solid advice and enjoy bombing like the world is out piñata blah blah blah. So I mention that FDR made some of the best advancements in Western socialism but was still an American president, and that Teddy was cool too, to which she replied

"Teddy Roosevelt? Oh, I didn't like him. I mean, we just see him as rude."

To which I replied:

"Yeah, we call that badass."

Apparently there's no distinction, apparently no matter what you do, being a Rough Rider who started the Bull Moose Party, held meetings on hunting and safari trips, inspired the Teddy bear and gave everyone the visual that, while you are whispering sweet nothings in their ear you are grasping a two by four behind your back is just plain rude behavior. No. That is badass.

There's something too soft about Canada. True, they have fought bravely in both the World Wars and helped to win them both (my great grandfather was in the Somme, my grandfather on Omaha beach, both were from Ontario), but the general idealism of the country is to speak softly and not make eye contact so as to not seem indimidating. Come on, guys! Pick it up! I mean, there's no point in being an arrogant warmonger who would rather buy some uranium than buy some, like, food for poor people; but still, a land with no spine is not a land. It's like a sponge land. You just absorb all the other cultures and they mesh together, but you're one of those sponges that doesn't have the steel wool on the back so you just have to wait until the scum is really soggy to wipe it off. I took some pain killers, this doesn't make sense.

But Canada! Grow a pair! A big pair!

I need sleep or drink. Or drink and sleep. What?

Dear Conservative America: Do The Worm!

2008-11-06T20:17:00.000-08:00

Stop being so sweet and nice. It's making me sick. I want to laugh in your face but all I can get out is a "yeah...well...we all have to work together...."

Bitches, we ain't gotta do that 'til January. You have like 70 days to be confused and sad and upset. Go back in time and talk to me, four years ago. It shouldn't be that hard. Go on, it's okay. Just don't stop me from being proud cause you're all sugary and nice and crap. Ugh. I know that I wouldn't be happy if McCain won (can you SEE the unmentionable woman's face if that had happened?), so stop the show and start freaking out and going "oh god what happened to our country oh god they beat us oh god there is no hope, cause we got out butts beat by a black dude and a bunch of kids, oh no oh no...."

I will not be denied satisfaction. Time to read the Coulter Blog and pretend that she's the floor.

Yes We Can

2008-11-05T00:00:00.000-08:00

And Yes We Did. And Yes We Will Do, for the next four years, eight years, how ever long it takes, to reach that more perfect union, to advance ourselves and to make our country-our world-a better place for us and our children and theirs. It is not just about Barack Obama, or Joe Biden, or the race against John McCain. It was about change, and hope, and moving forward and never going back. Now we can hope without cynicism, dream without the false sense or "realism" that says that there will always be bipartisanship and bigotry in the way of greatness. That is not Us anymore. We The People proved that we can be strong, and We The People will be, together, moving forward.

Um yes

2008-11-04T14:24:00.000-08:00

originally posted on Cute Overload

This is it. Don't get scared.

2008-11-03T23:49:00.000-08:00

Oh god oh god oh god.

It's tomorrow. Hell, it's practically today. I doubt that I'll be able to sleep or focus. I just want it to be over. And I want....I want to be happy. I want to be happy and cry so damn hard and know that no matter what happens now, at least I've got this hope. At least I've got this...

More on Wednesday.

Twenty days means a huge dump

2008-10-29T23:59:00.000-07:00

Since I last blogg'd. Dear lord. Too much has been happening: school, not having money, owing money, maybe getting a job, friend issues, family issues, and good lord in he'un, the ELECTION.

Like, I'm about to lose sleep over it. How will I focus for school next Tuesday? Five days. FIVE days and it'll all be over, over two years of campaigns that rounded out eight years of pain and misery and GOP cronyism. And Obama is ahead. Knock on wood, but he is ahead by 7% in the poll of polls, and right now, as they all stand, even if McCain gets all the states that are "swing" states, he would still lose to Obama by nearly 30 electors. Or points. Whatever they're called.

I mailed in my ballot last week. It was then that I really started to understand what Obama meant when he said that the election wasn't about him. In the same sense, it wasn't about John McCain either. It's about voters–it's about people–making up for the mistakes that they (or those who were able to vote in 2000 and 2004) had made. Obama might be the face of the change that I believe in (as McCain and the other candidates are for what they believe), but he isn't the heart and soul, he isn't the blood and brains that have kept the ticket running, that have made us all start running towards this final end. Barack Obama isn't the one who's lining up in the rain at early polling stations, nor is he volunteering and getting people registered. That's us, that's We The People, right there. An election is really only won if everyone who can contribute does. And I've done my part, and I'm proud, and when Barack Obama stands in front of the Capitol building in January, the chief justice won't be swearing in just one man, but millions of men and women who stood up and did their part and wanted change.

E Pluribus Unim, motherfucker. Also, no matter what happens, it's gonna beat the everloving crap out of the Canadian election, which you probably don't know happened.

Speaking of Canada, $1 USD=$1.30 CAD. Har har.

I'm sure that no matter what happens next Tuesday (dear god, Tuesday) there will be plenty of beer, and I'm thinking of splurging on at least a few Sam Adams or Rogue Ales, to get me in that American spirit. And I am thinking.....KFC? Something trashy. An early Thanksgiving. Or the worst day of my life. It's like the anticipation of Christmas, except that you have to wait all day to get your presents, but you don't know if they'll be presents or, like, shrapnel bombs? Or waiting to get married when she hasn't actually said "yes" yet, even though you're still having the ceremony and everything.

So the potential job? Transcribing and editing texts for an online archive that is accessible for the visually impaired. The potential pay? $16.16/hour, 10 hours per week. That's about $600 per month, which will help out not only rent, but livelihood as well. I'm 90% sure that it's mine.

What are we reading?
Chaucer: The Legend of Good Women
Children's: Coraline/Neil Gaiman
Poetry: Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction/Wallace Stevens
Ovid: Venus and Adonis/Shakespeare
Film: Treasure of the Sierra Madre

All pretty good, and I'm even starting to tolerate Poetry, thanks to Wallace Stevens being so damn good. Check it:

You must become an ignorant man again
And see the sun again with an ignorant eye
And see it clearly in the idea of it.

Never suppose an inventing mind as source
Of this idea nor for that mind compose
A voluminous master folded in his fire.

What else? My birthday is in a month. 32 days, to be exact. Numerology tells me that this year, or at least this birthday, will bring me love. I hope that will come true. And, because I love talking about these things, here's what I want for my birthday:

This watch
A pocket-sized Moleskine notebook, ruled
Some Faber Castell black fineliners
A sketchbook, 9x11, preferably heavy paper
A soft, warm scarf
A set of charcoal pencils

The socks are just a tag-on, since I have, like, no socks. I would also adore a bottle of wine or beer, but that's not the long-lasting love that one wants on one's birthday. Also, I feel as though I deserve a particularly good one, since the last two birthdays that I spent with friends were in Versailles and Avignon. So. Life owes me one.

And I really want that watch. I'm bored to death with the one that I have, and it looks so classy and it's a Fossil, and I adore Fossil more than anything, unless someone out there wants to get me something from the Balon Bleu de Cartier collection, which I would not sniff at in the least.

Halloween, in Canada, apparently means fireworks. The plan so far is for me to go as Huck Finn.

PoliBLARGH

2008-10-09T23:54:00.000-07:00

Two new idiomatic expressions, one which is highbrow.....and one which is not.

The Highbrow

You're talking to your friend, and they describe doing something. Let's say, "I'm gonna meet Mona and then we're riding to school."

You answer: "Do you mean that in the regular sense or in the John Donne sense?"

*the joke: John Donne, a contemporary of Shakespeare, was famous for his ridiculous double entendres (in fact he most likely invented the double entendre in it's modern form) in his poetry. Most famous is his use of "little death" as an orgasm (true, that's what it means in French, but whatever, it's dirty). One can always imagine John Donne standing around a group or courtiers and nudging the guy next to him whenever the ladies walked by, jabbing his elbow into the man's sides and going "eh? EHH?" In short, saying something in "The John Donne" sense means that you are taking the active verb out of the phrase and replacing it with a form of "fuck"*

Regular sense: Yesterday I stayed at home and studied for my chem final.
John Donne sense: Yesterday I stayed at home and fucked for my chem final.

The Lowbrow

You are discussing one of any various topics with a friend, and they bring up a specific item that annoys you. Let's say:

"Hey, have you seen Seven Years in Tibet?"

And you reply: "Seven years in Tibet? More like Seven Years in BLAAAARGH."

*the joke: people often use this form of sentence with the last word replaced by some sort of pun or jab. This time, we replace it with a barfing noise.*

Variations: If you think that it sounds better, or if the word has a "Mc" or "Mac" in it, go ahead and just put the barfing in the last syllable.
Example:

"Hey, I don't pay attention to the actual world, so I think I'll vote for John McCain."
"John McCain? More like John McBLAAAAARGH."

And while we're on the subject of John McCain: Boy oh boy am I sick of the whole "Liberal Media Gotcha Journalism" tripe that they're trying to sell.

First of all: they're slamming McCain/Palin for, like, lying. Repeatedly. About things that they should not lie about.

Second of all: they get on Obama's ass about it, too, and Biden's. But hey, you know why they don't do that so often? Because they check their facts instead of pulling them out of their asses.

Third of all: Come on, guys. If Obama ever pulled out a stunt like lying, or being immersed in Lobbyists, or picked a completely inexperienced runningmate, had a wife who had been addicted to Vicodin, a daughter who was pregnant at 17, or was endorsed by a preacher who claimed that the Holocaust was God's work, he would be out of the race. Hell, he would have to leave the country or be dragged out on a rail. But John McCain and Sarah Palin have been pulling out these exact things, and yet they remain, hell, they are the head of one of the largest political parties in, like, the WORLD. If the media had really maintained the so-called "liberal bias", then there would be no McCain/Palin. Look at what happened to John Kerry, and then tell me that the media is liberal. Knock it off, Republican Strategists.

Do you ever think that, between elections, the Republican Strategists and the Democratic Strategists get together and play risk, not to have fun, but to sniff out each other's weaknesses and poison their brandy? I do.