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.

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…

Puppet Show

So, I was writing this whole long post about Kanye and Taylor Swift, like everyone else on the internet, which was going to start with this conversation I had with a friend who grew up in the same church that I did, who always hates how the guys he knew said they wanted the girls to “dress modestly” but of course then asked out the (maybe wiser?) “hoochie” girls who dress the way they do because they have (correctly) figured out how the (typical) boy thinks and how to get attention and therefore bypass the gender gap and get what they want, by doing so earning the hatred of the original/smart/tshirt-wearing/earnest girl (from “You Belong to Me” by Taylor Swift) who may in fact grow into a normal and well-adjusted and brilliant woman but for now condescends to those who dress “provocatively” because the most terrifying thing in the world is sexual attention from boys, and she can’t admit that she wants it anyway (which is what Twilight is all about, which is why Twilight and Taylor Swift are dominating us all culturally), and how those things all together are what made this whole Kanye outrage thing possible and may get Barack Obama reelected (because he came down on the side of country music fans and puppies and rainbows and pretty teenage girls), but I think too slow, dammit, because this one is so much better and smarter and you should read it.

My conclusion, by the way, was going to be that I never think there’s an excuse for person-to-person rudeness, except in theatre, of course, which is not real, so what’s all the fuss about? This memes thing is way more awesome.

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.”

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.

pictures and frames

Quick meta-post to say that I am getting restless with this incarnation of the site, so I’ll be fooling with pictures and themes and the like. Let me know if it looks ugly. Or if something’s broken.

So few words per day

I’ve been hibernating lately, but I hope you don’t think I’ve abandoned you. I’ve been reading a lot, and thinking a lot, and have half a dozen posts gasping around somewhere, but when I do write, it’s all for work, so much so that even when I’ve got a decent idea for the blog, I often don’t have it in me to compose a post. A reporter friend said to me recently, “I only have so many words in me a day,” and that’s exactly how I’m feeling. What’s really a shame is how many of mine are wasted on pointless emails.

So I’m trying to write and say less, but hopefully better, simply because I’m daily becoming more sure that I don’t know anything about anything. Andre Gregory once wrote, talking about artists:

We began to speculate that your early years, say your twenties, should be all about learning — learning how to do it, how to say it, learning to master the tools of your craft; having learned the techniques, then your next several years, say your thirties, should be all about telling the world with passion and conviction everything that you think you know about your life and your art. Meanwhile, though, if you have any sense, you’ll begin to realize that you just don’t know very much — you don’t know enough. And so the next many, many years, we agreed, should be all about questions, only questions, and that if you can totally give up your life and your work to questioning, then perhaps somewhere in your mid-fifties you may find some very small answers to share with others in your work. The problem is that our society (including the community of artists) doesn’t have much patience with questions and questioning.

I don’t like to call myself an artist, because I’m not, really. But I do write, and want to continue writing, and right now I’m actually making a living doing so, which is kind of incredible. But as Gregory describes, I find my own questions to be a giant distraction, and I have no patience for them. It drives me crazy that I don’t know enough, that I’m not already a genius, that I’m having these fractal-like debates in my brain all the time, and it’s enough to convince me that I am assuredly much better off listening to someone else, and letting that whole big mess just sort itself out on its own time. I’ll check back in when I’m 52. Maybe by then I’ll have learned something. (It almost makes me wish the mentor-apprentice relationship was still a thing, because I think I’d like that.)

So instead I’m trying to focus on the tools themselves:  on story, on lines, on language, even when I’m writing things for work that don’t mean a whole lot — hopefully learning some kind of skill with the limited amount of words in me. Trying to have patience with the process.

The Machine

Pretty smart. And for a blogger and professional internet adder-to, it’s also validating:

h/t: Kate for the video and Club Narwhal for alerting me to the Wired story.

That’s Not My Name

I hereby nominate That’s Not My Name by the Ting Tings for song of the decade. Stay with me, now, I promise this is not just gratuitous musical taste-sharing. Embedding is disabled, so you’ll have to click-through to YouTube: That’s Not My Name, The Ting Tings.

Are you back? Has your life, like, totally changed? Is your boss/small child/romantic partner wondering why you just got out of your chair and created whirled madly around your cubicle/living room/bed? Congratulations, you have just accomplished the goal of the song. You have been recognized, though perhaps only as a future mental patient.

Classic story: fighting to be recognized in an uncaring world (“they forget my name”) without being reduced by the people who do call you by a name (“they call me Stacy…that’s not my name”), and desperately, maybe hopelessly, crying out for someone to call you by the thing you want to be (“are you calling me bird?”). If you watch the video, there’s this moment when she goes from combative and jittery to this soaring question, and then collapses right back into the fray. Genius.

And aside from all this meta-brilliance stuff, it is the best. song. ever. for a friday afternoon. In the middle there are three unique melodies and two voices spinning around each other and this bright thread running up and up and up and the drum is INSANE and I cannot sit still or write in coherent sentences fortheloveofallthatisholy.

Warm-up post #2

Still warming up for some upcoming doozies, so it’s another languorous, stretching post today. (Anyone ever notice how stretching doesn’t warm you up so much as relax you? After a good 5-minute period of stretching, I am not ready for a run. I am ready for a nap.) If I get really excited, you might even be lucky enough to get of those one-post-per-hour days. I know those went out of style in the blogosphere somewhere in 2003, but so did my 3/4-sleeve light blue cotton v-neck, and you don’t see me chucking THAT thing out, do you?

Ahem.

Today I am again curious about YOU, dear reader. I want to know why you are here. After all, this blog has never really been about world events, though every now and then I mention them. That’s my day job, and sometimes it overflows here, but I try not to do that to you. I assume your own news-gathering faculties are intact and well-tuned.

It’s also not really a journaling blog, as I think I’ve only posted pictures of myself once or twice, and when I tell stories, they’re for humor, not because I think you are dying to know what stupid thing someone said to me. It’s not even a product blog, though I did for a while have nothing better to do than review a few perfumes or mention a new place to spend your money.

I don’t write much about my religion or my politics or celebrities (though I’ve mentioned all of them and I if went in any of those directions I’m sure my hit counts would skyrocket). I don’t have a sustained pattern of mentioning the best movies, books, music, etc, — those posts are very piecemeal and usually kind of terrible.  I don’t use it as a career blog to link the writing I’ve done and my CV. In fact, my name doesn’t even appear.

But all the same, in the year and a half I’ve had this blog  I’ve gotten well over 20,000 hits, and I know my Dad doesn’t have that kind of time. So why do you keep showing up? What posts are interesting to you? If I made some kind of loose writing plan for PerPeg 2009, what do you think should be included? What do you like? Are you just passing through on your hunt for the end of the internet? Really really bored? Looking for confirmation that someone else is more confused than you are?

Maybe you like the scattered-ness. Because I am scattered and peregrine and perenially unable to focus, and you like ME, so the blog fits.

Or not.

Inquiring minds want to know.

{update 5:11 pm Apparently Nick Denton knows: I need to get drunk so I can get in touch with my reptilian brain. Only then may I approach the keyboard.}