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…

Satis House

Guys, I just don’t know what to think of Glee. It starts tonight, and I thought the pilot in May was mildly entertaining and it features some good actors, but I just can’t get behind it just yet. Which is odd, because you know I love teenagers, and shows about teenagers, and music made by teenagers, and songs about teenagers, and basically any combination of those three things, particularly when expressed with all the melodrama and angst of being 17. Also, there are show tunes. I should love Glee.

But watching it felt like being pandered to. They’re so quirky! High school sucks for them! They’re dreamers! Like you! But with better hair! It felt kind of toothless, honestly, the idiosyncracies too perfectly calculated and the camp lacking in real excess. (Which is why I think Gossip Girl, particularly in the first season and a half, is actually a better representation of high school and a smarter use of camp. The characters are distinctive, but not stereotypes, it’s the setting they’re in that’s outrageous, which is kind of what high school feels like, as if you’re the only real thing in a very absurd and arbitrary set of situations, but wherever you are on the social ladder, it’s not good or special enough so you act into said conventions because you don’t know any other way to be, yet, and this is as true for jocks as it is punk emo kids. Enough of that.)

Glee, to me, is less like high school and more like Great Expectations, with a snarky cheerleading coach instead of the gruesome Miss Havisham, and overwritten bullies instead of, I don’t know, orphanage in 19th century England.  The desire and expectation of the protagonist to be special is the same. Perhaps that’s too much of a leap, but consider:

Cliques being, of course, the class system; Will as the escaped convict Magwitch (unhappily chained in his position as science teacher, but seeing glee club as a kind of freedom and pulling the kids along with him); Rachel (tragically misunderstood prodigy) being Pip; and injustice being the state of the world at large, which, you may have learned, is not fair.

I think it’s a reasonable comparison to make: Dickens was the closest thing to a TV writer of his time. He wrote episodic novels, published in sections over months or years, getting readers hooked on his characters and letting a plot develop over time. And if a show about secretly talented underdogs targeted to appeal to a nation of generally-quite-privileged people who like to think they’re underdogs is exploitative, well, so was Dickens. He too wrote about the underclass for a literate middle class, and from what I remember, the title Great Expectations was as much an insult to his readers as it was a description of Pip. Because of the serial format, he was as dependent on the continuing good nature of his audience and advertisers as a network studio is, so much so that he rewrote the ending of the novel to better please them. In his original ending, Pip ends up alone but chastened; in the revised ending, he and Estella meet again at Satis (for “Enough”) House and there is “no shadow of parting” between them, presumably because Dickens suspected readers would want a happier conclusion for Pip.

So, whether Glee is better or worst than GE is not really the point. What’s interesting is that Fox was so sure this show would be a hit that it went to great pains to make sure it would be. The pilot was available all summer, and there are all kinds of extra goodies and clips that are not just promotional but fun to watch in their own right. And the characters are perfect: oblivious and insecure theatre girl, the nerd in the wheelchair, fastidious boy of questionable sexuality, warm-hearted jock, diva, nervous stuttering punk Asian girl. It’s like they had a bowl of adjectives and a bowl of nouns, and they just kept pulling them out and matching them until they had collected a motley but unutterably lovable crew of misfits that could never, in a thousand years, exist in the same place, but because they’re (loosely) based on types we’ve seen, we think they must be true. And then the show makes them sing songs so far from relevance that they can’t help but be adorable, but with skill, so they knock our socks off rather than ending as most glee clubs do, in earnest failure.

Fox has, of course, become very, very good at giving its audience “real” people, “relatable” people, people who are just like you and I but slightly or a lot more talented, which is the success of Idol and SYTYCD, or people who are despicable or stupid in many ways, to whom you can feel superior, which is what every other Fox reality show is about. And Glee is the eventual result of this formula, a formula that was successful a hundred and fifty years ago with Dickens, and works just as well when you add some Journey to it. (Better, in fact. Can you imagine a modern audience enjoying something so gross as a waxy old jilted woman whose moldy wedding dress catches on fire? Our taste for the Gothic seems to be limited mostly to Tim Burton movies nowadays, except for Sweeney Todd, which he didn’t write, and they are mostly harmless.)

This is not to say that I’m condescending to Glee, not at all. I liked reading Great Expectations, I liked watching Glee. I like watching America’s Next Top Model, for crying out loud. They’re well-made shows, they strike a chord, they’re good, actually, if predictable. What I want to know, what’s really bugging me while I’m watching the show, is why we, I mean as a people, generally, are interested in this story that is, at heart, sort of formulaic and banal and predictably “inspirational.”

In my office today, we were talking about the trend right now to remake old stories, like Pride and Predjudice and Zombies or Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, the old tales that we’re respinning with some new element, some new music or motif or cultural obsession. I’m not sure if we’ve adopted the idea that there simply isn’t anything new to say or write or sing about, so we just reapply old ideas to new faces (ie. Miss Serena May van der Woodsen Welland), or if that’s actually the only appropriate response to so much work and accumulated thought and ideas all available at a mouse click.

Mary Jo Salter published a great poem in last month’s Atlantic which seems appropriate to mention, simply because I think it’s puzzling out the same issue:

What is it about the forest

Why can’t we give it a rest?

All those writers taking

soulful walks in the woods:

good heavens, it’s been done.

She goes on to mention Dante writing about Virgil, Longfellow stealing from both, Nabokov knocking off (ha!) Proust, etc. To do anything else, to write in a tradition you don’t know intimately, would be writerly suicide. But this isn’t just a proving of her poetic credentials; she introduces and dismisses the greats in the same breath.  Even her meter and her rhyme are sporadic, unmannerly, scannable but following no coherent pattern. It’s poetry to break poetry, finishing with:

I’ve had my fill of Frost

proud again to be lost,

coming upon his fork

in the road for the millionth time,

or stumbling upon woodpiles

of somebody else’s work.

She stops short of showing us what that after-the-classics work looks like, what it means, for poetry anyway, to be “out of the woods.” She hasn’t left us a form to follow her out, which is perhaps the point, that there should be no form, just snatches of a rhyme here and there (Frost/lost) if you like, if it works, if it does what you want it to rhetorically, an almost hands-off, libertarian theory of literature and life in which you make your own way the best you can, hoping it’s enough.

From Great Expectations, chapter 8:

“Is that the name of this house, miss?”

“One of its names, boy.”

“It has more than one, then, miss?”

“One more. Its other name was Satis; which is Greek, or Latin, or Hebrew, or all three – or all one to me – for enough.”

“Enough House,” said I; “that’s a curious name, miss.”

“Yes,” she replied; “but it meant more than it said. It meant, when it was given, that whoever had this house, could want nothing else. They must have been easily satisfied in those days, I should think. But don’t loiter, boy.”

Being cool in high school

From Jezebel’s Jenna Saunders. Full post is well worth the read:

“The countess and I walked over, looked at the men, looked at each other, then looked again, more awkwardly, at these laughing golden boys — and immediately I knew that all the liquid eyeliner and velvet ropes and jet planes in the world will not stop and have not stopped me from remaining the person I was in high school. There’s a certain kind of popularity that, if you should be so lucky as to experience it at 15 or 16 or 17, deposits in its wake a sense of pure social mastery that never really leaves you. And there’s a certain kind of awkwardness, bodily shame, and tongue-tied single-sex-high-school befuddledness in what I still think of as “mixed” social situations that precludes any kind of innate suavity and leaves one always at the mercy of frizzy-haired shoulder-tappers.”

Launching, every day, the same way

I’ve been told by four different people in three different mediums that they like this new photo I’m sporting at the top of the page. Which, by the power of multiplication done by someone who doesn’t understand math, means 12 of you want to know about it!

Let me tell you about this picture. I like it. I like how the light is so loud and silver and catching the water, and while the brightest point of light is often– I’m told– the focus of a good shot, here it’s the background, it’s the flow, since even my shirt is silver. And that makes my hair, the movement and toss of it, the center, and because the light is the way it is, it makes the hair look like a unique shade of auburn that it normally isn’t : there’s some transmogrification in the lens of the camera or the way the sunlight reflects or the glow of the monitor that takes my dark blond hair and makes it the color of burnt sugar.

But what I like best about it is the way it shakes out, the way my hair pulls behind me as if I’m lunging forward. Truth is, we had the camera on continuous shot, and if you can see the photos before and after it, like I can here on my computer, you see that I’m actually twirling, going in circles over and over again, because I saw some model doing that in a tv show or a movie once or something. There were, quite literally, a hundred photos of me in some kind of circular motion in this exact spot before I deleted most of them, and then this one picture where, cropped and devoid of context, I look like I’m launching, like I’m running forward, like the spray of water in front of me is a barrier about to be broken, but I tell you dear reader, that I never actually got wet, even though I like how the picture makes it look as if I will.

Months before, sometime in the cold stretch of winter, Jana and I had worked our way through season 1 of Gossip Girl, and right after the Bad News Blair episode– the one where Serena unwittingly steals the spotlight again, I know, not very specific, and to make it up to each other, they steal Eleanor’s dresses and do their hair up and run around the city taking pictures of themselves in an impromptu photo shoot– Jana turns to me and goes, hey, that would be really fun! Not paying attention, I go, “mm-hmm, yes it would,” like you do when a 5-year-old wants to go to Disneyland in January and you can brush them off with a “but it’s winter sweetheart, let’s talk about this in the summer,” but 5-year-olds don’t forget and neither does Jana. So in the spring I get a Facebook invite, setting the date for three of us to dress up and run around and take photos. It’s an all-day affair, with two cameras, half a dozen locations, costume changes, light diffusers, flashlights, false eyelashes, the works. Even Blair might be jealous. We counted, and between the two cameras, there were more than 3000 shots.

This particular photo came at the end of the day, when I thought we were just doing headshots, and Jana’s looked way more interesting than mine at this point, because she has the most incredible flair for drama that my hippie self lacks, so even though I knew she was snapping away with the camera when I walked over to the fountain, I wasn’t thinking about posing anymore, just really glad to get into the cool air around the water. Because we were almost done and it would be fine if my make-up got bleary. And I started turning in circles.

But of all those photos of me spinning in the water, this is the one I like, the one where it looks as if I’m streaking forward. I suppose that’s a very Western, narrative-focused thing to think, that I like the progress of the shot.  Liking the arrested motion, the way it looks as if I’ve been caught in the act of running somewhere, getting to a particular point.

I suppose that’s why you see so many shots of models jumping or running in the fashion mags. It’s a way to simultaneously project movement and stop it. A very big part of the photographer’s job is to catch the model in an exact moment where the line of his or her body creates momentum but can hold it in the eternally still structure of a statue. Any other shot is dead, lacking in dynamic, and visibly so to the reader. Which is why all of our posed snapshots on Facebook, smiling in front of monuments and canyons, are only interesting to the extent to which we like or hate the people in them, or are impressed by the surroundings.

The difficult thing is that those fashion photos, and the one you see above, are just as posed as any snapshot in front of Niagara Falls. The only difference is that fashion shoots are posed by someone with skill, someone with access to models who have made it their job to make a spin look like a poem, or make a shirt look like a suit of armor. Someone who knows how to create a fantasy, not just set themselves in one. The image is always, to some extent, a lie.

And maybe that’s what I like, the fantasy of the shot: who doesn’t want to believe that they’re continually moving forward? Lately, when I see myself tripping over the same things over and over again, finding in myself only fresh new versions of the old flaws, I wonder how much of our talk of progress is equally fantastical. Which brings me to the title of the post: the feeling that I am bound to my own skin and experience and gifts and vulnerable Achille’s tendon, and will maybe spend my whole life working to become bigger than what I already am, moving forward in some vital, essential way, and still end up with nothing but a lot of pictures of me spinning. Migratory, returning every season to the same place I was in before. I guess my best hope is that when I return to an all-too-familiar place, I’ve earned a little more grace, a little more wisdom the second, or fourth, or hundredth time around. That even if I’m still going in circles, I’ve at least widened the circumference a little bit.

Stage confessions

I want to tell you about a blogger I just discovered, whose name seems to be either justin or henry, or maybe melodramaticpopularsong. Whatever, he has a particular rhetorical flair that I dig, and like Jacob Clifton of TWOP (another obsession of mine) does not draw lines between pop culture and the bigger things of the world. He’s hard to quote, b/c like David Foster Wallace everything is building for hundreds of words at a time, and also he likes commas way better than periods. But note:

Obama does his trademark Obama chuckle and he tells incredulous Brian that no, he doesn’t watch them, he doesn’t pay them any mind, but then instead of totally dismissing them, he makes this analogy in which he compares the people on cable news shows and talk radio to professional wrestlers, these men who inside “are good guys,” he says, and who are playing these artificial roles because that’s their job, and he points this out sagely and wisely and with aplomb and yet of course he’s pointing out the artifice of punditry in the middle of this perfect TV moment of his which has been completely and totally constructed for the NBC television crew, a point which has been made by somebody from the press pool minutes earlier, but even though Obama and the pundits are in some sense exactly the same, even they’re both on a formal level these public personas performing in constructed scenes and situations for a mass audience, they’re also not the same, they’re different, they’re not the same if only because you believe him and you don’t believe them, if only for belief, the difference is as simple as that, the power of belief and how it can animate and transform things and make them different, and then I’m thinking how in English we use the same word, “host,” for a television presenter like Brian Williams and also for the bread which people put on their tongue and which based on belief can change inside them from bread into something more than bread, some other filling thing.

Also, facebook tells me that he loves Gossip Girl. So go visit:  songs about buildings and food. The death of irony, indeed.

Why universe, WHY?

As if this particular Monday weren’t hellish enough, Gossip Girl is STILL on its unexplained, cruel hiatus. If it is just so that the cast can all get front row seats at fashion week and get photographed instead of shooting a resolution to the weirdest two episodes in the history of GG like they are supposed to, I will lose it like Agnes and start burning dresses until Jenny cries.

I’m just saying.

Cancel That

Update: there is no longer reason to be excited about the Gossip Girl spin-off. It’s about young Rufus and Lily, and therefore not likely to be worthy of our attention.

Never fear, the original GG is still awesome, and this week’s episode actually made my brain somersualt. I mean, it really took a good chunk of the first season for us to understand what was going on, but now that characters have been appropriately constructed, they are going to crush us all.

Dorota Explains It All, FTW!

Guys, there are rumors of a Gossip Girl spin-off. Since I spent Thursday night with the second half of season 1, you can probably imagine how insanely excited this makes me — as long as the spin-off doesn’t revolve around Rufus or Vanesssa. (Though I have to say, Vanessa in the last ep was pretty amazing. If this continues, I may have to reconsider my undying allegiance to team Manhattan.)

Small Dog made a very derogatory comment about GG a few weeks back.  So I had to explain to her lovingly, rage-restrainingly, why it is the Greatest Show of Our Time. Here’s what I emailed, with one or two late additions:

• Because it is the cleverest existing story of power trading in the days of constant technological surveillance, and what it means to come of age in a world where nothing is off-limits, money has made morals practically irrelevant (because they don’t reward you unless you count your conscience as valuable, and you have to decide its value when you have so much money that you don’t even know HOW to value things), privacy doesn’t exist, and the idea of the self is in itself a commodity.

• Because being a teenager is a ‘bloody slow-motion car accident’ for everyone, and these characters manage to make it just alittle more glamorous than you remember, which is a nice touch, even in its  horrifying moments.

• Nate Archibald is every guy I was obsessed with in high school, just with prettier hair. It’s nice to mock (with perspective) the stupid things you have left behind.

• The ability of the show to bend space and time is hilarious if you have ever been to New York.

• The meta-ness of it all blows my mind. Serena once, in her completely unconciousness wisdom, said: “Whenever something happens that is not part of your plan, you pretend like it doesn’t exist. You act like you’re in this movie about your perfect life, but I have to remind you that the only one watching it is you.” Which is, like, EXACTLY!

• Finally, because the stylists of Chuck Bass and Blair Waldorf have earned my undying devotion. Chuck was once wearing a pair of impeccably tailored yellow pants with a bright purple cardigan, and you just KNOW the actor put it on and was like WTF? and the stylist said “you are Chuck Bass and you will rock it,” and HE DID.

I have season one, darlings. And like Blair Waldorf, I don’t share. But just for you, maybe a cozy viewing party?

xoxo, Gossip Girl