no subject

I will have good things for you soon: I’m just trying to get a couple freelance projects together and deal with some non-internet related hoopla. As always, a lot of the good stuff I find on the interwebs is getting shared on my Google Reader, so feel free to take a look here if you haven’t already.

One of these days I will put some time into setting up a feed where my Shared items will come up on this blog and eliminate a few clicks for those of you who don’t use Reader — and why don’t you? I’m genuinely curious, like how I don’t get why people still use their Yahoo! email accounts — but that’s going to take more time than I have in the forseeable future, so. Click.

here’s something fun

Of chalk and sailboats

I finally saw Where the Wild Things Are. Given the emoting you’re used to from me, you might be predisposed to think that it dissolved me into a puddle of tears, but guys, I made it almost all the way through! Which is sort of unexpected, not only because it’s me but because everyone in the film spends so much time being sad.

Here’s what I liked about it, and let me be clear that this is what most people DON’T like about it: Max reacts to his situation not by running away so much as by reliving it with giant clawed monsters. The island of the wild things is a deep, deep dive into Max’s problems, but with way cooler houses, and while this seems to be one of the most recurrent criticisms of the film (not fun enough for actual children! too much psychological projection!), I actually thought it was the only way this movie could make sense.

Because an unfortunate truth of my own life is that even as a kid I was limited by my own imagination. The stories I made up, and the ones I wrote down, were the products of what I’d lived and done and read. Even my dreams were made up mostly of things I remembered from my waking life, if much weirder, what with that sailboat coming out of the bathtub drain and all, and that’s true for all of us, I think. I mean, I could imitate, I could rearrange, I could come up with things that felt new, but all stories are essentially inseparable from their sources.

Jonze makes this angle clear: Max’s creations haven’t emerged from the ether. Monster Carol behaves like Max, and KW often seems like a mash-up of his sister and his mom. Everyone speaks in the kind of simple sentences a kid would use, or that adults use when talking to kids. Since this world is of his making, it’s only logical. And despite the truly excellent rumpus at the beginning, things devolve into tantrums pretty quickly, just as they did before he ran away.

Pan’s Labyrinth, del Toro’s dark fairy-tale set in fascist Spain, was no idyll, either. Both movies start with a story: Max runs full-tilt down the stairs after the dog, fork in hand, hunting his dinner, and Ofelia’s books tell of a lost underworld princess. We quickly learn the miserable circumstances of each, and of their growing separation from their parents. Most importantly, both kids are extended an invitation to an otherworld in which they must prove themselves as royalty. (Ofelia has a harder time of this last task.)

Neither kid finds much in the way of solace in these new homes, because they are exactly as dark and difficult as the ones they’ve tried to avoid. Max’s situation is obviously not as dangerous as Ofelia’s, and his monsters are correspondingly much cuter, if a little mopey. But that dirt clod fight is basically the episode with the snowballs writ large, just as the Pale Man’s test of Ofelia’s character is a banquet only because Ofelia was sent to bed without supper that night. In each, the fantasy world’s rules always follow from what’s happening in the concrete.

The distance between what’s real and what’s imagined is so much bigger in movies ABOUT children than in movies FOR children. This is why 25-year-olds don’t watch those old Winnie the Pooh movies or go to, like, G-Force when they’re feeling nostalgic, and why WTWTA has been such an advertising juggernaut. If you’re six and you’re watching Winnie the Pooh, you’re in the woods with him. But the problem of being an adult is that you can’t really enter that world without a proxy, which is why Max and Ofelia exist.

That’s also why kids don’t get this movie. They shouldn’t. They don’t need proxies. WTWTA is not made for them, even if it was erroneously marketed to them. This movie is partly for people who know who Spike Jonze is, but more so for people sufficiently removed from being an actual kid that they can look back and now realize–much much later–that the igloo wasn’t any more awesome than the world outside it, and in fact the angle from which you see the world must necessarily triangulate your dreams.

So, I did tear up a little, which is what I started this post with and I’ll come back to it now. But not when Max and Carol are gazing soulfully at each other over the waves. I didn’t lose it until he finally makes it home, when mom collapses to the ground, pulling him in,  so full of words that in the end she can’t use any of them and just drinks him in with her eyes: her child returned. Her own fantasy– one I never thought I would be boring enough to share, let me add– is the one where everyone makes it home safe, everyone gets out alive. It’s a mundane daydream, maybe, but has its own wildness to it: remember how she yowled and chased after him when he ran out the door?

Shut out of Neverland, now I’m the Max who sits next to Alexander and makes a clumsy effort to apologize. And it’s not as much fun as throwing dirt, not even close. But I crossed that boundary a long time ago: if I were to make a blanket fort now, it’s not because I believe I can hide there.

How I will be occupying myself for the next forever

Just watched the first episode of Friday Night Lights, and I know I’m super-behind the times and all that, but I blame everyone who DID NOT TELL ME HOW EXCELLENT IT IS.

I don’t even like football.

back from california

more soon…

How to write a faith-dismissing blog post based on “science” for a women’s website

I just saw this. Let’s break it down by assuming that you, dear reader, write for DoubleX and found some juicy little studies that might appeal to your oh-so-educated audience of liberal arts-educated secular women, who are the only readers who might matter, because they (like you!) are smart. Please note that this post could also be acceptable at Jezebel. Here’s how you write it:

• Cherry pick your study. Preferably, it should introduce some difference in the brains of believers and non-believers that is genetic in nature. (Feel sorry for the faithful! Bless their hearts, they were born with broken brains.) Do not worry if this study is limited, poorly-done, or contradicted by other research:

“Even when men and women had the same response in the brain, women were more apt to attribute it to something divine, “out of body.” Other scientists have found these limbic tendencies particularly pronounced in adolescent girls, concurrent with the final stages of brain development. As Barry Kosmin, a coauthor of the new Trinity College study says, “That’s why when anybody sees the Virgin Mary, it’s a couple of young girls on a mountainside in Southern Europe.” (Nota bene: This week, Sam Harris—who gained fame by authoring The End of Faith but is by training a neuroscientist—released his new findings on the neural correlates of belief. He told me in this case he found no difference between the workings of the female and male brain.)”

• Remember that every behavior can be explained by the behaviors of prehistoric humans who haven’t left us a whole lot of pesky evidence that might broaden your thesis and make your job harder. For example: back then, women liked bright and shiny things that looked like berries, which is why we like lipstick now, and made every decision on the basis of reproductive success! Men liked to hit things with sticks, which hasn’t changed much (har har)! Evolutionary psychology, when properly reduced, solves all your toothy little writing snaggles:

“Some researchers hypothesize that women are hardwired to believe because of evolutionary imperatives. Belief in God— or the Mount Olympus ensemble cast, or a phalanx of wood spirits, and so on— has long been connected with tribal ritual, and formed the center of communities. Women relied on these communities for the survival of their children, while men were off spearing buffalo, pillaging neighboring settlements— or whatever the caveman business trip furnished.”

• Insert the patriarchy.  Never mind those matriarchal societies, they are aberrations and not worth considering. They couldn’t possibly be taken seriously as evidence against your thesis that everything is men’s fault, including religion:

“Not a single major faith is led by members of its female flock, and the more deeply adherent a religious group becomes, the less freedom it offers its women, not to mention power. It’s hard not to compare women sticking with faith to wives confined to bad marriages: They’re so committed to the institution that they’ll willingly shrink under mistreatment just to maintain their own status quo.”

• Assume the contention that science and religion must be opposed in all things is already well-proven, and don’t bring it up.

• Don’t take any of this (interesting, possibly illuminating) research seriously. Make dated jokes:

“atheism is from Mars, Wicca is from Venus.”

• Don’t mention or consider the many, many intelligent men and women who have found that belief is not a way to make one’s life easier, but a life-long struggle from which much of our great literature, art, music, philosophy, film and even *gasp* science are derived.

• End by dismissing women who have the audacity to struggle with said belief as victims, since you have made them so, and put them on the proverbial couch for therapy from the woman who endorsed The Secret. Oprah solves everything.

Disappointment

is realizing AFTER you have buttered and bitten into your perfectly-toasted Everything bagel that your butter has gone rancid.

Just needed to put that out there.

Shining, perishable dream

“That first night I opened my window on the bus into town and watched for the skyline, but all I could see were the wastes of Queens and big signs that said MIDTOWN TUNNEL THIS LANE and then a flood of summer rain (even that seemed remarkable and exotic, for I had come out of the West where there was no summer rain), and for the next three days I sat wrapped in blankets in a hotel room air conditioned to 35 degrees and tried to get over a cold and a high fever. It did not occur to me to call a doctor, because I knew none, and although it did occur to me to call the desk and ask that the air conditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come—was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was.” — Joan Didion’s Goodbye to All That

I’m sitting on the New Jersey turnpike right now, on my way back from my super-awesome best weekend ever in New York City. Across the aisle, a middle-aged woman is talking on her phone about what must have been her first trip. Here’s her catalog: She went to Chinatown. She saw Chicago for half-price. She ate the best soup of her life at that deli from When Harry Met Sally. She bought a hot dog! Off the street! And she is just so, so happy about all of it. She’s gotten a few eye-rolls from the cool kids on the bus, but her husband, sitting next to her with his eyes closed, smiles every now and then as she gushes. I can’t tell if he’s remembering the deli, or just loving the sound of her voice.

I was 14 the first time I came to New York City, somewhat misplaced in my high school’s business club. There was some kind of “youth business leaders’ conference,” and everyone else on the trip was an upperclassman that actually had an interest in some of those words.  I was taking a Keyboarding class at the time (how quaint does that sound?), which meant I could go, and my mom had prepared by buying me a blazer that was fully three sizes too big. I carried that blazer exactly the way one carries a train ticket, checking every now and then with a brush of the fingers to make sure it’s still there, still offering passage.

The day we got to explore Midtown–  which to us WAS the city, the only part of New York that mattered–  everyone paired up to leave me the odd number out. I didn’t want to make a fuss, and I didn’t want to stay with the chaperone, so I turned and struck off alone. It was the most vivid moment of my life thus far, and my list of accomplishments looked a lot like this woman’s, who is still on the phone in the aisle across from me. I bought a pretzel, I wandered in and out of t-shirt stores, I got turned around in the bustle, I found Chinatown. I knew New York was “dangerous,” so I did what you’re supposed to: walk fast, don’t gawk up at the buildings, look people in the eye if they seem dangerous, keep a hand on your bag, act like you know where you’re going. I was determined to pass as a New Yorker, having no idea how laughable that would be. As if a tiny blonde girl wandering 7^th avenue in an oversized Casual Corner blazer on a weekday afternoon pretending not to look at things could possibly be a native.

But no one blinked.  In the eleven years since, every time I come back to NY, no one blinks. No one questions my right to be here. Yesterday, while I was waiting to cross Broadway at 149^th, a man turning the corner in his car yelled out the window, “I hope you have a great day!” This giant city remains the single most welcoming place I’ve ever been– a phrase I just stole from my busmate.

Last night, Julianne and I stood between two bridges, looking over the Hudson towards Manhattan, with the sun setting through the cables and the water glittering in a way that SUCH DIRTY WATER has no right to. We talked about every movie about the end of the world where the Statue of Liberty is swept over by the towering waves of God’s wrath or our own selfishness.  We talked about the dragons of this particular city and about that ridiculous blazer I kept in my closet until I went away to college. We talked about the millions of New York stories being told so loudly that they drown each other out, and how I always like the schmaltzy ones where people take care of each other because this place is too bright and too tough to do otherwise. We remembered to each other the passion fruit macaroons we just ate– how the bright, orange cookies cracked in our mouths like shells.

Elliptical

I am in just a terrible mood today, for no good reason, and rather than afflicting you with it, I’ll pass on one of my new favorites:

It helps.

Gossip Girl, reduction

Oh, hey there, hello!

I’ve been a bit preoccupied with life and the start of fall and other things, so I’m sorry to say that I don’t have anything really good to offer you today.

However, Jana and I have been experimenting with a litttle foodie blog, written under the conceit of Gossip Girl, so if you want to see some pictures of cream puffs and other things we make, and have been following GG enough to not be totally mystified by the recappy sections, you can check it out here. It is silly and hopefully awesome.

(Credit for the blog name and all the photos that look good goes to Jana, as does the title “head chef and pretty-maker.” I am responsible for holding the lamps during photo shoots, suggesting new ways to make our projects more difficult– like making our own caramel instead of melting down pre-made candy– and failing at said suggestions, and blathering about the episodes themselves. And if that hasn’t intrigued you, I really don’t know what will.)

More soon…