Strange What Love Does

Likeness

2010-11-11T13:58:00.014-06:00

Any reader of this blog (and incidentally: are there any readers?) might have noticed that I tend to fall in love easily, pop culture-wise. The characters in films and books that I enjoy can become immediate shorthand for figures in my "real" life. People always told my father that he looked like Tom Selleck, more when he was younger.

A few years ago, however, a coworker of my father's told him he looked like Christian Bale in American Psycho. My father had never seen the film or read the Bret Easton Ellis book on which it is based (when I was fourteen, I did both of these things). I think he took the comment as a kind of compliment; Christian Bale is young and handsome, after all. And my dad does have an intense temper, which I can only imagine is magnified in the workplace.

So now, whenever I see Tom Selleck or Christian Bale, I think of my dad. But I didn't make the original association. The actor who reminds me most of my father, whose signal value is embedded with my dad, is Al Pacino. Not all eras of Al Pacino: just young Al Pacino, just Pacino playing Michael Corleone in The Godfather.

There is a physical resemblance, but it's slight, especially since my father has always had facial hair - I agree that Selleck is a nearer likeness. The association exists because my dad loves The Godfather, because he watches the films with tears in his eyes, because he once turned to me during the third film and said "Michael loves Mary so much," and I understood that he meant also that he loved me, so much.

So this business of who looks like who - of what emotions an actor's face excites in me - has a lot to do with image association, with memory. The German actor Daniel Brühl was on my mind the night that I met my fiancé. I had recently seen Inglourious Basterds, in which Brühl plays a young Nazi officer.

I didn’t much care for the film, which I thought was reductive and somewhat schizophrenic in its treatment of WWII, even for a candy-colored reimagining. But there was Daniel Brühl. I was reminded of the German actor’s pleasing onscreen presence, his well-ordered features and milky physicality. My negative reaction to the film as a whole probably had something to do with Tarantino’s perverse decision to cast Brühl as an entitled jerk in the same movie where real-life entitled jerk Eli Roth plays a semi-heroic figure.

Regardless, I don’t know if I would have noticed T’s resemblance to Brühl if I hadn’t just seen the Tarantino film. It wasn’t the first thing I noticed about him. We were at a BBQ in Echo Park. Aside from me, there were three men. I knew two; one was a stranger. These are the last moments I remember clearly, seemingly without affect, because from then on the memory becomes inflected with the blurry tint of repeated telling, the bronzed sense of canonization. The stranger was from Denmark. He had a tattoo on his left arm that looked at first glance like an American Indian headdress, but which I would later learn was the mechanical eagle from the cover of Judas Priest’s 1982 album Screaming for Vengeance.

Did I notice the resemblance almost immediately? Was it prompted by the fact that T and Daniel Brühl do look somewhat alike, or by T’s quiet, confident demeanor, his very slightly accented English? I can’t say for sure. But when the evening ended – oddly early, it seemed to me – I had T’s number, and I went home and changed my computer background to a photograph of Daniel Brühl in his breakout role in 2004’s Goodbye Lenin!

But now I’m not sure; did I change the background after meeting T, because of the perceived resemblance? Or had I done it before, after seeing the Tarantino movie, just because I remembered Brühl, because I liked the look of his face? The resemblance, and Daniel Brühl's association with T, had already rooted itself in my brain. For as long as I can remember, I have responded to media that I like, that I love, that touches me, that changes me, with devoted fandom. This behavior probably has something to do with my parents, who made me in their image: comic book and science fiction reader, space opera watcher, horror fetishist. Maybe fandom is chemical – maybe it is prompted by some hormone or amino acid produced by our brains when we look lovingly into the pages of a book or onto a broad, tall screen. This is the way it has always felt to me, anyway: like I am falling in love again, just a little bit. My bones still buzz when I hear one of Angelo Badalamenti’s scores at the beginning of a Lynch movie. My heart still sings when I see a favorite author give a reading. And hey, have you ever heard this never-released Rebekah Del Rio song, written by David Lynch?

(The rabbit hole goes deeper: do you recognize Del Rio from Mulholland Dr., wherein she sings Roy Orbison's "Crying" in Spanish?

)
But I didn’t feel this way about Brühl before I met T. I saw Goodbye Lenin! at the small movie theatre across the street from Lincoln Center in 2004, when I was nineteen and a freshman in college. I remember that the film oddly shared parts of the score of Amelie, a film I did not like, and that it was generally enjoyable.

But Brühl didn’t strike me then. I did not, as I had so often done before and have since, go home and scour the internet for information about him, try to figure him out. At some point, before or after I saw Goodbye Lenin!, I ran into a girl from the previous fall’s writing seminar on the fifth floor of 721 Broadway, where our classes were held. Her name was Daphne, and she commuted from Queens. She was the type of girl who always carried lots of bags: grocery bags full of what looked like laundry, bookstore totes stuffed full of paper, and always a massive, overstuffed brown backpack coughing apples, water bottles, text books. Daphne and I weren’t close, and after that first year she transferred to a different school. But she and I spoke briefly in the hallway about the movie. “Yeah, it was great!” She chirped. “And Daniel Brühl is really hot!”

I remembered those words after I met T, and if I'm honest with myself, my recognition of the resemblance, my memory of the fact that Brühl, of his attractiveness, was probably simultaneous with my realization that T was attractive. Not that they were the same person, or that I was attracted to T because Daniel Brühl is handsome, but because the thoughts were adjacent in my mind. I have lived so fully through stories, through media, that I think I have begun to experience my own emotions through the directives of pop culture.

T was in the United States for only six months on a scholar’s visa. When he left and we began the complicated process of bringing him back permanently and legally, I felt like the half-year we had had together was the briefest of good dreams.T’s departure seemed to toss me back to my old status, the lives I’d lived as a single twenty-something, a young adult in a long distance relationship, a lonely teenager. I feared becoming again the celebrity obsessed hermit I had once been, the person who was quick the separate the wheat of my preoccupations from the chaff of everyone else’s, the college student writing long-form poetry about Tilda Swinton.

A favorite picture of the "Tilds," as I called her at the height of my love.

I resisted the urge to grow a new obsession to keep myself busy in T's absence. But at the very end of our nine months of separation, within the last month, when we finally knew when he would be coming back, I had the occasion to watch Inglorious Basterds again, with a visiting friend, who loved it. The strange recognition came back. Brühl really does look like T. At that point, our separation had normalized; our Skype conversations and one-line emails were predictable, comforting and frustrating. As we entered the instability of our last weeks apart, I found myself drawn to perform the rites of my adoration behavior. I took to the internet in search of Brühl. I watched several of his movies, learning in the process that he was a specific kind of young European actor, the sort regularly cast in films that Americans perceive as “very European,” stirring stories of young love and angst with sustained sex scenes, fairly ridiculous scores, and plain heroines. These are the films my mother has always loved, and taught me to love. Their titles sounded like Saturday Night Live jokes about foreign films. It was no surprise that I liked him.

In Ladies in Lavender (yes), he plays a Polish violinist who washes up on the shores of Judi Dench and Maggie Smith’s Cornwall beach house in the 1930s. Unable to speak and with a broken ankle, he must receive the ministrations of the older ladies until he heals enough to reach for a violin.

Watching the movie is like looking at the poster for two hours.

In Love in Thoughts (again, yes), he is a Weimar dandy in a stylishly homoerotic relationship with his best friend, who he accompanies home for an incomprehensible weekend of sexual tension with the friend’s sister, a jaunt that ends in two deaths. In this typical scene, young people feel sad.

And in The Edukators, he is a figure maybe closest to some past iteration of my fiance (although he will hate to read that), a hot-hearted anarchist with an eye on a class war who breaks into grand houses to rearrange the furniture. Maybe I just think this character is like T because it is in this role that Brühl bears the strongest physical resemblance to him; T even chose this picture for Facebook's "doppelganger week."

I’m not sure I like being this way, finding outlets for my affection and focus in the ephemeral world of fictional narrative. But I know no other way to be. I watched the films alone on my couch. I didn’t want to see them with anyone else, just as I didn’t want anyone to come with me when I went to the airport to gather T. Although I had seen him every day on Skype, I wasn’t sure I would know him, that my intimacy with his face would persist, until the moment he rounded the bend of the escalator and came towards me, looking like himself, and no one else.

World's End

2009-12-17T15:43:00.003-06:00

What, exactly, is the point - or the merit - of Helen Simpson's short story "Diary of An Interesting Year," featured in The New Yorker this week? Certainly its publication has something to do with the flailing Copenhagen talks, rechristened "Nopenhagen" from "Hopenhagen" by various parties, and with the general idea that the world is ending. I've been haunted by apocalyptic narratives for my entire night - and as I've written before on this blog, deeply impacted by several. And now I've been upset by this story, too.

The setup is simple - a few pages of brief, miserable diary entries by a 30-year-old British woman in 2040, after society has completely broken down following something called the Big Melt (guess). The tone is cribbed from every other apocalyptic story, ever, but it most nearly recalls to me the dystopian fictions of Margaret Atwood (which, with The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake, and The Year of the Flood now number three) - that is to say, occasionally shot through with black humor, often obsessed with social rules, and completely hopeless on the topic of human nature. The narrator's relationship with her husband, "G.," formerly her university professor, is the type of sniping, pithy interchange that plenty of married couples experience - but then again, it's her fault, because she married him.

Another quarrel with G. O.K., yes, he was right, but why crow about it? That’s what you get when you marry your tutor from Uni—wall-to-wall pontificating from an older man.

It's her fault. Just like, not incidentally, the end of the world. Without the internet, nobody can do anything, least of all deliver a baby: "Nobody else on the road will have a clue what to do now that we can’t Google it." And then, things fall further apart: malevolent men arrive, the pregnant woman dies with her dead baby inside her, a cartoonish evil Spanish grandma materializes from nowhere and steals the narrator's tins of food. This blogger says that it's supposed to be funny, but I don't think it's funny. I think the black humor is a bad excuse for humor, and I think the lazy gallows-gawker quality of the story says plenty of negative things about The New Yorker fiction department's motivation in choosing Simpson's story. What, exactly, am I supposed to take from yet another story about the future that informs me that women will shortly be raped in the streets - or in forty-foot-tall tree platforms, as Simpson has it - and be forced to self-abort their captors' children?

This kind of sensationalistic fiction rarely raises anyone's consciousness. At its most effective, it only succeeds in doing what it did to me this afternoon: disrupted my sleepy holiday with a dark mountain of nameless dread. Perhaps the most frustrating element of the current doomsaying is that, as ever, it seems there's nothing we can do, other than buy guns, as one Peak Oil prophet once suggested all women do. I don't see much skill in Simpson's story; unlike Atwood's apocalyptic tales, this one doesn't reveal much about the human condition, or even about our current psychological state. It just says that our lives will end nastily, that hope reveals itself as a miserable lie, and that life offers us no consolation. Last time I checked, the point of writing was to draw out the essence of being alive, to perhaps provide a justification for the strange mystery of life.

Against Irony: The Many Virtues of Jane Campion's Bright Star

2009-09-11T00:34:00.005-05:00

In Jane Campion's Bright Star, the viewer experiences breath and air as markers of the passage of time in the lives of John Keats and Fanny Brawne, star-crossed lovers destined to leave more to history than to their own happiness. The film, shot entirely in natural and candle-light, is punctuated by two long stretches of period choral music sung a capella. Long close-ups on women's hands doing domestic work - sewing, cooking, and packing - return again and again. Several shots feature one of the lovers lying on their back dreamily or looking with apprehension towards an open window. Like a painting by Hammershøi or Hopper, these images suspend the viewer, drawing out the moment into a filmic statement about the fleeting nature of human existence.

That's Hammershøi's Interior With Young Woman from Behind and Hopper's Morning Sun, in order, above.

Like my other favorite films of recent memory - Silent Light and Jeanne Dielman (which I reviewed together here) - Bright Star dignifies the period women's work that a more glamorous film would sweep aside. Fanny Brawne, played in the film by the excellent Abbie Cornish, is constantly seen with needle and thread, creating the colorful outfits that bloom on her like another variety of the Hampstead flowers she and Keats spend afternoons collecting. Fanny is one of the better heroines of recent memory, a stubborn, exuberant, youthful and ultimately authentic lover. She is both more outspoken than we expect of a woman of her period and more believable. The kisses Fanny and Keats share are chaster than any I've seen onscreen, and more passionate for it. The film's subversion of the audience's expectations of a period film make it, like Sally Potter's Orlando, a more authentic experience.

It's a testament to Campion's script that Fanny's story comes to eclipse Keats himself; the film dignifies her longer life and less glamorous fate. Keats's Wikipedia entry refers to her as "rather promiscuous," which says a lot about the enduring legacy of misogyny embodied in the film by the poet Charles Armitage Brown, who believes that Fanny and Keats's relationship will ultimately destroy him. We all know how this story ends - Keats died of tuberculosis in 1821, at age 25 - and so the story leaves it to us to answer the question of whether passion killed the poet or inspired the work he left behind.

This film boasts many pleasures: the remarkable performance of Edie Martin as Toots Brawne, Fanny's younger sister; the transporting images of the Hampstead countryside; the intelligent and moving discussions of poetry; and the phenomenal lighting. I'll level with you. I was in tears the whole time. This is the best film of 2009, hands down. I love Bright Star especially because of its refusal to bow to the vast hunger for cynicism, a stylistic tendency in all modern art that has become lazy and predictable. With none of the tired shiny tricks like those on display in Tarantino's unfocused and bloated Inglourious Basterds,, this film captures the exhausting length of life with elegance and wit.

Menstrual blood, dandruff, garlic, Stella McCartney perfume, and shampoo, I'd wager

2009-09-09T15:29:00.003-05:00

I was listening to some lovely songs on Orenda Fink's MySpace when, I shit you not, this advertisement popped up:

It'd be easy to join the bandwagon of Twilight hatred, but I'm not going to. I'll level with you guys. I think Twilight is pretty awesome. I'm no fan of the retrograde gender/sex politics of the series - although, having read none of the books and seen only the first movie, I don't really know that I'm qualified to comment; I'm just following the lead of other writers I admire and respect - but I can't help a deep intrinsic affinity for Twilight and its fans, the titular Twihards. I've always adored vampires, to the point where I enjoy pretty much any pop culture product that involves them, even if, as with True Blood, I often wish it were better than it actually is. Frankly, Twilight as a delivery service of sexual tension and questions to preteen girls - even if it does go on to answer those questions with the bludgeon of abstinence - doesn't seem like an overwhelmingly negative thing to me. Especially if it leads them to the work of other vampire writers, like the ones I enjoyed as a preteen, Poppy Z. Brite foremost among them. Although Brite has since moved onto excellent culinary fiction (and seems to be taking a sabbatical from writing in the wake of Hurricane Katrina), her splatterpunk vamp novels Lost Souls and Drawing Blood were my bread and butter in the late 90s and early 00s.

I will revisit Brite's work at length in this space, but I'll close here by saying that Stephenie Meyer is damn lucky that so much deeply sexual vampire literature has laid the groundwork for her truly chaste vamp fable. We want Edward because we know he'd be killer in bed if we could just get him there.

The Racial Politics of District 9

2009-09-08T15:15:00.003-05:00

Warning: Definite spoilers ahead.

As I watched Winkus Van De Merwe, the titular anti-hero of Neil Blomkamp's feature District 9, grow a conscience along with his new "Prawn" body parts, I couldn't help wondering how the film would have been received if the Other in the film had been brown people instead of large insectile aliens. Winkus's character arc is familiar from well-intentioned old-fashioned narratives where the interloping white man infiltrates an othered culture, either of purpose or by accident, comes to understand the gentle natives and eventually turns tail on his own kind to help them escape their oppressors. It's an old story, the White Man's Burden, one where only the outsider can appropriately organize the pure-hearted but disorganized othered mass and lead them to freedom.

I don't think a full indictment of Blomkamp's movie is in order - it's a fresh take on the science fiction epic, and compellingly explores several themes that are ripe for inclusion in pop culture discourse, foremost among them the issue of displaced and refugee communities. Still, setting the film in Johannesburg and involving another refugee population - that of the Nigerians who also live in the slums and scam the alien population - gave Blomkamp the opportunity to make a more considered inquiry into the issues of race and culture present in his fictional situation. I can't say I was too impressed with the garden-variety witchdoctor-employing African warlord Obesandjo, who had the capacity to be expanded into a pivotal player but remained a stereotype of a ca-razy African primitive. Also of interest / frustrating: the fact that military contractors have joined the ranks of Nazis and, well, giant insectile aliens in that rarified class of villains who can be killed with impunity. And I have to agree with Rich at Fourfour's complaint about the film's inexplicable switch from straightforward fake-documentary to first-person narrative film.

Still, I enjoyed District 9 and found myself moved by most of its emotional tricks: the kind and humane alien, Christopher Johnson, and his paternal relationship with his son, as well as Winkus's enduring love for his wife Tanya. It's also one of the most uncannily unsettling movies I've seen in a long time, making the most of its odd marriage of faux-documentary style to the constant threat of Cronenberg-level body violence. The film's greatest strength is Winkus himself, a weird Michael Scott of alien management who we manage to root both for and against. I will be interested to see the sequel, currently known as District 10, and see how much further Blomkamp can take his allegory.

Miscellany.

2009-09-08T15:12:00.002-05:00

* I have a website now! Check it out: www.lisalocascio.com

* My story "Park Rats" was featured on Joyland Chicago

* My food writing appeared on One For The Table. Check out the short essays: "Fried Fish" and Cafe Orlin.

Look, life is hard.

2009-08-17T04:24:00.005-05:00

And nobody wants to be alone forever. All I'm saying is that if your personal ad is called Hi ladies im looking for the ONE ! and contains the sentence "Im not fat, about avg weight and 5'7 i am a pharmacy tech and enjoy my work, here are sum pics and a ROSE just for your BEAUTIFUL", well, all I'm saying is that this is not, perhaps, the best ROSE:

Just personally. When I want a man I don't know to give me a flower via a image pasted in a Craigslist personal ad amongst three strangely similar pictures of said man, it might be nice if that flower wasn't black. And you won't meet anybody more attached to her teenage gothdom. Also, I might not be so down with that (obviously fake) flower being adorned with the type of fake blood that I used to play with as a child, a sort of red gel, like cake icing, which came in a white plastic tube. I mean, I guess that's what you get when you lift clipart from Geocities vampire fanfic pages created in 1996.

Just personally saying, not the best ROSE for my BEAUTIFUL.

Looking at love

2009-08-12T02:32:00.005-05:00

When I was a kid I liked to wedge a sharp corner in my mouth - you know, the edge of some cardboard or plastic packaging, or else the top of a Bic pen cap - and jab at the point where my palate met my top teeth until it was irritated and bleeding a little. I liked the taste of the blood and the tingling sensation. I never did any real damage. In fact, it never even occurred to me that this was weird, or self-destructive. The pain was besides the point. It was entertaining. I felt something different.

At night now I sometimes look at things on the internet designed to poke me in a similar way, although I take a lot less pleasure in them than I used to in gumming on a repurposed cracker box. One is the blog of St. Paul-based photographer Melissa Oholendt, which I stumbled upon through a friend's blog. Oholendt photographs engaged couples and weddings. On her professional website, she sets forth a mission statement of sorts:

You know the moment where the groom sees his bride for the first time? His look tells a story of love.

My passion is telling your story.

When I say I'm yours, I very literally mean...I'm yours.

So far, so strangely-emotionally-transgressive-and-bizarrely-sad. But hey! Her photos are nice. But (no insult meant to the Oholendt here; I'd hate to be TP'd by marauding fans of the photog), that's not why I look. When I stare blearily at pictures of "courtney & matt" or "beth & jeremy," I'm actively looking to snark (bad news, according to these findings). I want to think something bad. Not because I'm against Oholendt's stated goal of capturing love, but because I'm exhausted by the big question of how people fall in love.

For a good chunk of my life I thought I understood the machinations of emotional attachment, sexual compatibility, and human companionship quite well. Then, when I became single last year for the first time in nine years, I realized I was completely out of my depth. Since then I've experienced the vagaries of the dating world in a fashion that is neither unique nor, all things considered, particularly egregious. The things that have happened to me are the stuff of some particularly mumbly indie romantic comedies. I'll get over it.

But this year I was with a man who took beautiful pictures of me. I framed one, and it's sitting bubblewrapped in a cabinet right now because between the time I packed it into a box in New York and took it out of one here in Los Angeles he made it dramatically clear that my assumptions about our relationship were incorrect. And now on the internet I can look at the pictures he takes of a different woman, one who looks like she would agree with Oholendt's quip:

Um. Is Jennifer Aniston way prettier than Angelina Jolie? That would be a yes.

So I guess this post is a limp, barely interested Team Jolie fistpump.

But anyway. When I was a senior in high school I went through yet another bout of body image issues. I never had an eating disorder or hurt myself, but I sure felt pretty fucking terrible about the way that I looked. At one point I cut a photograph of Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis out of one of my mom's copies of Hello!. I coated it in several overlapping strips of Scotch tape, a sort of ghetto lamination job, and stuck it in my wallet.

I'd pull it out when it was time to order at a restaurant. The photo - not the one above - didn't show Depp or Paradis's bodies, just their heads.

"What are you doing?" my sister asked me once.
"It just helps me," I said. "You know, to think about being beautiful."

It would have been more effective if I'd just folded the picture in half, pinched the corner sharp, and opened wide.

Commerce

2009-04-28T01:23:00.003-05:00

Today I'd like to walk you down some favorite commercials from my past. I spent many years doing my homework in front of the television in my kitchen, watching everything on Channel 32, the Chicago Fox affiliate, from 4 to 10 PM. The lineup was great: Full House, Family Matters, Seinfeld, Frasier, and most importantly The Simpsons, at 5:30, 6, and 10 PM. I printed out a six-month schedule of every Simpsons episode Channel 32 would play and crossed them off as I saw the episodes, sometimes cross-referencing one of my many Simpsons guidebooks. Although I watched several hours of Fox every day, I did not know that Fox was a conservative network until I got to high school. It was just my entertainment delivery system.

So, let's set the 1997 scene with a little Harvey Danger:

Oh, you thought that was going to be "Flagpole Sitta," right? Psyche psyche psyche!

Empire Carpet commercials were like soothing background noise, always trilling the number to call for carpet tomorrow as I crouched over my science worksheets.

Al Piemonte Alert!

And what could be better than a little Windsong to give me hints about the delicate universe of male-female relationships?

The Moo and Oink commercial I wish I could post here is not available on YouTube, so I'm posting the vastly more famous "Moo and Oink Dance" clip below. But I never saw this flashy clip; the one that I was used to was a fairly rote, poorly made clip with listless employees showing trays of meat to the camera. Please enjoy this much more interesting commercial in its stead.

This Eagleman commercial has surely gained internet fame of its own by now, but I can't begin to count the number of times I watched it, waiting for Daphne and Niles's long-suffering love affair to come on again:

But all of these gems are dulled in the face of the most lovely and subtle of ads, the crown diamond I watched all winter and all summer, when Fox reran of I Love Lucy and Three's Company and I watched although I didn't understand or enjoy those shows, because I was hopeful Bewitched might eventually come on. This commercial is my DNA. It is my blood. It was given to me by my father and I will give it my children.

There is nothing better. The door falling off; the handful of fanned-out cash; the dead-eyed shots of the junkyard: this, truly, is my heritage. Tow me away, Victory!

Like light

2009-04-18T11:09:00.005-05:00

Do you know how many photographs of James McAvoy I have on my computer?

So many.

When, as a senior in high school, I developed a terrible crush on Adrien Brody, I tortured myself with the knowledge that it was completely inappropriate because I was so old. Even as I bought an autographed photo of Brody on eBay and cut pictures of him out of magazines, tried to follow his supremely boring lovelife on the internet and traveled alone to a movie theater about forty-five minutes away from my house on the El to watch the middling pre-Brody-Oscar streetlife movie Love The Hard Way, I felt guilty. I was eighteen! I was way too old to, you know, discover that Brody's mother was acclaimed photog Sylvia Plachy, buy a bunch of her hardcover collections on Amazon, and try and cultivate a correspondence with Plachy about how much I enjoyed her work so that we would be best friends when I moved to New York for college and I would become her protegee and she would introduce me to her charming, single son...

You see the way my mind works. But I was eighteen. I was still allowed a little bit of that. Being a senior in high school with a crush on a translucent-nosed Oscar-winner was way more okay than being a first-year master's candidate BitTorrenting British TV like State of Play and Shameless just so I could take screenshots like this one:

It's fitting that I have yet to see The Last King of Scotland, one of McAvoy's more famous efforts, but I have sat through all of the Children of Dune miniseries (what an intersection, my favorite pale Scot playing my favorite post-human Messiah's son!) and the aforementioned "middling James McAvoy vehicle" Starter For 10. Oh man, I should definitely see Rory O'Shea Was Here, the fun-quadripalegic movie whose more restrained UK title was Inside I'm Dancing. That looks right up my alley.

Also, I saw Wanted in a movie theatre in the Czech Republic. Twice.

Why the outpouring of sudden McAvoy love, aside from my inescapable preoccupation with this scene from Atonement?

(Not original, I know. But understandable.)

The Guardian has a Proust Questionnaire-like Q&A with McAvoy up on their website, and honestly, the whole thing is just a bit much for me to bear. I just got out of this crush, McAvoy. Don't drag me back in.

My favorite of his responses:

When were you happiest?
When I was 15 or 16 - I slept really well then. Now I sleep on a bed of anxiety-tipped nails.

What is your most treasured possession?
My lightsaber - it's well cool.

What do you most dislike about your appearance?
Freckles.

What would be your fancy dress costume of choice?
Boomer or Athena from Battlestar Galactica.

If you could go back in time, where would you go?
To when dragons roamed the Earth.

What does love feel like?
Like light.

Be still, my heart.

Pacific Rimjob

2009-04-12T20:04:00.005-05:00

I recently received the happy news that I will be moving to Los Angeles, a city I have long admired from afar, this fall to begin a doctoral program. With that in mind, I thought I'd set out on a free-associative sprawl through a culture I'll be somewhat nearer to starting this September: Japan!

What was my first impression of Japanese culture? My parents started feeding me sushi when I was fairly young...

(Note: Not a picture of me)

Around the time I was ten, my mom became aware of Hayao Miyazaki's 1988 masterpiece My Neighbor Totoro. She sent away for a VHS copy, which my sister and I watched with glee.

For years we searched high and low for Totoro merchandise, not easy to find in mid-1990s suburban Chicago. When I visited the Sawtelle neighborhood of LA with my boyfriend many years later, I was blissed out of my mind to find a stuffed Catbus at the Giant Robot store.

On a childhood vacation to Disney World, I discovered Yukito Kushiro's Battle Angel Alita, a manga about a lonely cyborg girl with a mysterious past. I never fell fully into real manga or anime fandom, although I enjoyed plenty of both media.

I also remember being taken to a Japanese restaurant in Chicago called Suntory at some point in my childhood. It served what I would later come to recognize as shabu-shabu cuisine. The waitresses wore full kimono. I very clearly recall that the restaurant displayed photographs of its locations all over the world - including outposts in Sydney and Johannesburg - and yet I strangely cannot find any evidence of its existence on the internet.

At the beginning of adolescence, I became, like most teenage girls who like Hot Topic, enthralled by FRUITS, the bombastic collection of photographs of Tokyo street fashion available in book and postcard form:

During high school I discovered the work of Haruki Murakami, America's favorite Japanese surrealist. Norwegian Wood was my first Murakami book.

I tried, and failed, to custom-order a white kimono to wear to my high school graduation. In college I read Edward Said's Orientalism, which made me feel a little bad about my love of Japanese weirdness. But I also experienced the work of great Japanese filmmakers in depth. I took a course at Facets Cinematheque on the work of genius / idiot savant provacateur Takashi Miike, director perhaps most famously of Audition:

I've also long nurtured a frustrated desire to learn more about the Ainu, Japan's aboriginal people. Two years ago I was lucky to see Tomu Uchida's film about Ainu culture, The Outsiders at BAM. I've still got my fingers crossed for a Criterion release.

I decided to make this post because my roommate and I were discussing ZZ Packer's short story "Geese," a masterful treatment of the outsider experience of Japanese culture. The juxtaposition of the African-American and Japanese cultural experiences reminded me of my new favorite thing about Japan: Jero!

Jero is the stage name of Jerome Charles White, a Pittsburg native who is now a star in Japan. Jero's maternal grandmother is Japanese, and he grew up listening to enka music with her. Enka is a tradition of very heavily sentimental love songs which has recently gone out of style in Japan. For an English equivalent, think of the work of Perry Como, the "Velvet Fog." (With Japanese subtitles for thematic consistency!)

I'll leave you with this CNN interview with Jero. Sayonara!

[sic] as ever

2009-03-14T00:19:00.004-05:00

It's almost spring, so that means it must be time for another installment of Personal Ad Hell. Let's walk hand-in-hand-in-hand down to the underexplored mm4w alley of Casual Encounters, shall we?

Road trip to NYC

Me and a close friend just decided to drive to New York today. We have never been and would like to have some company to possibly show us around. We are currently on our way from Pittsburgh and may need a place to hang or crash. I am 23, white and the taller of the two. He is 22, white and wears glasses. We are both gentelmen and we know how to treat a lady. If interested we can send a pic or two. I can give my cell # to those who reply. Hope to hear from you soon ;)

PS we will arrive roughly around 7am and we will be staying till sunday

Wait. Um. Isn't this section for two dudes who want to screw the same woman? These guys also want a chick to let them stay at her house and perform tour-guide duties for free. No mention is made of sex, and I'd love to meet the woman - probably deeply religious - who would happily play NYC ambassador for these clowns and then be scandalized when they try to fingercuff her in her foyer. I love the useless physical descriptions: one is taller than the other one. You know, the one who wears glasses. And they're already in the car! Get ready, ladies of New York City!

mix it up (Deeply NSFW)

I can't say what, exactly, upsets me so about this ad. Both of the headshots look like they were taken by the dudes' moms, for starters. The lower penis looks, in shape, disturbingly like human excrement.

The cum show-It is always easier with two mature men vs one

Like all transcendent CL ads, this post quickly departs the subject of sex and becomes all about how WOMEN need to LEARN A THING OR TWO:

As you know many men are full of hot air and when a female takes them up, they cannot perform as advertised. We can and would love to meet up. We are not pornstars and do not pack attachments like they do, because they are freaks of nature, but females clearly have told us throughout our lives that we know how to use our nice sized and thick equipment.

Note: all women should read "nice-sized" as "uses fingercots as condoms." But at least they're not FREAKS OF NATURE!

While your sex life right now may be wonderful, non existent at the moment or you are just downright bored at the moment, when sex is good, there is nothing like it. However finding it, is easier said than done and going to a bar and just hooking up in an alcohol induced state is not your style. That is why you are trolling the posts here on Craigslist hoping that you can find what you want by responding to a few posts.

Uh, yeah. You guys know that everything written in second person is actually just clumsily styled first person narrative, right?

We play safe, are both easy going and very respectful. Condoms are always worn for penetration and we play with your pleasure in mind. Our favorite position is you in doggie style being very well fucked while also sucking the other guy. Saying that, we are fine with all positions, combinations and inputs. We also love eating pussy and will go down on you for as long as you want us to or you can ride our faces or 69. For the lady whom truly wants it all, we can go backdoor or DP, but you have to let us know if you are comfortable with it, since we want this to be totally enjoyable for you. This may not be for you and we'll totally ignore your backdoor if you tell us that. Blindfolds, spankings, light bondage, toys, a second female or more as long as we are on the same page is fine with us. We are so open, that if you have a strap on and want to fuck one or both of us, that is fine too. Or stick a dildo up our asses too. We are fine with that. We are hetero by the way, but it feels good and we are not uptight sexually. We are not neanderthals and your input is very important, because this way we know up front what you enjoy. We can be very dominant and if you want us to treat you like a total slut, totally controlling that is fine too.

Look. I'm of course happy that these guys practice safe sex and are so willing to negotiate the terms of their internet-arranged threeway. But I am pretty sick of the rhetorical device of suggesting exactly what one wants to happen as if it's another person's desire. This whole thing would be so much shorter if it wasn't reliant on such a whiny, accusative, passive-aggressive prose style. "We are fine with that. We are hetero by the way, but it feels good." Uh, okay, least-fun, most-defensive threeway participants ever. Is the gay panic you are guaranteed to have if your cocks touch at some point in the evening "fine"?

3 Dudes and/in You! - mm4w - 28 (Williamsburg)

Oh, cute. Of course you assholes live in Williamsburg. This thing reads like a hipster douchebag guidebook (maybe one that the author of the first ad discussed in this post could use on his NYC trip):

Hi there,

How are you doing today? If you're feeling up for it (and you aren't/weren't a dude), there are three wonderful dudes out there who want to have you over for a little wine, a little supper and some sex.

we're looking for a special lady who wants to enjoy three dudes at the same time, in multiple positions and areas of your body. we have lube, ribbed condoms, and a Jack Johnson CD so we're pretty much all set to go.

Must be OK with Eiffel towers, using safe words, crying, the word "booyah", bukkake, chest hair, and have a burning desire to get all sexxxed up by three dudes at the same time. This is an experience that will blow your mind.

Your pic gets one of me naked holding a teddy bear next my junk.

Oh, yeah, an evening with these clowns is exactly what the doctor ordered. Allow me to put on my white belt and triangular-fold printed scarf, hop on the L, and get ready for a room full of men-children who haven't been this scared since they watched It on cable three weeks ago. They didn't expect that anyone would take their stupid NYU joke seriously, you see, but I went to the trouble of looking up what an Eiffel tower is, and I want something for my trouble. To the soundtrack of "Better Together".

WE I DO YOU RIGHT - mm4w

WE ARE 2 STR8 MEN 44 AND 42 TALL ITALIAN CLASSY

You guys, I think I'm in love.

Like Coca-Cola in green glass bottles, they don't make offers like this anymore

2009-03-02T23:49:00.002-06:00

Rorschach Sings!!! ("Watchmen" Parody) from Tame The Bear on Vimeo.

"Lisa, you've never even taken a clandestine shower."

2009-02-18T10:02:00.003-06:00

I am incapable of keeping anything from anybody.

Deli Proof Daily! #1 from Deli Proof on Vimeo.

I HAD IT BAD tonight!

Having It, Badly

2009-02-15T19:58:00.002-06:00

Check out the lineup for the next "I Had It Bad" Reading Series at Happy Ending Lounge, this Wednesday, February 18, featuring Nick Sylvester!

The Interior World

2009-02-14T12:00:00.004-06:00

Last spring I found photographer Julia Fullerton-Batten's book Teenage Stories in a gallery bookshop in Paris. It's a collection of images of real-sized teenage girls stumbling through miniature landscapes, as well as other visual statements of dream life: a girl in the woods, her long red hair stuck up in the branches. A woman's body lying in front of a window looking out on an airport at night (an image that is now the cover of the Joan Didion book Play It As It Lays). These images have captivated me for a year now, and I thought I'd post a few here.

In my own dream world, one of Fullerton-Batten's images would be the cover of my first book.

Relics of the Nineties Anonymous

2009-02-07T23:14:00.001-06:00

"Smashing Pumpkins to Appear on the Chris Isaak Hour."

Two Movies

2009-02-06T21:15:00.001-06:00

Last week, after what I think was exactly a calendar year of not going to the Film Forum for no other reason than sheer laziness (well, also not living in NYC for five months of 2008), I saw two films at the Film Forum. They were Silent Light, directed by Carlos Reygadas, and Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, directed by Chantal Akerman. It was my first time seeing both movies.

The premise of Silent Light (Stellet Licht in Plattdeutsch, the language spoken by Russian Mennonites) - a man falls in love with a woman who is not his wife - interested me less than the details of its production. Silent Light was filmed with a nonprofessional cast of Mennonite actors. Although it takes place in the Mennonite community in north Mexico (a community I did not know existed), the actors also hail from Canada and Germany, and were able to communicate with eachother because they all speak the same small language. Miriam Toews, one of the lead actors, is an acclaimed Canadian author who was raised in a Mennonite community. All of this is the type of trivia that makes me adore movies.

And I did enjoy Silent Light deeply, although my prurient interest in the film as a window into the cloistered lives of Mexican Mennonites ended up being inconsequential. The movie is an explosion of sensuality. Watching Silent Light reminded me of an African cinema course I took during my undergraduate career. The instructor told us that we would have to learn to read film in a new way, since African cinema features few of the tropes of mainstream American movies (closeups, quick cuts, flashy camerawork) and often features long still shots on people moving through a landscape. But Reygadas's film is by no means plain. every scene was so full of texture that I felt physically respondent to the film, wet when it was raining, heavy with sorrow during scenes of a funeral - but it subverts the expectations of the modern viewer. The film begins and ends with long dreamlike shots of a sunrise and sunset. The images are strikingly beautiful, and yet the desire to look away, to do something other than focus on what was in front of me, was hard to resist. Most of the people in the theatre did not resist - the rows were lit up with cell-phone screens as people texted and checked their missed calls. But Silent Light is all about the value of experience, even at the cost of personal comfort. A life fully lived, it seems to say, will never run out of surprises.

Jeanne Dielman is completely tonally different from Silent Light, but it too has a deep love for the unmoving camera. For nearly three and a half hours the viewer follows Jeanne through her day. She is a Belgian housewife without a husband, performing the rituals of domesticity seemingly solely for the benefit of her teenage son, who is at school all day. Even with the promise of "something" happening at the end of the movie, Jeanne Dielman is a long haul. Scenes ten and fifteen minutes long show Jeanne meticulously preparing food and then cleaning up after herself with a heartbreaking efficiency. The viewer returns with Jeanne to her chores - folding up the sofa bed her son sleeps on, making her own bed, grinding coffee beans - so many times that one starts to feel the same sense of exhaustion and misery at the routine that Jeanne herself must feel.

One of Jeanne's daily tasks is draping a small towel over her shiny middle-class bedspread, so that the gentleman caller she receives in the middle of each day will not sully her linens. Jeanne Dielman is a genteel prostitute, you see, selling dispassionate rolls in the sack in exchange for her continued stasis. These encounters are barely shown in the movie. Instead, we see Jeanne's ability to cope deteriorate over the course of the three days. On the second day, her hair is still tousled when her son gets home. "Your hair's a mess," he says, scarfing down his food. Jeanne's sister writes to her from Canada: would you like to visit us and maybe meet a nice man? But Jeanne can't even summon the energy to decide whether or not she would like to make the trip.

Where Silent Light was life-affirming for me, Jeanne Dielman felt uncomfortably familiar. I, too, am a woman who spends a lot of time alone in her apartment, although I am not also a discreet prostitute. I know the feeling of preparing a meal for yourself and then carefully cleaning up all evidence that the meal even occurred. The slight satisfaction that I take from small household tasks can become an enormous gloominess over the course of a day spent alone. By nightfall I'm restless, and if there's nothing for me to do and no one to see, the clean kitchen is small comfort.

Chantal Akerman was 25 when she made Jeanne Dielman. In an interview with my friend Dennis Lim, Akerman said:

“Jeanne has to organize her life, to not have any space, any time, so she won’t be depressed or anxious. She didn’t want to have one free hour because she didn’t know how to fill that hour. [...] I sometimes think I should have made it after many other films, at the end of my career,” she said. “I remember saying to myself, how can I make a better film? But it was also exactly the film I had to make then. It says something about a woman, about a way of living a life, about life after the war. It was the first thing I had to pour out of myself.”

She added, “I would have changed nothing about it.”

Have I ever told you that I don't even watch ANTM, but I read all of Rich at Fourfour's recaps?

2009-02-06T19:46:00.002-06:00

"She looks to me about as versatile as a 65-year-old bottom who misplaced his Cialis."

Happy endings

2009-02-05T22:10:00.005-06:00

I've been trying to write a review of the three excellent films I've seen in the last few weeks for a few days now, but in lieu of that, check out the internet home of the reading series I am hosting at Happy Ending Lounge on the third Wednesday of every month. Unrequited love is a universal experience, but every crush is different. The I Had It Bad Reading Series explores the embarrassing machinations of the human heart.

Also, I've added a picture and am no longer a faceless entity.

The Enormous Radio

2009-01-26T16:51:00.004-06:00

For the past six years I've been a student at an institution that gives me an entire four weeks from mid-December to mid-January off from school. I have always spent this time at home in Chicago with my family. I've never particularly liked returning to New York in January after my long winter break in New York, but I forgot just how sharp the shock of returning to NYC can be. I've been back for a week now, and it feels like forever.

Oddly, one of the things I miss most about Chicago when I'm not there is the local NPR affiliate, WBEZ. Although I can't fault WNYC, WBEZ is the sound of home. I've been listening to it on the internet a great deal this past week. Right now they are announcing the temperature across various suburbs: "16 in Glendale, 14 in Merrillville..."

When I listen to this weather report I feel like I speak a secret language: Merrillville is in Indiana, not terribly close to Chicago, and yet right now I'd almost rather be there than here. Okay, that's just romantic sentiment, I would not rather be in Merrillville, IN than New York City. But I do feel like one of the things that makes New York City bearable is that many of the people who live here hail from nearby places - Connecticut, New Jersey, upstate New York - and can return home frequently if they so desire. I can't.

This may be my last six months in New York. Right now I am waiting to hear from a variety of institutions - none of them in New York - as to whether I have been accepted for further study. If none of these options comes through, I am seriously considering returning to Chicago. It's not a decision I take lightly. This city has been very good to me, and I recognize that Chicago might not hold the same opportunities I have had here. But when I sit and look out on Second Avenue and listen to the traffic report from Shadow Traffic, the woman listing the forty-minute stretch of the Edens to Pulaski, my thoughts go somewhere else, and my body longs to follow.

The Cutest Animal You've Never Heard Of

2009-01-15T17:53:00.001-06:00

The Pika!

In Memoriam: Patrick McGoohan

2009-01-15T12:28:00.003-06:00

I'm not sure where I first heard of the remarkable television show The Prisoner. Like other cult television shows (Twin Peaks being the most obvious example), The Prisoner had an extremely brief run, from October 1967 to February 1968, but has come to loom large in the pop culture imagination. Maybe I was familiar with the concept from the Simpsons episode "The Computer Wore Menace Shoes," a terrific Prisoner parody of which no YouTube clip seems to exist, sadly. In any case, I received the complete series DVD set for Christmas 2004 and watched it in its entirety over the next six months.

It was a happy time in my life. I was a sophomore in college, living in a tiny Lower East Side apartment with my boyfriend and my best friend. The apartment was advertised as a two-bedroom, but was in fact a one-bedroom. My boyfriend and I slept in what was meant to be the living room, which featured the only two windows that let in natural light (the rest looked out on airshafts). Our futon was pressed up against the windows, and it was freezing in the winter. My mild domestic impulses seemed like hysteria in contrast to the laissez-faire housekeeping of my roommates, who left snail trails of library books and sweaters in their wake as they moved through the three rooms. The bathroom was coated in tiny curly black hairs and the kitchen was almost always dirty. I had never been so happy in my entire life.

During our frequent breaks from reading Orientalism and writing about the fluidity of gender roles my boyfriend and I would sit down and watch an episode or three of The Prisoner. What joy the opening sequence always brought us:

And what happiness to hear the series' star, Patrick McGoohan, intone some of his immortal phrases. Our particular favorite was his send-off, "Be seeing you," of which my boyfriend could do a killer impersonation. More than forty years after the show was on the air, he and I had become rabid Prisoner fans. The series is terribly smart, engaging and challenging a variety ideologies. Even in its missteps - there's an entire Western-themed episode, which didn't work for me - it never condescends to the viewer. Plus, it features a villainous weather balloon.

The news that the show's star, ice-cold badass Patrick McGoohan, died yesterday at age 80 filled me with a sadness I can attribute to more than my hatred of the freezing weather. On The Prisoner he rode the line between camp and cool like it was a British sports car or a crazy-ass bicycle. Rest in peace, Number Six. Be seeing you.

Ruminations on the Golden Globes

2009-01-11T19:47:00.003-06:00

I have always had only the most passing interest in the Golden Globes. In keeping with that lack of enthusiasm, here is an incomplete, vaguely stream-of-consciousness liveblog of tonight's show.

7:47 pm: They just showed Marisa Tomei. I feel like every time I've heard her name mentioned in the past five years has been in reference to how surprisingly good she looks naked. In 2005, someone mentioned this in relation to her role in Factotum. But by far the most constant comment about Tomei is that she "looks amazing" in Before The Devil Knows You're Dead. Seriously, upwards of sixteen men have mentioned this to me. Good for Tomei. I bet this skill comes in handy in her current role as a stripper in The Wrestler (Full disclosure: I have not seen any of the films mentioned above).

7:57 pm: "Please welcome the star of the upcoming films Bunraku and Happy Tears, Demi Moore!" Best sentence ever? Also, I misheard "Bunraku" as "Spunkaroo."

8:01 pm: My mom just said "There's Shirley MacLaine! She's still alive!"

8:09 pm: This announcer has not been given a lot to work with: "Here are two stars of The Dark Knight, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Aaron Eckhart!" Here they are, folks! Two of 'em!

8:12 pm: Laura Linney has the most beautiful skin. What does she do? Bathe in the blood of virgins, Erzsebet Batory-style?

8:22 pm: Alec Baldwin looked adorably nervous when they announced his nomination. Also, what did David Duchovny mouth to the camera? He told me what he was going to say this morning before he left my apartment, but I forgot.

8:30 pm: Renee Zellweger's dress is hideous! This makes me happy! Also, they just cut very briefly to an incredibly creepy shot of Marc Anthony stroking Jennifer Lopez's arm.

8:44 pm: Hi, Kate Beckinsale! You and Diddy are a hilariously wooden duo. Remember when you had a career and made good movies? I don't!

Sometime later - didn't record the time: David Duchovny was so sad in front of the mike with Jane Krakowski, I can't even make a good joke about his sex addiction and how it has impacted me in a positive way.

9:18 pm: Sandra Bullock making a tired joke about the relative sexiness of the Vicky Cristina Barcelona setup is my idea of the entertainment in hell.

9:29 pm: Do the people in attendance really care enough about Madonna and Guy Ritchie's divorce to look mildly scandalized at Sasha Baron Cohen's mild joke?

9:38 pm: As Kate Winslet wins her second Globe of the evening, my committment to this project waffles. Amelie Gilette is way better at this than me: "9:20pm--Slumdog Millionaire, the only movie that could make Who Wants To Be A Millionaire even remotely entertaining, wins for best screenplay. Brad Pitt clearly mouthed, "What's this for?" as the writer went up on stage. If it's not a magical 80-year-old in love with an 11-year-old , it doesn't matter does it, Brad?"

9:43 pm: "Hello, we're TV actors." Pretty good, Rainn Wilson.

Best Law and Order rapper name ever

2009-01-02T00:08:00.001-06:00

"Gots Money"

My Top Ten Songs of 2008 (Note: No real relation to 2008)

2008-12-26T15:32:00.004-06:00

I love year-end "Best Of" lists, but the music that's important to me in a given year is rarely from that year. I become really involved with a few songs per month, listening to them over and over again. My relationship with music I love hasn't changed fundamentally since I was 13 or so - I become immersed in things very quickly and want them around me always. These are the songs that have held special meaning for me this year. They're organized in a vaguely chronological, vaguely hierarchical fashion - which is to say, not really by any rhyme or reason.

10. Kate Bush - "Suspended in Gaffa"

My mother is an old-school Kate Bush fan. For the last few years she has been attempting to get me into Bush's oeuvre, but beyond a general admiration for its cover I was relatively nonplussed by The Kick Inside, Bush's first album. Until this past January, that is, when I acquired her entire discography after hearing the song "The Man With The Child In His Eyes" on the soundtrack of the middling James McAvoy vehicle Starter For One. I listened to the one-two punch of "Moving" and "The Saxophone Song" while trying to peck out stories in my study late at night; watched the bizarre video for "Wuthering Heights" and its weird YouTube responses; and fell asleep to the sexy three-song progression at the end of the album: "James and the Gold Gun," "Feel It," and "Oh To Be In Love." As my interest in Bush grew, so did my affection for her work, and I came to be as engaged by Hounds of Love, The Dreaming, and Bush's last album, Aerial. I listened to "Suspended in Gaffa" (from The Dreaming) more than any other song, captivated by its evocation of the line between ecstasy and depression.

9. Ladytron - "Ghosts"

I first heard Ladytron during my first year of college, in 2003, when a junior in high school sent me two mix CDs and a twenty-two page handwritten letter explaining the meaning of each song. "Seventeen" was one of the only songs I liked, and Ladytron became one of my favorite bands. On Halloween 2006 I saw them play at Webster Hall with CSS, a show so killer that I purchased tickets to a September 2007 McCarren Pool Chemical Brothers concert just because Ladytron was opening. Unfortunately, not even the arctic cool of this Scottish quintet could save the ultimate lameness of a Chemical Brothers concert. This song, on the other hand, captures what the band does best: glacial statements of emotional entanglement set against a killer beat.

8. CSS - "Believe Achieve"

I bought Cansei de Ser Sexy's 2006 debut after the aforementioned awesome Webster Hall concert. Like a lot of the things I venerate on this blog, CSS's sound has the appropriate quotient of grime to sex. I bought their sophomore effort, Donkey, in August and quickly singled this song out as my favorite. I burnt it onto a CD containing most of the tracks on this list and listened to it as I drove around my hometown, singing along.

7. Dawn Landes - "I'm In Love With The Night"

This beautiful song, for which I could find no corresponding YouTube, was introduced to me indrectly by Chris Onstad, author of Achewood, who linked Landes's song "Twilight" on his character Molly's blog. At the time I was living at a villa in Florence, where I would spend long afternoons writing on an old leather couch in the lobby. After I'd exhausted what the internet could offer me of Landes's songs, I broke down and bought her album Fireproof on iTunes. The entire thing is flawless. The ache in her voice sounds hopeful to me. Also awesome: her cover of Peter, Bjorn and John's "Young Folks":

6. Radiohead - "Lucky"

Although they're probably the most acclaimed band of my lifetime, it wasn't until this year that I "got into" Radiohead. My awakening took place during my time in Florence, when three friends and I went to Milan to see the band play a Roman amphitheater. Unsurprisingly, the band was killer live, especially their rendition of this song.

5. M83 - "Skin of the Night"

I bought M83's album Saturdays = Youth after the A.V. Club noted that "It's hard to imagine finding much to fault in an album that professes a serious devotion to the likes of the Thompson Twins and Kate Bush." Score! The album's spoken word interludes are sometimes embarrassing, but then again, the band is French. They probably think English sounds cool just the way we think French does. This endless unwinding song is as long as a prom night spent waiting for the sun to rise.

4. Cat Power - "Metal Heart"

Really any of the first three tracks on Cat Power's 2008 disc, Jukebox, could have made this list; "New York" and "Ramblin' (Woman)" are just as excellent as "Metal Heart." But the latter is a rerecorded song, originally a track from Moon Pix, so brilliantly reimagined that I didn't recognize it the first few times I heard it.

3. The B-52's - "Dancing Now"

I've always loved The B-52's, probably because I was six years old the summer that "Love Shack" came out. Their sound triggers a Pavlovian response in my brain forcing me to have a good time. I liked all of the songs on Funplex, but I listened to this one more than any other on that leather couch in Florence, dancing very subtly in my seat.

2. Crystal Castles - "Courtship Dating"

I feel like anything intelligent I try to write about Crystal Castles comes out kind of muted, so maybe I'll just be honest. I fucking love Crystal Castles. Their music is the only thing that makes me feel the way all music on Q101 did when I was 12 years old, like I'm riding on top of a train and the wind is in my face and anything is possible. I goddamn love this song. I can't explain how much I fucking love it. This band makes me want to punch somebody in the face and then make out with them.

1. The New Pornographers - "Centre for Holy Wars"

I am horrified that I can't find a YouTube link for this song. The best I can do is a kind of suspect last.fm link. It's a shame, because I've listened to this track (from Mass Romantic, the band's 2000 debut) more than any other song this year. I listen to it when I'm getting ready to go out, slipping across the wood floor of my apartment in my socks, and I listen to it when I'm hopping around in my sweats and glasses, hyping myself up to go running. I listen to it when I'm happy and when I'm sad. Maybe the New Pornographers are old news, but this year they - and especially this song - were big news to me. Something about this track has made me unflappably happy. Maybe it was the chorus, the soaring words "exactly where we are" - a sort of mantra about self-acceptance, if you will - that put "Centre for Holy Wars" at the top of my list.

"Dreams are poems, not stories"

2008-12-19T17:55:00.004-06:00

"In Dreams" from Blue Velvet

Anna Domino - "Land of My Dreams"

Masters, Legends

2008-12-16T16:56:00.006-06:00

In the current Rolling Stone, there's an article (not online yet) about Orlando-based real life superhero Master Legend. ML is one of what the article calls "a growing network of similarly homespun caped crusaders emerg[ing] across the country," a tiny group of men and women who, taking inspiration from Golden- and Silver-Age comic books, dress up in bright colors to fight evildoers. I am not intimately familiar with this movement, despite being a devoted comics reader, but I feel that the article does these guys a disservice. Author Joshuah (nice spelling, bro) Bearman takes the easy way out, writing the profile in a tone that vacillates between mild derision and charmed amusement. According to Bearman, it's nice that these losers want to help people, but not terribly effective. Master Legend and both of his sidekicks - the Ace, and then his replacement Ace Gauge - are given the usual "fun weirdo" treatment. The article takes it as a given that their do-gooding is cute but ultimately useless, the machinations of men rendered impotent by poverty, abuse, and casual alcoholism.

I found the article's condescending tone tiresome, particularly the following passage:

Real Life Superheroes have a conflicted relationship with law enforcement. The hardcore types have a somewhat dated, Death Wish-era worldview, as if the cities are overrun by chain-saw-wielding clown gangs and the cops just can't control the streets anymore. The more civic-minded superheroes imagine themselves as informal police adjuncts, a secret society of costumed McGruffs. One of Master Legend's most prized possessions is a framed certificate of commendation from the Orange County Sheriff's Department, for the time he and the Disabler snapped into action after Hurricane Charley, helping to clear the roads and rescue people from the wreckage. "We were on the news and everything," Master Legend says. "The police recognized everything we did."

Since then, Master Legend claims that he has developed a police contact on the inside, his "very own Comissioner Gordon." To prove it, he gives me a phone number. I immediately call and leave a message; I've tried to confirm tales from other superheroes, only to discover that the police have never heard of them.

"I have friends in high places," Master Legend promises. "When they see the silver and black, they know who's coming."

As it turns out, Master Legend's police contact later gets in touch with Bearman and confirms that ML has been helpful to him. I just don't think ML, gentle and slightly deluded dork that he might be, deserves the condescension RS heaps on him. His tasks - protecting endangered gopher tortoises, handing out toiletries and clothing to the homeless during a staph infection epidemic, and the aforementioned hurricane relief work - are pretty fucking honorable. Bearman never gets over the hilarity of the fact that ML and his cohorts take their task so seriously. Little jabs sprinkled throughout the text ( "This whole movement is more than just fat guys in spandex," insists Superhero, himself a brawny guy in head-to-toe spandex, yuk yuk) function as winks to the reader: don't worry, we don't think this stuff is any more valid than you do.

But aside from the general DIY lameness of the Real Life Superhero endeavor, I'm not sure these people deserve our ire. Certainly Master Legend and his ilk are illustrative of how incredibly less cool comics are when brought to life - the whole thing is kind of like a community theatre production of Watchmen Live! - but isn't that kind of awesome, too?

I've often been told - mainly by my male friends - that I'm not a real comic book fan because my life as a comics reader began with a grab-bag of EC Comics, Archie comics, and the aforementioned influx of Slave Labor Graphics titles.

(Cut to 13-year-old me, in the SLG IRC chatroom, talking to Lenore author Roman Dirge: Hi! I found out about Lenore the way most people do...
Roman Dirge: Oh? How's that?
Me: From reading JTHM!!!
Roman Dirge: Great.)

And it's true, I didn't grow up obsessively following most of the standard superhero characters, although I did read long runs of Spiderman and Uncanny X-Men, and collected X-Men trading cards. But I loved and love comic books for their unlimited potential. For me, words and pictures aren't about the possibility of super powers, they're about possibility, period; about the potential for everything from familial reconciliation through literature to out-Lynching David Lynch.

Reunited and it feels so good

2008-12-14T10:46:00.004-06:00

What a sub sandwich eatin azz homo - m4m - 34- (I have to problems going to your job)

This is either an inside joke or the sole internet presence of a pod of Subway- and NSA-loving gay men. Either way, the words in the parentheses are my favorite thing ever.

:: Searching for his Little Gurl - m4t (Upper West Side)

I love the way this one is formatted like a job ad, complete with bullet points and summary-in-quotation-marks: "There is nothing more feminine then being Totally Dominated by a Tall Fat Master"
Edit: Oh god he added pictures.

Today's nominee for Terribly Uncasual Encounter is REAL LOYAL FRIENDS - w4w (TRISTATE)

i will like for you to be ride or die type of friend whos loyal and not pussy you have to be BETWEEN 18 - 30 you have to be GOING TO SCHOLL OR WORKING. U HAVE TO BE GETTIN MONEY. you CANT BE GRIMEY OR GREASY cause i have A THIRD NOSE FOR GREASY GIRLS THATS WHY I NEED NEW FRIENDS

Something tells me she typed this while yelling the same words at the rapidly retreating, sadly oily, soon-to-be-ex who never took notice of her "third nose."

farmboy in oregon for max and cindi - m4w - 52 (MIDTOWN)

The entire text of this ad is:

max and cindi i miss you both and please forgive me i was wrong scott

Reader, I hope your holiday is full of situations that require you to post mournfully specific apologies on Casual Encounters. God bless us everyone!

On my knees for Nny

2008-12-11T19:20:00.006-06:00

In January 1998 I was in seventh grade. Shortly after winter break, I came down with a terrible cold, the type of mucousy weeks-long ordeal that everyone falls into time and again, but I took it very personally. The previous summer, I had begun keeping a journal. One of the first entries, on June 6, 1997, read: "I got my period. A week ago. Not that it matters, anyway." The following entry was on the same page:

I have a new motto. IF YOU DON'T LIKE ME, SCREW YOU. And you know what? It works pretty well!

Seventh grade was marginally better than sixth, the hands-down winner of Worst School Year Ever, mainly because the universe took pity on me and moved a new girl into my suburb. I spotted her on the first day of school and zeroed right in, transfixed by the possibility that I might be able to nab her before she figured out how lame I was. On the first day of school I had a newly dyed-red bob and a cool black sweater with rainbow stripes across the chest. Executing a version of the awesome "sexy walk" I'd been working on, I hobbled over to her desk. "Hi," I said. "Are you new?"

That dear sweet girl later said that she looked up to see me "half-limping, half-humping" my way down the aisle towards her. And she forgave me that, as well as an endless list of other ills: the way, in ninth grade, that I zipped hoodies up to just under my rack and actually pushed the sweatshirt back behind my boobs, my raver-baby-goth vinyl nightmare wardrobe from 1999-2001, a habit of casual lying so strong that I once told her my dog was purple and held to it as the (white) dog walked into the room.

One of the reasons my cold pissed me off so much was because it necessarily postponed my first sleepover with my new friend. The catarrh I'd contracted managed to destroy any positive element of January, the most miserable month of the year. I holed up in my room with my favorite comic books, Jhonen Vasquez's Johnny The Homicidal Maniac series, and their natural soundtrack, the first Garbage album.

My father had brought me a few issues of Johnny The Homicidal Maniac (hereafter JTHM) the previous fall. By the middle of the winter I was hooked, having read and reread them until the bindings were wobbly. I was missing a few of the seven issues - #4 and #6, I think - but the storyline was comprehensible without them. The main character, who abbreviates Johnny to "Nny," is a psychotic shut-in with awesome boots who murders people in creative ways to generate a continuous supply of blood with which to cover a wall. If the wall doesn't stay covered in blood, "things" begin to push through from the other side. Nny is surrounded by a menagerie of goths, unhappy children, and inanimate objects - dead rabbits, sinister doughboys - who embody different elements of his internal monologue.

JTHM is a major pop culture lodestar for millennial goths, but I didn't know that when I started reading it. It was just something my dad brought back from the comic book store, and it aligned nicely with my nihilistic thirteen-year-old worldview. What I liked about JTHM and Marilyn Manson then is the same thing I now like about Crystal Castles: extreme violence transcendent in its exaggeration. I've never lost my appetite for media willing to grab my face and force me into something, even while I've maintained a simpatico for gentler music, literature, and film (see Sufjan Stevens, the work of Marilynne Robinson, Benny and Joon).

So I holed up in my room with the comics and the album, playing the song "My Lover's Box," over and over again. I was confused by the way I felt for Nny: deep sympathy, almost pity, a desire to take care of him (relationship problems here I come!). I knew, of course, that he wasn't real. For my purposes, however, he was about as accessible as the boys I had given up having crushes on at school and the whiny lead singer of my favorite band.

I decided to start a new website to suss out my feelings. I had played webmistress once before, in the winter of sixth grade, with an Angelfire page called "Faeri's Place" that featured a pretty boilerplate poem about the effects of social ostracization (not good). This time I drafted up a website using Geocities called "My Own Personal Dungeon: A Tribute to Nny." This website still exists. Here's a sample:

My opening spiel: The first time I picked up a JTHM, I was 13, fed up with life and utterly convinced that I was not only alone in my opinions and views, but that I would always be. Once I read JTHM #1, my entire perspective changed. I suddenly loved everything that Nny said and stood for and meant(as sick as it was). I didn't really care about the fact that he had caverns below his home filled with corpses--he had the same type of pain I did, the kind I was convinced that no one else could have. Unfortuantely, I somehow misplaced my JTHM #3-6, so all I have now are #s 1,2, and 7( and couple of equally delightful Squees). I never even got a chance to read the ones I lost, so I'm looking forward to buying the Trade Paperback Which I now have.

One major thing that clouds my life is my hatred for my school and the brats who attend it. They can't see that my differences, my individuality, make me a more interesting person, not a worse one. When I am done with middle school, when I go to high school and am liberated because my friends and I will have a place and actually make sense, I will look back on this and smile. But for now I frown.

From a page called "Learn more about MEEEEE!!": My interests include art, sculpture, books, and making teachers cry. One thing I really love to do is wear little black dresses and capes to dances and baffle the little sunny girls in pink while I dance with all the hot boys. That's fun. But anyway, I like a lot of music...some of its good and some of tis bad.. Most notably, Fiona Apple, Tori Amos, Emma Townshend, Veruca Salt, NIN, Sneaker Pimps, Eve 6, Green Day, Beck, and Everclear. Scuba diving is fun and I love the British Vrigin Islands. I worship his holiness Jhonen Vasquez. No, really, I;'m a wiccan, but I don't want to explain that right now. Maybe I;ll do it later. Anyway, here is the maor proof that I am on the right side of the thin line between genius and insanity(but what is the right side?):

I have a crush on Nny.

Yes. Its true. I'm not one of those freaks who ends up on the Jerry Spring show who likes criminals. I would rather that Nny did not kill people. But that doesn'y cloud my liking of him. The things he says are wonderful and beautiful. He makes so much sense with his wisdom:

"How is it you're so beautiful and so fucking ugly on the inside?"

"It's like every time I leave my house I give up my right to being treated like a person."

Sigghhhhh. Welll, I know I'm scaring you. I'm scaring myself. I hope I'm scaring the Christian Fundimentalists. Peace and out. Look at the rest of the sight.

All [sic], obviously. I must really trust the internet to unearth and repost this material here. Of course lot of the above was made up; dreamed of it though I may have, I never wore capes to school dances, and I don't know how to scuba dive. Thankfully, I was one of the more internet-savvy kids at my school; if anyone with an uncharitable soul had found this website, seventh and eighth grade might have been serious competitors for sixth grade's Worst Ever crown.

I was a silly kid who wanted bigger and darker things in my wonderful sheltered life. I had a bottle of nail polish, black with sparkles in it, called "Out All Night."

"Oh yeah, that sounds just like you," my new best friend said when I brought it over to her house for our sleepover the next weekend.

This blog is only about vampires and personal ads

2008-12-09T14:47:00.007-06:00

Most vampire stories are love stories, and any good love story has an element of impossibility. Vampire love is either the most or the least impossible, depending on how you look at it. The solution to falling in love with a vamp seems obvious. Undead bites living, and the two are together forever. But it's never that easy.

One would think that vampires would avoid all the attendant trouble of falling for their food, and stick instead to their own kind, as they are often hissingly encouraged to do in by old flames. Yet nearly every story of bloodsucking passion includes the weak logic that vampires, left alone with each other for eternity, are largely sick of each other. The exception is the evil pod of vampires that stalks through every story with a sympathetic vamp - an odd number, maybe five or three, often featuring only one woman, with the dark implication of an even more perverse sexuality, as if part of the dark arts are endless "Heavy Duty dicks for One Lucky Chick".

One of the marks of a "good" vampire is inexorable attraction to - and fated love for - a specific human. Dracula had Mina, and now in the film adaptation of Stephanie Meyer's incredibly successful Twilight series, Edward Cullen has Bella Swan. I've never read the Meyer books, but that's mostly because the first one was published long after my departure from the YA aisle at the bookstore. If I was eleven, I'd be all over this shit. The last few weeks have seen a hemorrhage of vampire media. I've seen both Twilight and Let The Right One In, a far superior Swedish film with a similar topic. I also finished the season of True Blood, a bit behind the rest of the American public.

In all of these stories, a vampire's mettle is tested by their desire for their human love, bloodlust and regular-lust conflated by proximity. True Blood's Bill Compton thinks he can control himself, and generally does, but neither Edward Cullen nor Eli, Let The Right One In's preteen vamp and the only girl of the trio, has such faith in the strength of their wills. Ultimately each of these narratives are about the concept of self-control, a neat trick especially for Twilight's convenient abstinence corollary. Of the three, Let The Right One In succeeds most fully, becoming the story of a friendship just a bit stranger than usual without resorting to the romance-novel histrionics of Twilight or self-satisfied TV tropes of True Blood.

What was the first vampire movie I ever saw? My father was a fan of Dark Shadows, so we followed the 1991 remake. I also have a hazy memory of a night spent watching one of the Christopher Lee Dracula films when I was around seven years old, sitting on my parents' bed with my mother asleep beside me. I fell into a weird combination of unwitting lucid dreaming and sleep paralysis, quaking for what seemed like hours under the belief that Lee was coming in the window.

My maternal grandmother died suddenly on Halloween, 1998. She lived alone in New York City, so my family did not receive this news until the following Monday. A week passed in which my parents disappeared to settle her affairs and returned as pale, drawn versions of themselves. The next weekend we held a memorial service for her in our local church. I was mourning my grandmother, but I was also bored with the endless arrangements, and I missed my mom. When, the day before the service, she suggested we go downtown together, I leapt at the chance. I was in eighth grade.

We ate lunch at Foodlife, a restaurant in the Water Tower Place mall with a concept that seemed new then - a series of different stations with little kitchens individually preparing cuisines from many lands. For the first time I had a dish that would become one of my favorites, cold thick white noodles smothered in sweet peanut sauce and topped with cucumbers and scallions. Afterwards, she asked if I'd like to see a movie. I did. We went upstairs to the movie theatre to find that the only thing showing was John Carpenter's Vampires. "Let's see it," my mom said, surprising me.

The movie was no masterpiece, but I loved it. At the time, I found Thomas Ian Griffith's Jan Valek terribly appealing, although his allure, just like that of Johnny Rzeznik, has decreased considerably since 1998. I kind of had a thing for James Woods, too, who with this film taught me the word "polesmoker." And there was something undeniably hot about Laura Palmer receiving cunnilingus-reminiscent vampire bites.

My mom had shown me another vampire movie a few years earlier, Tony Scott's The Hunger. As I've mentioned earlier in this space, my parents were never incredibly censorious about what I watched, a trait I have long appreciated.The Hunger was a little exotic for my ten-year-old blood, however. My mother dozed off as we watched, and then woke up to find me staring at the Catherine Deneuve-Susan Sarandon sex scene that made the movie famous. "Maybe this isn't a good idea," she said, switching it off.

Four years later she sat beside me in the darkened theatre, having put the great weight of her grief aside to take me out for a night on the town. On the screen in front of us, heads were torn from bodies and stakes driven into hearts. But the movie was still a vampire story, so it required a love story. At the end, as Daniel Baldwin leaned over and kissed the soon-to-be-vamp Sheryl Lee, my mom reached for my hand and squeezed it in the dark.

Things that are not graduate applications

2008-12-02T20:21:00.004-06:00

The Britney Spears Rolling Stone cover. How sad is this? I don't know what smacks of more desperation: the magazine turning whatever residual Obama excitement that exists into an endorsement of the most manufactured comeback since Coke the first triumphed over Coke II, or the fact that nobody is even pretending any more that "Britney's back!" means anything other than "Britney's skinny again!" Even the way they rolled her shirt up looks so haphazard but direct, like a madam's hasty attempt to prove that a hooker still has it. In this Jezebel post, the author notes that she saw Spears on television for the first time when she was 16, that Britney replaced Shirley Manson as the arbiter of hot. I was fourteen when I saw a weird infomercial for the first Spears album, and although I was a Garbage fan in the late Nineties I can't remember a time when Shirley Manson - or anyone like her - was considered mainstream hot. The high-porn standard of beauty has been the norm for almost as long as I can remember, and for just as long almost everyone has been complaining about it. The revolt against the Britney idea of beauty and music is as old as unambiguous appreciation of these things. I guess I'm supposed to ironically appreciate a song like "Womanizer," but like this cover it just bores me.

Law and Order alternate universe approximations. Unfortunately I don't have screenshots for any of this, but I sure love the almost-real stuff L&O comes up with for their ripped-from-the-headlines stories. Especially "b-friendz.com," a stand-in for both MySpace and Facebook that is somehow also a real website. Somehow every attempt they make at approximating an element of the real world comes off as both a parody and a clueless imitation. I especially like it when the detectives rough up the nerdy head of b-friendz.com. He's no Nate Silver, that's for sure.

That Time I Felt This Thing

2008-11-29T19:31:00.005-06:00

What was my first act of fandom? Anecdotal evidence says that it was singing along with Madonna's "Papa Don't Preach" video, an act of which film footage exists. But I think I was simply imitating my parents' Madonna fandom, not making a statement about my own. I was four, after all, and I liked the way my parents smiled at my hesitant lip-syncing as much as I liked the song itself. "Papa Don't Preach" always seemed sad to me, anyway, especially the shot of Madonna cowering on her bed with her stuffed animals.

No, it's more likely that my first statement of pop culture adoration - my first step towards being the person who wrote in an early draft of a Statement of Purpose for Ph.D. applications that "I have a lifelong devotion to and preoccupation with pop culture icons," (a phrase that was excised after my father's incredulous once-over) - took place on the April 1996 day when I came home from seeing the remake of Flipper. I was eleven years old. I've never been much of a journaler, but that day I opened up a new blank book I'd received for Christmas and wrote on the first page: "I saw Flipper today. Now I have a crush on Elijah Wood."

My crush on Wood didn't last long - when I unearthed the diary a few years ago I was surprised to reread those words. It didn't have the legs of the more epic crushes that would come later, starting later that very year when I saw Brassed Off! on the smallest screen at our local movie theater and developed a prurient interest in Ewan McGregor. During that crush, I didn't have any set behaviors to follow. I printed out images of McGregor from the internet until my color cartridges ran dry and read up on his childhood in Crieff, Scotland. "It's a haggis and heather town," I told my mom, as if I knew what that meant.

It wasn't until my next big celebrity crush, the ur-text of my crushes, that I would establish a template of the half-embarrassed, half-enthusiastic maneuvers that I perform sheepishly to this day. In the meanwhile - sixth and seventh grades - I had crush after crush on boys my own age, classmates in school and in the afterschool Catholic classes I attended. I was the type of bookish girl who cements her unpopularity through brief, fierce interests in things like Wicca. I pined after these boys, dreamt of the day they would ask me to get a hot dog or go to the movies. Finally one did, and for a month I had a "boyfriend" with whom I would hold hands but not kiss, even when our friends locked us in the bathroom together for forty-five minutes. I wanted to kiss a boy, I wanted a boyfriend, but when it was all in front of me I couldn't move.

Then, during the summer before eighth grade, I heard the song "To Sheila" from the Smashing Pumpkins' 1998 album Adore, and fell down the rabbit's hole of emotional entanglement with people who could be at best icons and at worst unfulfilling addictions to me. I've never shaken the habit of falling strangely in love with celebrities. It's a big part of why I started this blog; because I stubbornly believe that there's something interesting about the fact that I, a generally educated and intelligent person, fall against my best wishes in a sort of hopeless lust with strangers.

If there's anyone out there, who did you have a crush on? And why do you think you did?

My favorite thing Jezebel has ever done

2008-11-11T16:15:00.000-06:00

The truth comes out.

The End. The Beginning?

2008-11-09T22:32:00.006-06:00

I went to see my old favorites The Smashing Pumpkins play at United Palace Theatre on Thursday night. I felt strangely apathetic in the days leading up to the show. I used to jittery and plan-obsessed for days before an SP show; it was a trial to focus on my real life. But mere hours before this show, I felt weirdly unexcited.

I generally try to get to a venue at the time listed on the ticket, even though it often leads to two hours of standing around in the dark, especially unpleasant now that I often go to concerts alone. But on Thursday I was enjoying a nice dinner with friends; I wanted to take my time. So we got to United Palace at 8:45, only to find out that the band had been playing since 8. I felt a little disappointed, but more guilty than anything else. Like I'd let down an old friend I hadn't seen in a long time.

The last time I saw the Smashing Pumpkins was at their supposed last concert on December 2, 2000, at the Metro. I was 16. I wore a white ballgown and a blonde wig - someone at one point claimed they had mistaken me for Courtney Love, which seems neither likely nor a compliment - and improbably tall shoes that cut off all circulation to my feet. At one point I asked a security guard to lift me out of the crowd because I thought I was going to faint; after I'd guzzled a few bottles of water, a kind cocktail waitress led me back to my space near the front of the small venue. Everyone hated me. Pumpkins fans, myself included, are a notoriously difficult bunch.

I wasn't expecting terribly much on Thursday night. I like the reformed SP album Zeitgeist okay. I've never developed a disdain for Billy Corgan's nasal snarl, even after years of listening to the music less and less. I still like the way he sounds. His voice was the least of my troubles on Thursday. I had missed most of the first half of the setlist, which was a shame, considering they played "Eye," my favorite weird SP b-side.

This Idolator post sums up what I did see pretty well:

Now, it’s bad enough to subject your audience to about 40 minutes of abrasive, deliberately off-putting music, but it’s even more uncool to come back for an encore that mocks them for not being 100% with you, and feeling disappointed for not hearing more of what they expected to hear from a show billed as a 20th anniversary concert. In conventional show biz logic, if you’re going to go that far, you should at least leave the audience with a crowd-pleaser. In Billy Corgan logic, you come out and perform one of the lesser songs from your best-selling album, and then finish off with a song that mixes disingenuous hippy-dippy “everyone is beautiful!” lyrics with improvised sarcastic rants that outright diss the city you’re playing in, mock the fans for paying to see your band, and tell your visibly disappointed audience that you’ll see them in hell. It was full-on douche-tastic passive-aggression.

(This is a quote from Matthew Perpetua's review.)

I just felt old. I don't mind, nor am I surprised, that Corgan is an ego-driven jerk. This is the man, after all, whose lamest noodlings I used to thrill to, whose music was the sole soundtrack to a different life I imagined for myself when I was twelve years old. Jesus, I still feel guilty for being late! Despite my determination to enjoy whatever the band trotted out, even one of the awful new songs ("G.L.O.W.", anyone?) I just found myself irritated by everything. Including Billy's outfit:

He spent most of the evening in a fringed skirt made out of what looked like white duct tape, white Nike dunks, and a white Zero shirt with some sort of Elizabethan collar. Forgive the terrible picture quality:

For the encore, he put on a different shirt:

Yeah, Billy, that was totally the item of clothing you needed to change.

I don't know. I guess this post doesn't include any big surprises. It's basically a poorly-written meditation on the reasons my friend Daniel doesn't read Postsecret anymore. I can't find the actual post he made on the subject, but his reasoning was something like "Well, when you can tell me a deep human truth that's not that life is hard and loss is sad, I'll be happy to read." You could probably say that about my blog tonight.

There's a silver lining, though. I came home and got all of my Pumpkins discography back on my computer. I had never uploaded most of it; I haven't listened to this music consistently for years. And it's wonderful. I'm especially enjoying Machina II, an album I never spent much time with when it came out in 2000. Listening to these songs again reminds me why I have loved this band so deeply.

Robert Lowell once wrote that the work of Sylvia Plath "makes one feel at first reading that almost all other poetry is about nothing," That's about how I feel about Billy Corgan's music. It's demanding, too emotional, yet it always makes me feel like I'm twelve again, lying on my bed and hearing the songs for the first time.

This was my favorite picture of Billy Corgan when I was thirteen years old. Note the birthmark on his left arm and hand.

A quickie

2008-10-01T17:27:00.003-05:00

My favorite headlines today:

Is there a black slut who wants an Italian cock? Now? - m4w (Canarsie - Kings Highway)

Good news (African-American) ladies! He's "also into getting freaky" and "very open minded."

Think you can Give GREAT HEAD?? PROVE IT! - m4w - 23 (Union Square)

For truly it is a craft and also the most dangerous game.

BLK WANTS FIST WHITE EXPERIENCE - m4w - 28 (Midtown)

Best typo ever or just a really straightforward fisting enthusiast? The ad doesn't clear anything up, either: there's all manner of allegorical references to "never getting to play in the snow" and strange measurements ("9 INCGES (CUT)").

the nomadic one eyed bandit - m4w - 26 (bronx/queens/manhattan)

When I googled the phrase "nomadic one eyed bandit," I got this article from the British newspaper The Independent:

Negociations were said to be underway yesterday to free at least some of the 31 European desert trekkers who have vanished in the Algerian Sahara over the past two months.

After weeks of false trails and reluctant co-operation by the Algerian authorities, it now appears certain that the tourists – 14 Germans, 10 Austrians, four Swiss, a Dutchman, a Swede and a Norwegian – have been taken captive by a bandit chieftain, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, part Robin Hood and part Islamist extremist.

Mr Belmokhtar – also known as Belaouer ("the one-eyed") – operates in a vast sweep of desert in south-east Algeria. Although an Islamist volunteer in Afghanistan in his teens, he was for many years regarded as a "romantic" outlaw who robbed but never killed his victims and sometimes helped the poor.

So what I'm saying, I guess, is EMAIL ME, Mokhtar. I'm waiting.

Pursuing an MFA in Creepy Sex Allusions

2008-09-30T10:32:00.003-05:00

GChat conversation, 11 AM:

william: how is school going?
me: pretty good
me: submitted for the first time last night
william: how was that?
me: stressful, critique is next week
me: i had to write a summary of my book for the first time
william: oh i thought you were talking about sexually and i was really surprised at how casual you were about bringing it up
william: i didn't really know how to respond
william: so i thought i would go with it

[...]

2008-09-26T16:29:00.004-05:00

"Casual Encounters" is a pretty straightforward name for a website focused on NSA sex hookups. But sometimes people posting there don't seem to really grasp the nature of that term. How it means having no expectations of the person you fuck and no required commitment other than an agreement to bump uglies.

Even the title of this guy's ad is disturbingly uncasual: "I know my job and I own up to it".

[...] My job is to pay for dinner even if you say you want to pay half. My job is to be ambitious in my career and make enough money that if we live together and your career takes a turn for the worse - I would have the money to afford to keep you fed and healthy AND sexy (we will talk about you being sexy below). [...]

Oh boy.

[...] I recognize that obligation. I agree to it every day when I put my pants on, or when we take a photo and you have to lean into me (we know who is who). I don't lean into you. We don't have photos of me sitting in your lap. My job is to intuit, using my sexual psychic powers, when you need to be objectified and fucked like an animal (yet still ensuring your orgasm) or spanked or hair pulled, or more, and when you need gentle love like what you saw in that romantic movie you watched. I need to also magically know when you want it quick and urgent and when you want it to take all night. And when you scream the very painful words "fuck me harder," even whilst I am fucking as hard as I can and running out of breath, it is my job to find a way to do it harder. Yes, it is tough, but it is my job [...]

It is HIS JOB! But what is my job?

Now you: There are many jobs for you. Your first and last job are the same. The rest of the list is important too, but they don't work if you don’t do your first job first. Your first job is to be sexy in the way that you can be. It is your job to discover your own natural sexiness, manifest it, AND your job to figure out what I think is sexy. [...] I have heard girls get upset about this. They say, "it is not my job to be sexy all the time," or "It is not my job to meet your definitions of sexy." And I say, bullshit. Have you never stepped outside? Who raised you? It IS your job. It may not be your job to be sexy ALL the time, but you better believe it is your job to be sexy when you are around me, my friends, our friends, and the neighbors. I am not saying you have to dress up, I am only saying you need to figure out where/what and how to create your sexiness and make sure I agree with it. Sure you can have your off-days where you don't change your underwear until noon the following day, or you are bloated and gassy and you just can not be sexy. That’s ok - I like girls who are real - I will still love you. I know you fart and get acne in strange places sometimes and have all kinds of biological processes that are esoteric to me - those things don't turn me off either, afterall I like real girls. I just ask that you manage and control the things that are in your control. But don't let me catch you eating pork sticks everyday and then complain that your stomach hurts and you have the runs for weeks.

You be sexy. Eat right, wear sexy underwear (which I will gladly buy for you), comb your hair and as you dress in the morning DON’T ask yourself, "will this outfit make guys at the county fair want to jerk off on me? If yes, then change and stop wearing shirts with your name airbrushed on them. Ask something like, "Would this look turn my man off if I were giving him head and he were looking at me." or "would my man be proud to walk with me in this outfit?" This question will keep you from dressing like your grandmother, a nun and the lonely lady you work with that, when she shows up in the morning you look at her clothes or hair and murmur, "what is she thinking? And she wonders why no men are attracted to her?" Don't be that woman. You be sexy. Ask the right questions when dressing in the morning.

Okay, got it, fuck bunny, internalized. All the time, right?

And you need to be able to figure out when not to be sexy, like: when meeting my perverted father, when I am sick in a hospital bed, incapacitated and unable to move, but only able to see that some male interns and you are talking about my condition. At that moment you need to be clinical and NOT sexy; when you are at the dentists office and he is about to put you under (wear ugly stuff), when I am feeling down on life and we go to a party - don't be hot, you are only going to get me to sink lower. Just be nice looking or better yet, suggest that we cancel and have some "us" time.

Uh...all right...but wha -

I can not tell you how to locate your inner sexiness - but I can offer you some advice on how to avoid being unsexy.

Thank god.

Unsexy: photos of yourself cramming food in your mouth, or cookies or an alcoholic beverage. Or photos with your mouth gaping open as if you are wasted and screaming at a party. I am out here working out, staying in shape and taking care of myself - for what? For you to cram cookies and beer into your mouth, run around drunk with your jaw hanging open? and take photos? No. We will not date.
Unsexy: Your growing gut.

But what if I have, like, a little pooch, even though I do 1000 situps a day?

Pooch like Maya Rudolph - very hot. Gut like post high school ex-jock? It is diet time.
Unsexy: yellow underwear. You wear it, you sleep on the couch. I don't want to see it and I don't want it touching my laundry.
Unsexy: panties with little cutesy polka dots on them or any pattern that looks like something a 4 yr old girl would wear at her pajama party. Save those for when you feel puffy and bloated and want to snuggle with your stuffed animals and eat chocolate ice cream.

This is where he really started to lose me. I'm sorry what? You don't want me to wear cute underwear?

Don’t tell me that your ass is fat because that is your body type - and then shovel lasagna down your throat 3 days a week. We have a deal. I will do my part. You do yours. Stay thin - meaning if you are 130 pounds - you need to stay around 125 to 135. I like slender girls or muscular or thin or thinner than average. Slender does not equal thick. If you look like Minnie Driver or Kate Winslet - then your excess weight is hot and I love it.

It's his lucky day, because I am in fact (size 6) Kate Winslet. Sam Mendes says hi, future loverman!

Your job is to be in charge of our morality. If we are at a dinner party and I say something a little mean to someone and you notice it. It is your job to pull me aside and say, "that was wrong - you go and apologize because you hurt that persons feelings." I won't like it - but I will obey. You are doing your job and I respect it. I will somehow find a way to go apologize.

You are in charge of the our emotional health. Even if I say I am fine. When you notice that I have some unresolved issue that I need to work on, I have to listen and do whatever it takes - even if it means seeing a therapist or counseling or reading some stupid book. You are in charge and you must find a way to do this without ever being bossy or over-critical.

How do you do that? I don’t know. It's a tough job and only you can do it. My job is not easy either.

***

Way more potentially loveable, although just as problematic probably, is this guy, "Gaslight Fairytale - NY, 1896":

You're a female who has always daydreamed about
(1) being an inquisitive child, and
(2) having a dear older stepbrother, cousin.

In "real" life, we two are adults who share this
Edwardian / Victorian, Grimms' fairytale,
pseudo-Euro-art-film taboo vision.

Oh! Okay, okay, we're Goth, got it...

(Glasses, skinny, stringy hair, or geeky?
Not mandatory... but fine.)

Whatever your beliefs, you likely have odd tin-type, daguerreotype
memories of the past. A poetic pickpocket
or a scrappy street-urchin -- if only at your core.
Be intelligent, sometimes submissive but often
terribly sassy,
perhaps a collage of girly and tomboy spunk...
and possibly a wee dram secretive or
shy about your unusual nature
and thought processes.

(I love how it is spaced out like freshman Intro to Poetry homework)

This is not a mere kink:
We may share strong roleplay and
ageplay; but also much sibling
conversation -- it's quite natural for
you to believe this is real.
So by all means, have your own "normal"(?) relationship
in your other, grownup life. As I do. But you and I keep in
touch by e-mail, telegraph, lurking on a
streetcorner.
When we can, we meet up and play, fight, romp
around, hold hands.
Let yourself go... and regress: I keep
a sharp eye out for swerving trucks and
frothing carriage-horses, and stare down
sneering villains (Your brother
is terribly brave).
I rescue you from all manner
of real and invented dangers,
as we escape from the (fictional?)
"scary man in the park."
We roam ancient churchyards, dank
alleyways; secretly mock passersby;
play at Alienist and amateur sleuth;
or just watch the
rain from a swell Deco diner booth.

Uh, this is Manhattan, right?

Tell me every daydream, desire, complaint, obsession,
bit of angst, woe and fantasy, light or dark:
I cannot be shocked by anything. I will mentor and
protect, scold and praise you, make you laugh when
you cry. I'll be glad to advise you (your brother is
very smart, you know), and pick your eager
inquisitive brain. I entertain you; brush your hair
while you tell me your dreams.
If outbursts are in your nature, I dodge your fury,
hold and tease you while you wriggle;
tickle and/or spank you should you require:
The extent, intensity and limits of our
relationship will go no further than what you
desire and are able to handle, dear Baby Sister.

I mean...he's not wrong in thinking this is an attractive scenario for a lady. I'm half tempted to email him. Unfortch, I know that as much as I hope my secret fantasy Edward Gorey big brother looks like the most recent incarnation of Mr. Tumnus, the truth is probably closer to this. Or maybe it's my friend Daniel. Hi, Daniel!

Eavesdropping for fun and profit

2008-09-24T11:16:00.004-05:00

Right before the band came on at the My Bloody Valentine show last night, after the second terrible opening I've seen the Lilys perform (saw them open for the Brian Jonestown Massacre in 2005 and it was just as terrible), this trio of people did that annoying thing where they push through the crowd pretending to look for someone and then it turns out they just wanted to be closer to the stage. They decided to plant themselves right next to me. In doing so they separated a woman with an amazing 80s goth haircut (sort of a monklike fringe, shaved in the back) and her man.

"Excuse me, I need to stand next to my wife," the man said with utmost restraint.
"OH WATCH OUT YOU'RE SEPARATIN' FAMILIES!" One of the trio chortled to another, moving closer to me. They were two women and a man, maybe in their mid-to-late-thirties. One of the women was either drunk or medicated, because she proceeded to speak loudly about things that most people, even me with my penchant for public uncomfortableness, do not.

It seemed that she and the guy were a couple who had dated in the past, but he had "cut her off" sometime in August, and she was pissed. At first I thought she was complaining about him cutting her off in her babbling conversation, but then it was clear she was demanding an explanation for his behavior in August. But our girl - who was, say, 5'2", with a perfect helmet-blowdried red bob (she probably brings in a picture of Louise Brooks) and dressed in that near-goth inexplicably slutty way lots of women her age do for concerts - was not the type to take a straight train of thought from A to B.

"Why did you cut me off in August?" She demanded of the guy (who I will note here was not the type of guy anybody should be hurting over; sorry, it's not okay to wear aviator sunglasses inside in a dark room even if you're a blazing hot British vampire, and this guy was more like a slightly-better-looking Kevin James, which oh god makes me WISH I had started Personal Ad Hell on this website before I found this amazing Casual Encounters ad where the guy said he looked like Kevin James). "I went three and half weeks without sex. I cut myself off. I cut MEN off."

"Three whole weeks, huh?" The guy said, mildly concerned.

"Yeah, and then when I was on the phone with that guy, I told him, I told him all kinds of fucked up shit. ALL KINDS."

"Like what?"

"I told him I got herpes from my lover who was bisexual, oh yeah..." The couple dissolved into giggles and then a prolonged openmouthed kiss. "Yeah, all sorts of fucked up shit. And you know what? You know what I am SORRY I don't have the big ass you want. I know you want a big fucking ass. I know you do. But I like being a waif. I like being a little girl. I can't put Botox in my ass to make it big so you can fuck it..." The guy grabbed her and made out with her again, presumably because he was crazy turned on, or maybe because he was slightly more conscious that they were sharing space with a couple thousand other people waiting to float away on a tide of shoegaze.

At this point I was kind of blushing for them, but not really because what they were saying was inappropriate, more because it was so inaccurate. Botox doesn't, uh, inflate anything; maybe she was thinking of lip fillers like Restalyne or collagen? But you couldn't put those in your glutes, either. There are implant procedures, but they're pretty costly and stupid. More bothersome was the fact that even this crazy drunk-or-just-loud lady was slipping back into this thing I watch women do all the time, which is tout their own thinness against the broad tide of society's demand that they bulk up. Cram it! No one is ever going to give you a hard time for being tiny!

At this point the third member of the trio, the other woman, who had not been a participant in this conversation, turned around and apologized to me. "They must be really annoying," she said. "So much drama."

"No, it's fine," I told her. "Kind of amusing." I immediately thought, ah ha, here is the much-abused nice friend. But all of my sympathy evaporated when the redhead detached herself from the guy who wanted to fuck a big ass and started kissing her friend. This is also behavior I abhor! Admittedly, it wasn't exactly Girls Gone Wild gonzo-style performalesbianism, but just all the weird homosocial cuddling that goes on in public. Once when I was home visiting some friends I hadn't seen in a while, I met one of their friends from the local college, and watched with a little bit of vomit in my mouth as she proceeded to interrupt conversation all night by making eye contact with one of them, saying "Kiss," and pecking them on the mouth.

Don't get me wrong - same sex affection is fine by me, in fact it's sexy by me. But this stuff just combines the queasiness of PDA with the pointlessness of weird showy public cuddling. Anyway, then there was some ass-stroking between the women (apparently they were free from the derriere neuroses that led to the redhead being cut off) and then the music started, and I figured the whole thing was over.

Until they started taking cutesy pictures of each other throughout the entire concert. Who knew that cell phone cameras have flashes now?

Lettin' the ladies have it

2008-09-21T22:05:00.003-05:00

One of my loyal readers (okay, my only loyal reader) pointed out that I never take apart the w4m section of CL's casual encounters. So I will try tonight. I suspect there's a lot of good reasons why I haven't ventured over here before. It's certainly not because, as a woman, I think that women are less capable or less likely of writing totally hilarious requests for NSA sex...

...it's just that a lot of what I've seen has been, uh, boring.

This lady, who is "looking for a man that can handle [her]", writes: My Friends describe me as delectably seductive. Really? Well, uh, that's a rousing endorsement, especially considering your friends must be an intolerable passel of aging Carrie Bradshaw wannabes.

"I'm new at this" tries to slip her baggage in between relatively pertinent facts: Jodie, curly black hair, kind of gray eyes, 147 lbs, 5'5, stuck in a loveless marriage, Weather woman, like to watch football. Whoa there, lady! Don't think you got your emotional neediness past me!

At first glance, the headline "I'm big and ugly but want to get laid today! - w4m - 33" seems refreshingly open, but then it gets weird: inside she says: Oh I have green eyes, auburn hair, 5'8, 36D boob size, 117 lbs. So are you playing some weird woman mindgame where you only want to have anonymous sex with a dude who wants to fuck an ugly chick? Is there even a school of thought where that works?

Easily half of the listings have been flagged for removal, most likely because they're advertisements from working girls, or actually contain links to adult friend finder-type websites.

This one (NSFW NSFW!!!) is interesting because it features pictures - and not just pictures, but pictures that show the girl's face. It must be my stupid societal conditioning but this ad makes me sad for some reason instead of giggly. Why are you putting your blowjob face on the internet, lady?

So this one seems, at least, semi-legit and original in terms of incest fantasies...until you look at this m4w ad, which is worded almost exactly the same way. What does this mean? Is a company posting these? Is it some sort of all-incest all the time escort service?

As usual, women provided me only with frustration and mystery, whereas men were imminently more understandable.

Epiphany

2008-09-21T15:06:00.004-05:00

Would I have stalkerish tendencies if it weren't for the internet? Probably, but there's no chance they would be so well-honed. I really have to watch it. I buy something on CL and Google the seller and before you know it I know where they went to high school and meeting them in person to pick up the tickets is going to be a little awkward.

Come, strip and get us drinks. Get us snacks.

2008-09-21T13:26:00.002-05:00

I was going to count the number of question marks in the title, but instead I'll just cut and paste it: football SLUT ?????????????

This is part of a trend I've noticed on CL. Men who claim to be amazingly handsome and rich who just want a "whore." But not, presumably, an actual working girl. Here's another:

I need a young bitch

"Female only," huh? I'll make sure that the puppy I bring is all lady.

Young Millionaires looking for attractive Female

I guess most guys who post on Casual Encounters get a lot of responses from gay men and pros. But even the guys like the one above seem to imply that they don't really want a pro; they want a sweet college student who wouldn't mind having sex for money.

Looking for a specific of Girl...

...A Working Girl.

Bear, Lehman, Merrill...Need a New Job?

Ooh, zeitgeisty!

Equivocating: "My Wife's Type of Men"

2008-09-18T21:10:00.005-05:00

This guy knows his wife doesn't really want to have sex with another guy, so he gives a frustratingly specific description of the mystery man who will blow their sex life WIDE OPEN:

Her type of man is long haired, fit/athletic no big muscle and of course younger. A man like Bon Jovi type, into rock/heavy metal.An american indian will do tall with long hair. Age must be 40 years or younger. Other nationalities, Italian Greek, frensh, spanish, brazilia, portugese, American white Canadian, south African australian and argentinian Mixed black with light skin and dreadlocks No eastern europeans please.

I'm not sure what "American white Canadian" looks like. Personally, I hope they get a Frensh guy.

2008-09-18T19:54:00.004-05:00

This morning on the train I was standing behind a fit Asian businessman. I couldn't see his face, but I could read what was playing on his iPod, which he held up to examine as he flipped through songs. He settled on Marilyn Manson's "The Beautiful People." Serendipitously, today Jezebel's Dodai covered Cintra Wilson's Times piece on the long life of Goth culture. All of this made me very happy.

I was never a proper goth, but I wanted to be. Starting in seventh grade I felt pangs of jealousy when I spotted one at the mall. Where did they get arm warmers and black lipstick? In eighth grade I started listening to Marilyn Manson (who I know is not the arbiter of goth, thanks) after seeing the video for "The Dope Show" on MuchMusic. My love of his music grew through lucky finds of Manson's earlier albums and EPs, and on April 20, 1999 my dad took my best friend and I to see Marilyn Manson at the Rosemont Horizon. He was supposed to be on tour with Hole, another favorite of mine, but Courtney Love had dropped off the tour and we saw Nashville Pussy instead, which was probably the only enjoyable part of the show for my father. When I got home, proudly clutching my brand-new size large shirt emblazoned with naked, sexless Manson, Columbine was all over the news.

After that I acquired a spiked leather color and a pair of close-fitting shiny black pants. They weren't vinyl, not yet; instead they were made of a sort of crunchy track-pant acrylic. The summer after that I discovered Poppy Z. Brite's Lost Souls, as detailed below, and learned about what would always be thrown in my face as "real Goth": the Cure, black lace, orange lipstick, relentless mopiness. At this time I also became deeply involved with Jhonen Vasquez's comic book Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its fandom, but that's another blog post for another tie. Suffice it to say I found myself deeply sympathetic with variously "gothy" things, including a host of comic books, endless vampire erotica, and a strong desire to be more depressed than I in fact was.

Then, at the beginning of ninth grade, I discovered online shopping and Hot Topic. By mid-September I was outfitted in skintight black vinyl cigarette pants that laced up with a suede string; various "corsets" that zipped or lightly laced up, in red brocade and pink vinyl; shoes that even I couldn't pretend didn't look like part of a Sexy Pilgrim Halloween costume; a miniskirt airbrushed with the image of bats flying out of a belltower, and very dark unappealing lipstick. I bleached my hair, then I dyed the tips purple, then I dyed it bright red. I owned a black velvet minidress that came to about the middle of my thighs with purple inserts behind black netting and bell sleeves.

At certain times older and more experienced alienated teenagers would look at me and inform me that I wasn't really goth - I was a kindergoth, a kinderwhore, some strange amalgam of raver and bored-looking suburbanite. Thank god the term "emo" didn't exist yet. My parents didn't really care; my mom even had some fun with the whole thing, going to Express with me and helping me suss out the most-Goth items on display.

From sixth grade on I owned a Sony Discman that gave me an entirely other life, one in which I was the protagonist of an incredibly cool movie scored to my favorite music. No matter how pathetic my tentative stabs towards romance were, no matter how harshly I fought with my parents over my relationship with my new boyfriend, no matter how hard I struggled in Math class, I could always escape to a world where "Rock Is Dead" was playing. "Set the Ray to Jerry" was on next, and both songs were just for me.

Marilyn Manson is an easy target. Neither his music nor his posturing could ever be called terribly original, and his hopefully-fauxmance with Evan Rachel Wood doesn't endear him to me, either. But I miss the days when he was on MTV, when he was present enough to offend people. It's not that popular culture has hardened to shock tactics like the ones Manson used; instead, some marketing genius over at Disney realized that if you grab the kids younger, when they don't like to be scared, they'll have brand loyalty to whatever dreck you pump out for them for the rest of their lives. It's part of the death of the record industry, too, I understand; right now the only people who can be counted on to buy albums are under 21 years old.

But there was a time in my life when nothing was more satisfying than the easy-to-swallow transgression that Manson served up. Everything about it was palatable to me at age fourteen: the queasy depiction of his escape from South Florida presented in his autobiography, the constant crowd roar effect he used in his songs, and his look.

I don't really care for the aesthetic any more, but when I was a Manson fan the way he looked made me feel thrillingly free. He was and is often awfully, brutally ugly, but with such style that it seemed okay. I was surrounded with images of what beautiful teenage girls were supposed to look like, and all of them were a far cry from anything I could or would be:

It was nice to have permission to be a little ugly and weird.

This blog should be called Personal Ad Hell, I guess

2008-09-17T15:37:00.003-05:00

Holla, eh? Okay, how about aaaah! Why are you topless in what appears to be a deli?

I missed True Blood this week

2008-09-17T01:36:00.003-05:00

...but this guy is definitely looking for his "Vempire."

Edit: Since he has not one but two amazing posts, I don't feel bad at all about posting dude's picture:

Man, if I was a "Vempire" I wouldn't want to chew on that.

Last Edit, I swear: He's got three ads! Also, he "LOVE[s] TO WORSHIP THE GODDESS BY SMOKING THE SACRED HERB OF VENUS(MARY JANE), IF THIS INTERESTS YOU THEN YOUVE FOUND THE RIGHT MAGUS OXOXOXO."

XOXO, indeed.

Ho ho ho!

2008-09-15T00:56:00.004-05:00

This guy is an entire sociology course in five minutes. The title is "NOT a picture of my penis" but it is posted on the Casual Encounters section of Craigslist, where people can be forgiven for expecting and maybe even hoping for penis pictures.

Alan Moore reference, but probably relating to the movie? Check. Emo cutie t-shirt pose picture? Check. NJ Guido persona pose picture, complete with tribal band tattoo and spray tan? Check. It might be worth emailing him to find out just how bad his cultural schizophrenia is. One thing's for sure, though: He was Edmond Dantés... and he was my father. And my mother... my brother... my friend. He was you... and me. He was all of us.

Why so, uh, turgid?

2008-09-09T16:33:00.001-05:00

Amazing.

True love?

2008-09-08T00:27:00.004-05:00

My friend Leon once told me that he'd figured out why women like vampires.
"Because of Vampire Weekend?" I asked.
"No," he said. "It's the ultimate inaccessible guy. He literally cannot commit to you. He's dead."

I don't know if this is the reason I like vampires, but I always have. Although as I child I was terrified of almost all mythic beasties (especially aliens), vampires always seemed more sexy than scary, even when I was too little to think something was sexy. Starting around 1998, when I was in eighth grade, my interest in the undead became a bit more prurient. In November of that year I saw John Carpenter's Vampires, a not-good movie I deeply loved and which gave me the gift of the word "polesmoker." On a vacation to England with my family I bought a copy of Poppy Z. Brite's Lost Souls, a book that forever married homoeroticism, New Orleans and vampirism for me (although I am the child of Anne Rice fans and met her at age ten wearing a cape and fangs, I have never really enjoyed her books). Lost Souls is also a pretty handy primer on high eighties goth. It became my gospel insofar as a book in which a fourteen-year-old vampire named Nothing waxes rhapsodic about blowing his dad can be the gospel of a suburban eighth grader. Which is to say, totally. I even underlined my favorite lines of Lost Souls in red lipstick, just as Nothing's doomed mother Jessy does in her copy of Dracula.

Although by this time - the middle of eighth grade - I had created two highly embarassing websites which will apparently stand in perpetuity on the internet, I was not familiar with fan fiction. Wait, actually I'm going to have to revise that, because I had been shown a good deal of tenacious, stomach-turning Hanson slash by a friend. In any case the internet had little to do with my first and last foray (thus far) into the world of serialized play-format fan fiction. The project was called My Life As A Vampire and comprised of escapist fantasies in which my friends and I became vampires endowed with the ability to fly. We started hanging out with other vampires: the members of the Smashing Pumpkins at first, and then basically every actor or musician I ever liked. Together we terrorized my school and enemies, mudered Cameron Diaz (of whom I harbored an intense dislike which has since cooled to disinterest), and flew around dreamily. It was overwritten, embarassingly self-indulgent, the blatant product of early teenage sexual frustration, and I decided to show it to everyone, sending weekly installments to ten or so lucky souls. Around the time I was sixteen I put together a bound edition of My Life As A Vampire that I am still quite proud of, surprisingly well-designed document of my dorkery that it is.

So I guess I came to HBO's True Blood tonight with more than a casual interest in and history with vampires. I haven't read the Charlaine Harris books the series is based on; I've actually never heard of them before now, which is surprising considering that for many years I read almost every piece of vampire lit I could get my hands on (notables include this one, this one, and hey! definitely this one). I think the first episode, "Strange Love," shows a great deal of promise. I presume Alan Ball knows what he's doing with the campier elements of the show, but some of them were unforgiveable, especially [SPOILER WARNING, I guess] that out-of-control vampire sex scene. The whole concept comes with so much great built-in eroticism - there was a good line in the episode about the uses of the artery in the crotch - that it's easy to overdo it. Did you know that vampires are sexy? That they have to lean in close to you and smell your blood and then bite your neck? Which is kind of a sexy place that people like to get bitten anyway? And that maybe the whole thing could be seen as a metaphor, for, I don't know, human sexuality and its implicit dangers and risks?

They've also got to style Anna Paquin a little bit less like Buffy:

And while I like the conceit that Sookie's telepathy is quieted by Bill's presence, they're going to have to give the two leads something to do with each other other than stare meaningfully, because we got a great dose of that in the first episode. The IMDB photoset has no fewer than nine stills posed exactly like this one:

"Should we move yet?"
"Naw, let's just keep arching our backs for a while."

I'll just put it out there that my sister maintained throughout the show that there's something weird going on with Paquin's boobs - they are remarkably high and small and close together. But I'll defer to the Paquin-boob experts on this one, whoever they may be.

What I most like about this show was its handling of its setting, the Louisiana town of Bon Temps. Lots of small details were nailed, especially the socioeconomics - many characters work two jobs and nobody seems to be going anywhere fast. I'll admit to enjoying the juxtaposition of revivalist healings and baptisms with vampire-y sex in the opening credits, although a small voice inside me is complaining loudly about the implicit equation of crazy poor southerners and their crazy religion with creatures who actually, uh, eat people.

I finally figured out what happens to NYU grads who can afford to stay in the city after graduation!

2008-09-04T19:24:00.001-05:00

Nevertheless, if you're cute, cultured, sassy and [in-shape], and a person that has an actual life also (AKA friends), but can't resist amazing television such as these shows (plus Californication, Dexter, Brotherhood and a number of fun and funky HBO dramas)...

Let's get it on...

Jeffery,

A quintessential New Yorker at 5'10, 160lbs, rock-stair hair, brown eyes, killer smile, a world-traveler, guitar musician, works in advertising/media, and loves sushi/sashimi and dive bars in the East Village..

Bands: The Killers, Damien Rice, Rilo Kiley
Books: Candide, The Alchemist, The Fountainhead
Movies: City of God, Amelie, The Spanish Apartment

Hmmm

2008-09-02T22:33:00.003-05:00

Well, I mean, they have to pull out sometime, right? Otherwise everybody'd be all glued (gooed?) together like they were LARPing conjoined twins.

Personal Ad Hell

2008-09-02T00:10:00.002-05:00

If you are overworked, stressed, disgusted, exhausted, fading into obscurity, or purple with pink polka dots, have no fear...all I ask is that you be smart and slender and send a recent picture.

This guy doesn't think he deserves much. Just a skinny lady. I mean, she can be totally wrecked, but as long as she's thin, they'll work it out.

F.H.W.

2008-08-08T00:52:00.002-05:00

A couple of months ago I had what I immediately termed a "middle-of-the-night Fiona Apple freakout." I'm not sure why I started thinking about her. A friend of mine had mentioned seeing her at a party. He wanted to hit on her, but I guess she was there with her boyfriend.

Anyway, it was around two in the morning. I had brought my laptop into my bedroom, something I generally try to avoid doing, and found myself rereading Chris Heath's hilariously overwritten 1998 Rolling Stone cover story on Apple, "The Caged Bird Sings."

Here's a choice quote:

But in the busy, greedy, impatient '90s, we become whatever may be written about us in one or two perky paragraphs, and hers might lead one to believe that Fiona Apple is either a precocious, calculating prodigy or an unbalanced, ungrateful freak. That is the great sucker punch of modern celebrity: It draws in the Fiona Apples of this world with that most wonderful of all promises -- to be understood -- and yet humans are still to invent a quicker, more-efficient method of being misunderstood by the greatest possible number of people than Becoming Famous in America. Fiona Apple has been discovering this for herself.

I first saw Fiona Apple on Saturday Night Live in late 1996. I used to glean a lot of important pop culture information from SNL; it was where I learned about another band I loved in middle school, Veruca Salt, and trying to follow the political jokes taught me as much about current affairs as, well, A Current Affair. Apple performed the song "Shadowboxer". I liked it so much that I asked for her album Tidal for my twelfth birthday a few days later.

In my memory that album will always be inextricably linked with a happy winter spent playing Mario 64, the only game I owned and part of my other birthday present, a Nintendo 64. For whatever reason the image of Mario diving into the aquatic worlds is especially linked to the opening song "Sleep to Dream." I listened to the album all the time, and I loved Fiona's controversial video, "Criminal."

It looks outdated now. Mark Romanek's slick surfaces and surveillance-camera feel are so common they're basically passe, and we're all familiar with Fiona's sad-hungry stare, the way her eyes sometimes turn red in the glare. But the whole thing transfixed me when I was twelve, even though I had to admit my mom had a point when she snorted derisively at the shot of Fiona squirting that, uh, dish soap out of the bottle at 4:03. Also, heroin chic (and maybe kiddie porn chic) aside, the video was and is sexy.

In 1996, the controversy over the video baffled me. Even though she was writhing on some faceless dude's knee, I reasoned, Fiona seemed to be in control of the situation; it's her song, after all, and the camera's on her. And while I don't really agree with my past reasoning now, I'm glad that I read the video that way. It didn't make me want to look tiny and sad in a closet. It was just a glimpse of a world that I could someday hope to enter and manipulate.

During my middle-of-the-night Fiona Apple freakout I relearned a few facts about her that I missed as a sixth grader. Most importantly, I discovered that Apple dated David Blaine. For a long time.

...And in fact, according to the RS article, Blaine and Apple have matching tattoos that say "kin." And! According to this David Blaine messageboard, Blaine is the faceless man Apple oozes all over in "Criminal," which successfully oblitherates any lingering feelings about the video being sexy I still harbored. Of course, the Heath article also mentions that Apple had been up all night "drinking Surfers on Acid (some malignant combination of Malibu, Jaegermeister and pineapple juice) with Boogie Nights director Paul Thomas Anderson," so maybe there was already trouble in paradise in 1998.

I didn't think a lot about it at the time, but I was pretty lucky with the women who were famous when I was what they now call a "tween:" Madonna, Alanis Morrisette, Apple, even the Spice Girls were all better than the cocktail of titilation and stupidity now on offer to young girls. I went to Lilith Fair and saw Jewel and Sarah McLachlan.There were about eighteen months in the late nineties when the whole "women in rock" package got accidentally recycled into a celebration of real voices, and I was lucky to be twelve and thirteen years old.

The End and the Beginning

2008-07-21T16:15:00.003-05:00

I was a diehard Smashing Pumpkins fan for about a seventh of my life, between the years 1998 and 2001. I got into the band after hearing a complete broadcast of the 1998 album Adore on Q101, "Chicago's Alternative," which I listened to religiously. My father got tickets to see the band perform on July 7, 1998, at what was then known as the New World Music Theater, in Tinley Park, Illinois. I loved the poetic impenetrability of Billy Corgan's lyrics, the soaring guitars, and, well, Billy Corgan: from the first time I saw the "Ava Adore" video on MTV, I was hooked on the bald songsmith's curious combination of vulnerability and theatricality. By the middle of eighth grade, I was madly in love: with his crooked teeth, with the birthmark that covered most of his left arm (as seen in seventh-grade me's favorite picture of him.) I wrote long poems to him in my journal. My greatest wish was to take a picture with Billy.

In my eighth grade yearbook, our answers to two questions were printed under our names beside our pictures: "If I could have one wish it would be..." and "In twenty years I will be..." My answers were "To be the inspiration for WPC's songs and JV's comics" and "Driving in a van with EG, listening to 1979." JV was Jhonen Vasquez, creator of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, EG was my best friend Erin, and WPC was none other than William Patrick Corgan.

My love for the band waned after I attended their epic five-hour breakup concert; I'd put so much emotional energy into my fandom, waiting outside the XRT building in the November cold and getting my wallet stolen at a Tower Records signing for which I had convinced my parents to let me miss school. I didn't get into Zwan. I liked Corgan's 2005 solo album TheFutureEmbrace but not the way he undercut its release by taking out a giant ad in the Chicago Tribune calling the Pumpkins back together. Of course the reformed Pumpkins were just Billy and stalwart drummer Jimmy Chamberlain. His endless confessional blogging seemed to have destroyed any possibility of pulling James Iha and D'Arcy back into the whirlpool.

I imagine I'll write much more extensively about the Smashing Pumpkins (and Adore, the critically reviled album that remains my favorite) in this space. But the main reason for this entry is the new Watchmen trailer:

That's Billy's reedy voice there, singing "The Beginning is the End is the Beginning," the B-side to "The End is the Beginning is the End," which was written for and featured on the Batman and Robin soundtrack:

I'm sure this was the meta trick of some soundtrack scrub out in Silverlake, but all I hope for is that we get another greenscreen video with Billy in a unitard, gesticulating wildly.

FYI

2008-07-13T14:25:00.001-05:00

If a girl who describes herself as "bisexual-leaning-towards-lesbian" tells you you look like Starbuck, you should consider yourself hit-upon.

Something Brief About Radiohead

2008-07-01T18:24:00.007-05:00

After my first boyfriend and I broke up, he got really into Radiohead. This was the April 2000, so he must have been listening to Kid A. It was the end of my freshman year of high school, and I had no experience with the band. Sometimes my ex and I would attempt to have amiable conversations outside the school while waiting for our parents to pick us up. He normally started off with some kind of backhanded compliment, such as "You're not dressed so slutty today."

And then he would start talking about Radiohead. Did I know, did I know, that Thom Yorke hated performing? That he performed with his back to the audience? Because all he cared about was the music? Did I know this?

No, of course not. I didn't listen to the band - although I did have a distinct memory of purchasing OK Computer in the seventh grade, hating it, and giving it to my mom - and I couldn't figure out what my ex was all worked up about. Later that year he wrote a bunch of poems with suspicously Radioheadesque titles: "Music (for the closing credits)," "IamnotwhoyouthinkIam," etc. And that was pretty much the last gulp of his engagement with popular culture before ascending into Grateful Dead cover band heaven, where he remains to this day.

Now, almost ten years later, Radiohead is a pretty undeniable cultural force. I went to see Radiohead in Milan on June 17. It was awesome. Thom Yorke did not, in fact, perform with his back to the audience. He danced like he was having a constant sexy seizure and stopped only to announce the football scores. And I wasn't dressed slutty, either.

Wanted: Pretty Great

2008-06-30T16:33:00.006-05:00

I have a confession to make: I like seeing people get punched in the face. I’ve always kind of wanted to be in a fistfight. In my high school cafeteria I once witnessed a girl break a Snapple bottle in half and lunge with it at her opponent, also female. I don’t think anyone got hurt in that fight, but I saw another one before I graduated where a huge boy had bitten off piece of his tongue. A security guard picked the piece of tongue up off the floor and put it in his pocket.

But these aren’t the fights I fantasize about. I just want to get one good punch in and maybe spray a little blood on the wall. And I guess it would be okay if the same thing happened to me in the process. Perhaps this bloodlust is the reason why I deeply enjoyed Wanted, a movie admittedly plagued by some truly bad writing and unimaginative choices. The whole thing hit me like a roundhouse punch to the face, but in a good way: I felt jolted awake, even as I laughed with incredulity at some of the wooden dialogue.

Wanted suffers from several action movie clichés, including a mindless voiceover that nearly derailed the film for me – it doesn’t help that James McAvoy’s American accent sounds painfully singsongy, like a smart-alecky British kid making fun of the Yanks with lines like “I am the perfect weapon” spoken in a dead-serious drawl. I was aksi put off by Janice, McAvoy’s emasculating boss. Interesting things could have been done with this character – she could have been an attractive woman (maybe Angeline Jolie should have had this role) or a man, but instead the writers were lazy and made her an easy target: an overweight middle-aged woman. Janice is a foregone conclusion as soon as you see her: of course she’s awful, of course she’s an object of ridicule, because she’s fat! And not young! Hilarious use of a generic foreign country is also present; the crowd at the Prague cineplex where I saw the movie tittered when McAvoy and Jolie go to “Moravia,” represented by a Prague tram station.

Despite these not-inconsequential problems, the film moves along at an often-hilarious breakneck pace with infectious enthusiasm. It’s like that one really emotionally stunted friend we all had when we were fifteen who was incredibly good at video games but could barely get a sentence out in conversation. He could be frustrating to hang out with, and you were out of luck if you had a crush on him, but it could be pretty awesome to watch him play video games for a few hours. The Chicago portrayed in the film, while a far cry from the actual neighborhoods I grew up around, has an internal logic and symmetry that is emotionally true to the city, and an especially fine use is made of the El.

Endnote: in their review of the film, the A.V. Club references "McAvoy's Bud Cort-with-sex appeal looks," which further propels my fear that James McAvoy may age a as Bud Cort has.

What does the future hold?

No Homo Film Society #1: Step Up 2 The Streets

2008-02-16T15:33:00.008-06:00

When I was four and five years old, I took classes at The Academy of Movement and Music, a Martha Graham-style art school for children. I had been enrolled there to take part in the complete curriculum of music, art and dance, but ballet immediately elbowed every other subject out my imagination. While I enjoyed making papier-mache hot air balloons in Art (we covered an inflated balloon with the wet papier-mache goo, let it harden, then popped the balloon and tied it to one of those green strawberry baskets with pipe cleaners) and playing the recorder in Music, Ballet was the only class for which I had to wear a special costume and act like I was all sorts of things that I was not: elegant, graceful, physically competent. I loved the ritual of putting on pink tights and a black leotard, of standing at the barre in a perfect line, admiring the symmetry in the mirror.

Unfortunately, I was terrible at ballet. I could not make my arms and legs do what the teacher wanted them to. I understood the idea behind the movements, but I could never keep my arm curve just so, and any attempt to memorize the different plies was an exercise in futility. So while my drawings were interesting and colorful and my recorder rendition of “Hot Cross Buns,” eventually led to a seven-year stint playing the flute, I was done with ballet by second grade. This didn’t mean that I gave up on dance, however; for years afterward I tried to muscle my way back into that privileged world of beautiful, solemn girls, tall and thin as Aspen trees, that flew across the stage. I took so many Beginning Modern for Adults classes that I could probably teach it myself at some unlucky community center. I studied African Dance at the Old Town School of Folk Music under a terrifying, tiny man who had stolen the hearts of all of the other students, who were thirty-something yuppies when I was seventeen. I Jazzercised.

Although by the time I was fourteen I had accepted that I wouldn’t be experiencing any stunning return to the world of dance, I found myself unable to watch dance without feeling sad, like something had been taken from me. If I had only had more stamina as a five-year-old, I told myself, I could have made it. I was young enough that the training might have worked. I was mad at myself, and my parents, for letting me quit so soon. Now I realize that the decision to put me on swim team was much more productive than letting me suffer through several years of crushingly sad mediocre dancing. But the bitterness I felt led to crying jags after movies like Center Stage, or even after Orchesis shows.

On Valentine’s Day, I saw a movie destined to break the mistiness that descends on me whenever a young woman is thrust into an environment in which she must prove her moves or go back to her terrible job/abusive family/boring high school. My discussion of this film will also be the inaugural entry in a new feature, No Homo Film Society.

“No Homo” is a phrase my male friends used in high school after indulging in some homoerotic activity. Example: A and B wake to realize they’ve spent the entire night semi-cuddling in a Barcalounger in A’s living room.
A, detangling himself from B’s sleep hug: Hey. Hey, B, wake up.
B: Wha?
A: No homo, man.
B: Oh, dude, totally.

Out of the mouths of babes, right? Anyway, in the grand tradition of our greatest unwitting Bush Administration allegory, 300,, here we go for Step Up 2 The Streets. When I first saw the trailer for this gem, my initial impression was “Wow, the first one did well enough to warrant a sequel?” While I didn’t see its parent film, I have a special place in my heart for films about those high schools where all of the students are nearing thirty. What could be more glaringly inessential, and therefore incredibly important, than the sequel to a B-movie about a supposedly “edgy” subculture, as portrayed and imagined by people almost two decades older than their inspiration? Like Juno, Step Up 2 The Streets - one of the most aggravating cases of “wordplay” in recent memory – may have its heart in the right place, but its brain is a coldly self-motivated machine hellbent on sucking up mouthbreathing teenagers’ hard earned MySpace money. Mildly troubled Baltimore dance phenom Andie (Briana Evigan) is given a dreaded ultimatum: attend an arts high school or move to Texas! When she chooses the lesser evil and takes an interest in the remarkably boring Chase Collins (Robert Hoffman, who apparently “enjoys meeting people who can dance well”), her street crew, the 410, a sort of flashmob-obsessed group of renegade newsies, drops her.

Step Up 2 makes remarkably straight-faced use of every stereotype it can get its hands on. Sexually threatening black male crew leader? Check, in the form of Tuck, the 410 pater familias who spends most of the film frozen in a 50 Cent glare. Somewhat shrimpy Shia LeBoeuf stand-in whose bouncy hair disguises amazing freestyle dance ability? Check, with the ambitiously named Adam G. Sevani, but you can call him Moose. How about an Asian immigrant with a hilarious accent and misunderstanding of incredibly simple colloquialisms? No need to come out of retirement, Gedde Watanabe, Mari Koda does a serviceable job mispronouncing “prank” as “plank.” There’s also a sassy Latina girl and stressed-out single mom. Indeed, only characters who aren’t tired types are the bland-a-thon leads, whose vanilla romance is only mildly more interesting because Hoffman appears about twenty years older than Evigan.

What’s he doing in high school? We wonder, but then the answer emerges in the most wonderful fashion with my favorite character, Blake Collins, as played by Will Kemp. Blake is supposedly Chase’s older brother, a retired ballet legend deadset on making the school a Fame-style performer machine. But any viewer worth his salt knows that Blake Collins is really just Evil Gay Sufjan Stevens. I couldn't find a picture of Kemp as Blake Collins, so here's a naked picture of him for kicks.

Here’s where the No Homo part comes in, I guess. Blake Collins is such an archetypical Evil Gay that he may as well have emerged fully formed from the Baron Harkonnen’s fantasy world. The Evil Gay, like the Magical Black Man, is a familiar character in Movieland. Unlike his brother the Noble Gay (Dumbledore!), the Evil Gay is probably not celibate, and often possesses the power to limit the hero’s success or at least fun-having. Some famous Evil Gays include Peter Lorre in The Maltese Falcon and, more recently, Cillian Murphy’s Scarecrow in Batman Begins (and maybe Cillian Murphy in Red Eye, for that matter). Kemp's conspicuous love that cannot speak its name is about as subtle as Mickey Rooney’s turn as Mr. Yunioshi. I wish I had brought a camcorder into the theater just so that I could post a clip or two of the simmering sexual tension between Chase and Blake Collins. Their under-the-radar onscreen bromance is about the only time when Step Up 2 rises above the level of, well, risible fluff. Kemp pronounces every line like he’s shaking a sick kitten off his arm into a pot of boiling water. I just wish he would burst into a chorus of “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.”

I wish that one of these immortal dumb teen dance movies would present a troubled teenager whose love for street dance was actually encouraged and honed by involvement with classical dance. Step Up 2 The Streets indulges in a near avant-garde level of idiocy, best exemplified in the scene when boring heroine Andie, newly squeezed into a white sundress, walks into a room. Her friend Missy (Danielle Polanco) squeals, “Damn, girl! You got titties!" Andie looks down at her chest, but there’s nothing there, despite the post on Evigan's IMDB message board by "oscarmau" entitled "HUGE RACK."

It's Not The End Of The World Or Anything

2007-09-22T13:41:00.000-05:00

Snooping around over at The Dizzies, I found myself entranced by Ed’s ”livebloggery” of Cormac McCarthy’s appearance on Oprah. McCarthy’s latest book, The Road, has received acclaim from sources as diverse as the big O and the Pulitzer Prize committee. It’s also right up my alley, as speculative fiction by masterful artistss is always special treat for me, a dyed-in-the-wool science fiction/fantasy dork. I loved Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and leapt at the chance to see Wong Kar-Wai’s 2046. So why haven’t I already filled up a Facebook profile with quotes from The Road, aside from the fairly repugnant quality of that idea?

Because I’m terrified of The Road, and not only because reading an excerpt of it forced me to learn the meaning of the word "catamite".The truth is that I have a very dysfunctional relationship with post-apocalyptic and dystopic fiction. I enjoy it – a lot – but it scares the crap out of me. As a child, I often dreamed of directing horror films, not because I particularly wanted to be a director, but because I thought that if I could see how scary movies were made, they might not frighten me so much (I also said that I wanted to be a nurse so that I could “hurt people,” but that’s a different story). When I was a toddler, my parents were great fans of the Hellraiser series, and often watched the films in our living room after putting me to bed. On these nights, without fail, I crept downstairs to peep out from behind the couch, saw something awful, and refused to sleep for weeks. For whatever reason, stories where the world ends, or has ended, are still a bit much for me. Today, with valid warnings of a real Ragnarok at every turn, I try to keep my mind calm by avoiding any unnecessary terror. This is not something I have always done. Here’s a list of apocalyptic media that scared me in the past and scares me now.

1. TERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY
If I saw T2 in theatres, then I must have been seven at my first viewing. I find this hard to believe. I mean, as previously noted, my parents were certainly a little laissez faire about what they let me watch, and I loved them for it. But this movie? Arnold Swarzenegger looking like a leather daddy and acting like a real daddy to poor screwed up Edward Furlong, and then sacrificing himself for humankind? This movie terrified me not because it was psychotically violent and not because that nice black computer scientist had to kill himself, but because there was no happy ending. Everything was fucked. Cut to shot of highway at night.

2. ALAS, BABYLON
I read Pat Frank’s 1959 surviving-the-nuclear-holocaust tale in my eighth grade advanced English class, which was cryptically called “A.T.P. Humanities” and taught by one Arlene Jarzab, who ran marathons and drove a red convertible. Ms. Jarzab had nothing but faith in her students’ ability to understand books typically assigned to high schoolers, which was why I read The Grapes of Wrath in fifth grade, The Good Earth in sixth grade, The Crucible in seventh grade and wrote a paper about population control in India in eighth grade. Alas, Babylon isn’t exactly one of the great works of the Western canon, but it is cannily gripping. The Russians drop the bomb on America, forcing the inhabitants of a surviving Florida town to recreate society. Diabetics die from lack of insulin, “highwaymen” are summarily executed for theft, and racial integration takes place out of necessity. The book is supposed to show how society could survive even the worst of all possible fears – by the end the survivors are serving fresh-squeezed orange juice and eating delicious roasted pigeon, and the spinsterish bluestocking is married and has chubby babies – but all I can ever think about is the telegram a military man sends his brother with their secret code for disaster: “Alas, Babylon.”

3. ANTHEM
Ayn Rand’s 1938 “Careful what you wish for, Socialists” novella was also assigned to me in eighth grade by Ms. Jarzab. In a distant future, collectivism has sent humankind back to the dark ages (but now with Communism!) and rendered them unable to use singular pronouns, meaning that the titular hero Equality 7-2521 begins every sentence with “we.” Equality is smart, but his independent thinking gets him assigned to menial labor by the Council of Vocations. He rediscovers electricity and attempts to use it for the greater good, but is imprisoned and tortured. Meanwhile, he falls in love (also a no-no) with a farm laborer. They run away together and find a preserved house in the woods, where they take the names of Prometheus and Gaea from a book. Now that I think about it, Anthem didn’t scare me so much as it pissed me off, because as soon as the woman (Gaea, nee Liberty 5-3000) learns to use the word “I,” she just starts spouting earth-mothery dreck like “I love you” and “I want to have your children,” and I kind of preferred the before version where she was reaping wheat and doing strong communist lady stuff. Also, my eighth-grade reading list looks kind of hysterically anti-Communist on second glance.

4. THE GIVER
I wonder if there’s anyone my age who read The Giver and didn’t find themselves haunted by the book’s strange blend of dystopic fiction and soft-core philosophy. I can’t recall whether or not I read Lois Lowry’s novel in school or on my own, but it almost doesn’t matter. The Giver was a genuine pop culture phenomenon among fifth- and sixth-graders in the mid-1990s, and probably still is. I remember carrying the book down the halls of my middle school and noticing who else had it, and having hushed conversations with my few friends about how very, very sad the book is. As in Anthem (and that granddaddy of dystopias, Brave New World), one of the most disturbing elements of the novel is the destruction of the family, although the infant distribution center and “birthmothers” of The Giver are somehow creepier than the straight-up kibbutz-style Home of the Infants in the Rand book (especially the scene where Jonas’s little sister mentions that she’d like to be a birthmother, and her parents admonish her…shudder). Jonas, the deep-blue-eyed, sensitive-boy protragonist, was also extremely crush-worthy. Lowry’s deft handling of adolescent sexuality stuck with me for long enough that I wrote some Giver slash when I was thirteen. I mean, Jonas’s dream about bathing Fiona? Hot.

5. THE HANDMAID’S TALE
I read Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel when I was 18, so I don’t know if it qualifies as a apocalyptic work that terrified me in childhood. It did, however, upset me more than pretty much anything I had ever read, and also established Atwood as one of my favorite authors. In my opinion The Handmaid’s Tale should be required reading for every high school junior, particularly the legions of girls ready to go wild who don’t understand what all the fuss about feminism is. The book’s funny, smart, angry narrator, Offred (quote my best friend Ben: “Offred was so fucking hot,”) explains in simple steps how Reagan-era America is destroyed by the violent religious right and transformed into the Republic of Gilead, where nuclear warfare has made fertile women a hot commodity. There as so many moments in the book that still disturb my sleep; the re-education center (really an old high school gym) where women are sent to become Handmaids, Offred’s realization that her husband must have killed their cat when they were trying to escape, the photograph of Offred’s daughter shown her by Serena Joy, and the miserable nightclub where Jezebels are kept. Atwood lights a tiny candle of hope with the epilogue, which implies that Gilead is long gone and has been replaced with churlish Inuit academics. I may demolish any respect my three readers have for me by noting that the first time I read the book, I failed to recognize its setting as Cambridge, Massachusetts. But after I figured it out, I sure couldn’t take the playful antics of those Harvard types lightly anymore. The Handmaid's Tale has been adapted into a film, play, opera, and radio play, none of which I've seen.

6. DEEP IMPACT
From my first blog, called “Madrant:”

5-16-98
Tonight, I went to see a movie which was the most moving, touching, beautifuk [sic], and horrifying film which I have ever seen. It was tragic, heartbreaking, suspenseful and humourous at times...and you know what? You Titanic freaks can all go stare at a wall, because Deep Impact KICKS ASS!
It's the story of how a comet predicted to hit earth changes the lives of so many people...eh, I no feel like explaining. But it made me cry..and if you knew me, you'd know that I NEVER cry in movies. You could show me a half-hour of children starving to death, and I'd think it was sad, but I wouldn't cry. Deep Impact Made me cry...so many valiant people...so few shelters...ARRRGGHH! Depression!
I will see Deep Impact over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again for the rest of my life...it is beautiful. And it kicks Titanic in the ass. So, to all Titanic fans: To females, stop staring at your Leo posters, use a Biore pore strip and go see this movie. YOu can see another, more appropriately aged attractive male in it, Elijah Wood(*sigh*) and ogle him...to Males, stop staring so fixatedly at your pictures of Kate Winslet nude and get off your ass, wash your hair and go outside. That glare is the sun you haven't seen in so long. Now, go to a movie theatre and see Deep Impact. Trtue, there's no naked chicks, but depending on your taste, there is Tea Leoni. Gosee [sic] it anyway...
Tired and hungry. K'bye.

It's kind of like LOLINTERNET: OH HI I'M IN YOUR PAST MAKIN YOU EMBARASSED

7. The Book of Revelations, especially as seen in the X-Files episode “All Souls” originally aired April 26, 1998

Although both of my parents were fairly burnt out on religion after decades of Catholic school and guilt, they made a valiant effort to inculcate the faith in our home. They weren’t about to send us to St. Mary-of-the-Ruler-Whack, however, so my sister and I went to extracurricular “CCD” or “Catholic class” held on Wednesday nights. I was a nightmare to the nice ladies who volunteered to teach these classes; I mean, I didn’t even process until the end of high school that they probably weren’t paid for their hour of sanctimonious workbook exercises. The highlight of my extremely splotchy CCD career was definitely seventh grade, when we were given Bibles and told to read the thing front to back. Not only did this give me bragging rights in my borderline-agnostic social circle for the rest of time, it also exposed me to Revelations, in which a woman in the sky gives birth to a dragon who swallows the sun. In “All Souls,” Scully has another forty minutes of religious guilt when she and Mulder have to figure out what’s going on with a series of handicapped girls who have died while in foster care. The girls were born with six fingers, and if I remember correctly, Lucifer is coming for them – but God gets them first, orchestrating their deaths so that they can ascend to heaven? I think? What I remember most is Scully reading some Revelations description of angels as having six wings: two to shield their eyes, two to stand on, and two to fly with. Scary. Also terrifying: Sufjan Stevens’ Seven Swans, especially the title song. Religious terror was never so hot or cuddly.

What books and movies scared you when you were small? Did the end of the world seem foreboding to you, too?

Good Ideas, Poorly Executed

2007-09-17T15:18:00.000-05:00

It’s just my luck that the first novel I read and the first movie I saw upon returning to New York this autumn have been massive disappointments, despite their seemingly engaging premises. Admittedly, I had higher hopes for Felicia Luna Lemus’s Like Son than I did for Julie Taymor’s cloying Beatles singalong Across The Universe. I first heard of Like Son via a feature interview in the April 12 Time Out New York. The novel follows the pilgrim’s process of Frank Cruz, nee Francisca, a Mexican-American trans man whose father dies, leaving him an Edward Weston photograph of Nahui Olin, a mysterious woman. The picture of Olin – a real-life member of the Mexican avant-garde movement in the 1920s and a fascinating figure in her own right – obsesses Frank over the course of a decade, during which he moves from Los Angeles to New York City, falls in love, and becomes a man. I’m fascinated by trans culture, particularly with the under-looked demographic of female-to-male transsexuals, and the Olin angle made the book even more attractive to me, because god knows I love forgotten female artists. Various other themes Like Son promised to examine included race, class, and 9/11.

The curious thing about Like Son is that it flatly does not discuss most of its supposed themes. Frank’s sexuality is only addressed when it can’t be avoided or ignored. Early on, he states that as a troubled teenager, “All I knew was that I was a boy and that being a boy felt safe and true and right” – a statement that almost directly treats his male identity as a salve for the sexual abuse he suffered as a child. It’s not that I wanted Frank to constantly justify his transsexuality, but it does seem odd how little attention the topic receives, especially in the context of Frank’s eight-year sexual relationship with his girlfriend Nathalie; they “fuck” constantly, and Nathalie wants a baby, but Lemus never addresses how all of this physical love takes place. In fact, Nathalie herself is another black hole of a character. The woman is a standard-issue indie sexpot, all messy beehive hairdo and chipped nail polish, the kind of dame who wears vintage silk cocktail dresses all the time (despite the fact that she’s apparently an office temp) and vacuums in the nude. May I suggest an industry-wide ban on these dreamy, weepy, skinny wet-dreams of the thick-framed-glasses set? These chicks have been popping up in literature like mushrooms in a dirty shower. But I digress.

Most of Like Son focuses on cutesy-for-cutesy’s sake vignettes from Nathalie and Frank’s domestic life. Nathalie is flaky and sensitive, with a tendency to run off to different states when she feels sad. Frank steals trees from the outer boroughs and replants them in Tompkins Square Park. They go to a movie at the East Village Cinemas and drink coffee from bodegas. Nahui Olin takes a backseat to this thrilling litany of fin-de-siecle New York life, emerging from time to time to enchant Frank for about an hour before he goes on to the next melodramatic thing, like getting an ill-advised tattoo before boarding a train in search of his runaway girlfriend. Most frustratingly, at the end of the book, nothing is resolved: Nahui’s picture gets put in the safe-deposit box, along with Frank’s past, which he has completely failed to explore. Like Son reads like YA author Francesca Lia Block – that progenitor of Weetzie Bat and anorexia glamour - for grownups. It would have thrilled me when I was thirteen and obsessed with anything that seemed new and different, but unfortunately now I’m just obsessed with finding novels that earn their page count.

I can't say that I thought Across The Universewas even a good idea for a movie. I’ve enjoyed Julie Taymor’s previous work, especially Titus, but a Beatles musical just seems like a terrible idea no matter who directs it. The band itself covered this territory satisfactorily during their career, and besides, what about that Cirque de Soleil thing? Mightn’t the latter be a better exploitation of the music in question than a zany Taymor-a-thon, especially considering that live performance would at least inject some energy into the proceedings? Alas, my entreaties seem to have fallen on deaf ears, because the showing I saw was packed at four in the afternoon. The film’s crimes are almost too diverse to list. Evan Rachel Wood and Jim Sturgess, as the story’s titular lovers (if you’ve seen the trailer, I doubt you need a plot summary, but here’s one anyway: “In a time of change, they loved”) have about as much chemistry as my seventh-grade self trying to light a Bunsen burner. They both behave in a peculiarly modern fashion – Wood, especially, seems more like her character from Thirteen than a hippie-turned-political activist, although probably less fun in the sack.

As The A.V. Club noted, by far the worst musical number is Eddie Izzard’s performance of “For the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” but equally excreable is anything that comes out of the lame mouths of Hendrix and Joplin rip-offs "Jojo" and "Sadie." Ultimately the film proves so frustrating, and so wildly inconsistent – why is there an Asian-American lesbian from the Midwest in the mix? Why can’t the movie make up its mind where it cares about the civil rights movement or not? Why does Vietnam look suspiciously like a museum diorama about war? – that the true sweetness of certain of its moments its completely obliterated (anachronism or nor, T.V. Carpio’s performance of “I Want To Hold Your Hand” is lovely). Weirdest of all, Across the Universe presents a Sixties America where free love and radical politics don’t deadend into the interesting, fucked-up seventies, but blossom into an endless hugfest. In a world where the Beatles are endlessly abused but never even mentioned by name, that’s a tough pill to swallow.

Loose Ends

2007-09-13T01:43:00.000-05:00

Lynch's Emily, who went with him to visit the Maharishi and was invited to stay at the holy man's house, is in fact Emily Stofle, who played "Lanni," one of the Greek chorus of prostitutes in INLAND EMPIRE. No word on why Lynch and Mary Sweeney divorced after two months of marriage in 2006, but Stofle stepped out publicly with Lynch for the first time at the Venice Film Festival, below:

I came home seriously considering signing up to learn Transcendental Meditation, and discovered that it costs $2500 to become a part of the practice. I did invest in a sort of generic-brand version called Natural Stress Relief ($25), which I have practiced intermittently since. It's good when I remember to do it.

The movie theatre in downtown Fairfield is called the Co-Ed.

David Lynch Weekend, c'est fin

2007-09-13T01:18:00.000-05:00

The Donovan concert was held in the mysteriously titled Men’s Dome on Sunday night, free to the public. My earnest chauffeur drove me around a low hill and through gold-tipped gates to the edge of a large round building. Fairfield residents walked towards the Dome laughing and talking, their Birkenstocks and linen outfits somehow color-coordinated with the landscape. The forceful presence of TM transformed the familiar Midwestern environment – rolling fields, thick stands of trees in purple dusk – into a sort of spiritual moonscape. Inside the Dome, posters praised the Maharishi and announced community events. Money was being raised to renovate the building. I removed my shoes and placed them on a rack that held hundreds of other pairs and padded into the sanctuary.

The interior of the Dome was wood; bright orange light from the saffron-curtained windows that ringed the room framed the silhouettes of the audience. I sat on the floor of interlocking foam mattresses and saw that nearly every other attendant had brought a portable chair-back, of the sort parents sometimes put on the floor for children to sit on. After a few minutes, I understood why: the cushy floor made it impossible not to slouch painfully, and lying down would eliminate my view of the stage. An enormous American flag hung from the ceiling directly above my head. On the stage stood a large icon of the Maharishi garlanded with flowers.

The woman next to me wore a flower-print prairie dress and a long brown ponytail. “Don’t you have a chair?” she asked me. I shook my head forlornly. “Oh, don’t worry – they’re for everybody,” she said, and walked off, returning with a chair-back. Somewhat more comfortably seated, I peered around at the crowd. The average age was fifty – a few people had brought young children, but nearly everyone in the Dome looked old enough to have enjoyed Donovan’s music during its heyday. The lights dimmed, and Bobby Roth came onstage, singing praises to Lynch, Donovan, MUM, and hey, all of us, too. Lynch walked on, followed by Donovan. MUM presented an award to Lynch for, well – the exact wording escapes me, but it was something along the lines of “For promoting peace and wellness through meditation in education.” Two standing ovations followed. Lynch and Donovan were photographed with a very large framed certificate. Glancing around, I recalled the numerous Fairfield residents I had encountered throughout the weekend who had had very little idea of who Lynch was, people who had never seen any of his movies but came anyway. The conference was about evenly split between Lynch enthusiasts and meditation enthusiasts, but the crowd in the Dome seemed to appreciate the director simply because he was a vocal proponent of TM.

Bobby Roth introduced one of the head educators from the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace. This man had worked in “a public school on the East Coast that was widely considered the worst high school in America. There were security guards posted every 50 feet in the hallway, and stabbings and beatings regularly took place at the school. The graduation rate was very low. And we come in saying ‘life is bliss.’

“At first the principal arranged our meditation sessions so that students had to miss study halls if they wanted to learn TM. There was one boy who had been in over one hundred and fifty fights, and he was widely considered one of the most violent people in the school. After a few sessions with us, he said: ‘I get angry, but my body won’t let me fight.’ Another boy, considered the most dangerous gang member at the high school, kept his head down at the end of a session. This was in a lecture hall, so after we called his name a few times, we climbed up and touched him on the shoulder. When he looked up, there were tears in his eyes. ‘I’ve never felt happiness before,’ he told us. A gang tried to dissuade students from attending our sessions, saying that it was a form of White mind control. But the students resisted and risked bodily harm to come. Another boy was homeless. He collected cans and spent the deposits on clothes from the Salvation Army. His family had just fallen apart. But he was a talented artist, and always wanted to pursue his talent. He got involved with us, and meditation seemed to work for him. He won first-place in a state competition for talented young artists, and he’s now attending school on a full scholarship.

“At the end of the year the principal of the school called us into his office and put the master schedule for the next semester in front of us. ‘We want you to put meditation on the schedule first,’ the principal said. ‘We’re making it mandatory for all students.’”

It was the second time I had heard this success story, and the second time it choked me up (It would probably behoove the reader to know that I am an unreliable narrator in that I am extremely susceptible to sentimental stories of unlikely success, in every category from education to athletics). It had elements that made me suspicious – why, for example, was each success story about a boy who had evidently been voted “worst” by a shadowy faculty committee? But I innately trusted the speaker, probably because he was a more realistic beefy Midwestern type, a guy my dad might know, than the ethereal clerks of the MUM bureaucracy I had been exposed to thus far.

Transcendental meditation has elements that might be generously described as eccentric and more accurately called cultish: a professed belief in something called “yogic flying” (about which Bobby Roth did at one point joke, saying “I mean, if you really want to start thinking I’m weird…”) and the reverence for the Maharishi himself. During the weekend I encountered Helena and Ronald Olson’s His Holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi: A Living Saint for the New Millennium : Stories of His First Visit to the USA, a memoir by the Southern California couple who housed the Maharishi on his first trip to America. The Maharishi turned the Olsons’ lives upside down, bringing in his own laundress, overstaying his welcome and hosting impromptu gatherings that lasted long into the night, and the American family responded by building an addition onto their house especially for him. The fervent devotion to a living man was too Messianic for my taste. But after two days of Lynch Weekend, I was completely onboard with the integration meditation into education. I was neither an over- nor underachiever in my primary and secondary school days, and yet I would still sometimes fall into paroxysms of guilt and worry over the mountains of work I wasn’t doing. Mightn’t a twice-daily calm down soothe so many of the problems rampant in American schools, administering a chill pill with no known side effects?

Donovan played the same setlist as the night before. Around me, people leaned closer together, closed their eyes and smiled, leapt to their feet for multiple ovations. Lynch was again seated next to the mysterious Emily, of whom I could see only a full head of dark hair. At the end of the evening, the audience walked out calmly. I felt the dangerous pull of fandom. Lynch was still in the Dome, presumably waiting to leave. I knew I shouldn’t wait. I wanted to wait. Admirers in the same position fanned out around me like trees on a barren stretch of prairie, leaning towards the director as he crossed to the side of the room, Emily in tow. She departed his side and gathered a chair. “Come on,” I heard her tell him. “Sit down.” Collectively, we began to gather forward in hope: he was sitting still. But as soon as we had the thought, Lynch and his lady were up and out the door, done with us.

The ride I was supposed to get from one of the men who had driven me to and from my hotel before failed to materialize. I wandered around the rapidly emptying parking lot, wondering how I would get back to my room. It was a quiet and safe night. I bumped into a street sign bearing my mother's maiden name. If I had to hitchhike, Fairfield was the best place to do it.

David Lynch Weekend, Day 3

2007-07-05T19:00:00.000-05:00

(I am currently out of the country and have intermittent access to email, so please forgive the erratic posting.)

“Hi! My husband and I attended your birthday party last year, and we gave you a book about meteorology, and I was wondering if you got a chance to read it? My husband is a meteorologist in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, if that helps you remember?” The woman turned her voice up slightly at the end of every sentence. She had short, curly blonde hair, and her outfit leaned more towards affluent housewife than spiritual seeker. She smiled at David Lynch expectantly, clearly expecting him to be impressed by her knowledge of his interest in the weather.

“Well, no,” the director answered, smiling apologetically. “And I’ll tell you why. That’s because I haven’t been home – honestly, really haven’t been home – in six months. I’ve been promoting my movie, and I haven’t been back at my house in a long time.” The woman actually looked at him with some disappointment before retiring from the microphone. Although there had been a great deal of over-familiar address used in the Q & A sessions – the previous day’s question for Donovan that began with “Hello, brother,” was memorable – I couldn’t get used to the innocent expectation many of these people had that Lynch would remember them from a previous meeting or take them under his wing as collaborators.

It was the middle of Sunday, the final day of Lynch Weekend. The morning’s lectures had included a historical perspective on meditation from MUM’s executive vice president titled “From Lao Tzu to Einstein: Experiences of Higher States of Consciousness” and a short tutorial called “Ayurveda and Mind-Body Balance” delivered by Nancy Lonsdorf, M.D. Through a brief quiz Lonsdorf helped the audience determine their Ayurvedic type – my memory fails me, but I believe the types were dry, moist, and something else. The type dictated a particular self-care regime. The doctor shared anecdotes about the efficacy of Ayurvedic medicine as well. “I used to work with a very overweight lady, and she asked me for tips on how to lose weight. Well, I told her a lot of things she could do, and then when I saw her a little later, I asked her how it was going. ‘I don’t really care for a lot of it,’ she told me, ‘but I do like the hot water part.’ I had told her to drink hot water; it helps the digestion. Well, anyway, it happened that I was out of town and didn’t see her for number of months, and when I returned I went into the kitchen of the building. There was another woman in the room with me, like a girl really, and her back was turned to me. I had never seen her before: she was slim and had long braids. She turned around, and it was the overweight lady; she had lost about one hundred pounds.”

The story, like many I had heard during the weekend, was enchanting but slightly suspect. None of the Ayurvedic health suggestions were groundbreaking or outré – Lonsdorf spoke a great deal about going to bed early regularly, getting enough exercise, cutting down on fat and sugar, and drinking plenty of fluids. Couldn’t the overweight lady have suddenly taken up bicycling or gotten gastric bypass surgery? The possible reasons didn’t matter; what mattered was that she had drunk the hot water and then lost weight. When Bobby Roth took the podium back from Nancy Lonsdorf, he said proudly, “And Dr. Lonsdorf is just about to turn fifty, folks.” There was applause; indeed, with her soft blonde hair and slim body – covered in a figure-skimming tan suit just like Bobby Roth’s – Dr. Lonsdorf looked very young.

When the second Q&A with Lynch and Donovan began, I resolved to stand in line to ask a question. I had no idea what I would ask, but I felt strongly that I must take advantage of the opportunity to speak to David Lynch. One of my somewhat unfounded assumptions about Lynch Weekend was that the event would give me the chance to happen upon the director in a hallway or at the dessert table and speak with him in a leisurely fashion. One of the photographs from Lynch Weekend 2006 shows the director standing the center of a room surrounded by admirers as he smiles patiently and signs a DVD. I kept waiting for that same photo op to arrive, but it never did. Perhaps this was because I was very dependent on the bus that took me to and from my hotel – I could not linger in the hallway after an event but had to make haste towards the driveway, where a van driven by a member of the community was waiting.

For most of my life I have maintained the gauche activity of admiring celebrities. When I was four, largely through the influence of my parents, I began a lifelong interest in Madonna – a home movie from this period shows me singing and dancing enthusiastically along with the video for “Papa Don’t Preach.” In fifth grade I had a crush on Elijah Wood in Flipper and in sixth grade on the Ewan McGregor in Brassed Out (a Scottish film about a coal mining brass band that features a charmingly oily McGregor). The sparkling centerpiece of my idol worship commenced in 1998 with my great love generally for The Smashing Pumpkins and specifically for Billy Corgan. The band’s lead singer is a singularly devise figure – his nasal snarl and hairless pretension made immediate enemies of about half the populace – but to me at age thirteen he was a tantalizing mixture of mystic bard and rock god (a description, it occurs to me, that Donovan would probably like to apply to himself). I collected Pumpkins memorabilia through eBay auctions and obscure mailorder catalogues in the days before cohesive internet fandom and grappled with embittered thirty-year-old fans on Listessa, the SP mailing list. On October 17, 1998, the band – now reduced to Corgan, guitarist James Iha and bassist D’Arcy, having ejected drummer Jimmy Chamberlain for drug use – held a promotional signing for their new album with radio station Q101 at Navy Pier. I had a water polo game that same day, but my dad resolved to take me over to the event during our lunch break. As I walked into the room – hair wet, glasses fogging up – and spotted Corgan in the corner, I nearly fainted. The idea that I was mere feet from my man flabbergasted me, all the way through my stumbling, dumb-smile trip over to the table where the band sat. “Here you go,” the once and future king of my heart said to me, handing the CD back, and I mumbled “Thank you,” then had to go sit down*.

In the intervening years I like to think I have gotten better at meeting the people I admire. Living in New York has endowed me with the ability to pretend like I don’t notice celebrities immediately, but it has not taken away the impulse to run home and call everyone I know to tell them that I saw Josh Hartnett on Bowery and Bond Street and I don’t even like him but Josh Hartnett! In a situation like David Lynch Weekend, where I had actually paid for the privilege to share air with the object of my adoration, it seemed imperative to make the most of my proximity. But any idea of what to say to a famous person you admire seems highly boring, including doing something zany like jumping on stage or asking for a personal favor. Indeed, the sweetly naïve expectations of my co-attendees had begun to irritate me. The best questions were the ones about craft or decisions that prompted spontaneous reactions from Lynch, like the teacher who was worried about integrating TM into her school’s curriculum for fear it might be seen as a religious program. “Meditation isn’t religion,” Lynch answered. “There’s enough religion!”

A Father's Day present, courtesy of Donovan

2007-06-19T18:50:00.000-05:00

And now, a break from your regularly scheduled David Lynch Weekend programming.

As I’ve noted, my affection for Donovan stems from my experience of listening to him in the car with my mother. But there’s a more involved story about my history with Donovan’s music. One weekend in February 1995, my mother went to New York City to visit my grandmother, leaving my sister and I with my dad. I was on swim team then, which meant early-morning meets at the high school about once a month in the winter. I dreaded jumping into the cold sweaty pool at seven in the morning, and the constant beeping that meant “go” during the races made me a nervous wreck. Because of the high stress of the swim meets, I could usually finagle some sort of gift out of my dad afterwards – a couple of new pogs (or one special slammer!), say, or a trip to a movie. I wanted to see a movie that day, but only two were showing at the local theatre: The Big Green, some sort of soccer movie for kids starring a chubby boy with curly red hair (Patrick Renna, it turns out) and Gus Van Sant’s To Die For.

My dad and I both knew which movie we should see, and which movie we wanted to see. The latter had Nicole Kidman and ugly-hot teenage Joaquin Phoenix (together! naked!), and that’s the movie we ended up seeing. It was the type of snap judgment call that my parents have often made in favor of nudity, violence, and ordering me wine at restaurants when I was fifteen, and I love them for it. “Season of The Witch” is used to great effect in the last scene of To Die For (no spoilers). After the movie, my dad took me to Coconuts, where we bought a copy of Donovan’s greatest hits. We played it in the car while we drove to Long John Silver’s. The song “There Is A Mountain” came on, with the memorable lyric “First there is a mountain, / then there is no mountain, / then there is!” My dad started laughing. “What is this guy on?” he asked me. Knowing rhetorical questions about drug references (although I'm sure Donovan maintains his song is about the ocean of bliss within the self, not acid) after a disturbing movie, set to a soundtrack of psychedelia and crunchy fried shrimp: my dad was treating me like an adult, or how I imagined he would treat an adult.I was in heaven.

David Lynch Weekend, Day Two: Donovan in Concert

2007-06-19T16:55:00.000-05:00

I walked back into downtown Fairfield in search of a meal with meat. It had been raining on and off since the early morning, and I dodged pondlike puddles every few steps. I had asked a tan-suited man at the information desk where was a good place to eat in town, but he had stared at me uncomprehendingly and answered, “Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t eat out.” After passing the BP, which sold coffee but nothing worth eating, I crossed the street every few paces or so to remain on the side with the sidewalk – the paved strips were not constant but alternated on either side of the road. I passed Every Body’s, a combination organic grocery store and vegetarian restaurant. Then a few more blocks of houses and empty lots, and when I rounded the corner towards my hotel I saw a monumental building of red stone, complete with a clock tower.

It was the Fairfield court house, clearly dating from another, more prosperous time, when passenger trains stopped at the town’s tracks instead of twenty-two miles to the east in Mount Pleasant. Like many small Midwestern towns, Fairfield is arranged around a large town square. The town boasts a surprising number of restaurants, including a “Thai Deli,” several places specializing in ayurvedic cuisine, and some pleasantly new-age coffee shops. One such spot is Revelations, which is a combined bookstore and wood-oven pizza emporium. Directly across from my hotel was Azteca, a Mexican restaurant. Although I have had bad experiences with “ethnic” cuisine in isolated locales (and airport sushi, but that’s another story) it looked like my best bet to get some meat and hot sauce in my system; the blandness of MUM’s food was beginning to make me feel faint.

After a surprisingly good meal of beef tacos, I retired to my hotel room. The rain had begun again, and I had no desire to tough out the twenty-minute walk back to campus, as I was utterly without umbrella or slicker. Fairfield has no public transportation to speak of; I had made the journey from Mount Pleasant with the aid of a man whose number I had found on the David Lynch Weekend website, who had in turn sent his sister to pick me up at the train station. Through this woman I discovered Fairfield’s intricate network of the retiree chauffers, calm, friendly people who seemed slightly bemused as to what all the fuss about Lynch was. I called her on her cell phone and asked if she would be willing to drive me back to MUM for Donovan’s concert. I felt slightly bad every time I called to ask for a ride, because I knew I would interrupt her gardening or doing something else she enjoyed; her chauffering was incidental, not vocational. Of course, she told me. It would cost me six dollars. On the ride there, she asked me if I thought Lynch’s movies would be in the Fairfield library. “I’d like to watch one,” she told me.

Donovan was to play two concerts over the course of the weekend; one at the Ogden Auditorium, and another at something called the Men’s Dome. Saturday evening’s was in the auditorium, the same smallish room where I had thus far heard Lynch, Donovan, John Hagelin and various others rapturously introduced by Bobby Roth. My overflow badge damned me to the same wait for entry, but I no longer worried that I would have to watch the concert in the empty broadcast tent beside the auditorium which I had yet to enter. A local paper had noted that two Native American school groups were attending the conference, ostensibly because of its emphasis on integrating meditation into education. I recognized the students passing me into the auditorium. Not only were they by far the youngest attendees, but they were herded by a woman who chose her words carefully – “All right, ladies and gentlemen, now I would appreciate it if we could all move in a straight line and quietly towards that door” – and spoke in the measured field trip voice I remembered from my middle school teachers. I settled in the last row of white plastic chairs, a vast improvement over the bleachers from the day before, and waited.

Bobby Roth, glowing in a fashion normally reserved for expectant mothers, took the podium. I regret not bringing a tape recorder to the Weekend, if for no other reason than that I have no recordings of Roth’s introductions. I feel that my descriptions here have reduced them to a ridiculous stream of repetitive superlatives, but in truth they were all distinct, and genuine; Roth truly felt excited and impressed by everyone who spoke. He was a fine speaker, and as a sort of proxy contained the excitement of the entire room. Donovan was praised and feted, his recent history noted, and then the man himself emerged, dressed in rockerly clothes: a close-fitting black sweater with some sort of white pattern and black pants. He carried a green guitar with a small gold emblem of a deer on its body. As the applause soared and Donovan settled in his chair, I glanced around at the crowd. Many couples resembled each other, as a dog begins to look like its owner: pairs of people with lank dishwater blond hair spilling over their collars or wearing matching black jackets, their hands clasped in polite affection. The anxious, calm faces of the teachers in the audience interested in what TM had to offer them bobbed like hopeful lightbulbs over their bodies. Here and there were MUM students, their unlined faces serene in a fashion that belied their youth.

Donovan announced “And I am, the Sunshine Superman,” launching into that song. It was just he and his acoustic guitar – he had no backup band – and his solo performance lent some credence to the somewhat pretentious things he had said in his Q & A about being a troubadour, a single poet, who sang and wrote alone. “Even John [Lennon] and Paul [McCartney] didn’t truly collaborate; each were individual artists,” he had instructed one questioner. His guitar playing was efficient and impressive, and the pall of snark that had fallen on him during his Q&A sessions seemed to lift. My favorite part of Donovan’s music has always been the unexpected sounds with which he dressed up his songs: the hum-om vocal modulation on “Hurdy Gurdy Man,” the organ on “Wear Your Love Like Heaven,” the careening whir on “Sunshine Superman.” Absent these effects, however, his music was just as compelling, stripped of excess but not of feeling. I was struck again by how wonderful his music is for children, not only in its sunny psychedelic subject but also in its repeated belief that everything will be all right. Unfortunately, that part of me that never made a good babysitter when every other twelve-year-old girl in my suburb was raking in the dough ignoring children for a few hours on a weeknight kicked in when the school group behind me screamed in a shrill, alarming tone and clapped offbeat throughout most of the performance. One of them sang repetitive snatches of a Rihanna song.

Here is Donovan’s setlist from Saturday night:

Sunshine Superman
Catch The Wind
Colors
Gentle Heart (a song he explained would be on his new album)
Lalena
Hurdy Gurdy Man
Wear Your Love Like Heaven
Season of the Witch
Jennifer Juniper
The Universal Soldier
Happiness Runs

Encore

A whispery blues song, also on the new album, whose title was not given
Mellow Yellow

Earlier, to a questioner who had wanted to know about his thoughts on performing, Donovan had said “Play three fantastic songs, and then you’ve got them, and you can do whatever you want.” This was precisely what he did in the Ogden auditorium. He had a carefully crafted set of patter that he kept coming between and during the songs. In the middle of “Hurdy Gurdy Man,” Donovan launched into a story about how George Harrison had written a verse of the song when they were in India with the Maharishi. Would we like to hear it, he asked? Well, he would too. Unfortunately, no pen was available when Harrison composed his verse. It wasn’t included in the recorded song, he explained, because at the time London studios required songs to be less than three minutes long. The crowd let out a collective sigh of disappointment. But! Donovan had memorized it, and would sing it for us tonight. It involved time being buried and truth coming to light. “Season of the Witch,” Donovan noted, was Lynch’s favorite of his songs. The audience was often invited to sing along, especially on “Happiness Runs,” a song about meditation that Donovan noted was now being used to sell cereal. I had never heard the song before, but as he instructed us to sing “Happiness runs, happiness runs,” (“First the gents! Now the ladies!") and trilled “Thought is just a little boat upon the sea,” above the crowd’s eager chorus, we all fell into clapping pattycake-style, like a room full of five-year-olds at a singalong. I love concerts, but I’ve rarely felt the sort of togetherness Donovan managed to forge between the Eraserhead devotees, people who had meditated for more than thirty years, and his own bliss-conscious fans. When he left the stage, it was to a roaring ovation.

I had seen Donovan in person once before, in February 2007 at the Anthology Film Archives’ showing of Jacques Demy’s The Pied Piper. The theatre at that cinema is always freezing in the winter, and Donovan emerged on stage to introduce the movie wearing a silky scarf, his hair a dark corona over his black jacket. “In 1972,” he said, “I was the Pied Piper. The question is,” he paused, “Am I still the Pied Piper?” Another pause. “And the answer is yes. I am still the Pied Piper.” He smiled mysteriously and backed into the eaves, moving in a way that reminded me of the albino in Wild At Heart who walks by Sailor and Lula, gesticulating with ecstasy while Koko Taylor performs in a bar in New Orleans.

David Lynch Weekend, Day Two

2007-06-13T15:01:00.000-05:00

At five after eight the shuttle to the university’s campus had yet to arrive. Torrential rain fell outside my hotel’s window, and there was no number to call to check whether or not I had transportation to the day’s events, which were to begin at nine-thirty with a videoconference appearance by John Hagelin. Breakfast, my schedule informed me, was from eight to nine-thirty. An endless series of nondescript white cars passed in front of the hotel, and then finally a small yellow school bus skidded around the corner. A few moments later a fit man with a white mustache appeared in the front door of the hotel. “You waiting for a shuttle?” he asked. The driver, it turned out, was a gym teacher at the local high school, and the school bus was the chariot of choice for the girls’ tennis team he coached. He had accidentally left the top hatch open overnight, so almost every seat was covered in water. After he dropped me in front of MUM’s Student Union, I hoofed it around to the entrance, which was in the back of building, a Vedic quirk it shared with many of the MUM buildings I had seen thus far.

This breakfast would be my first taste of the university’s much-vaunted all-organic vegetarian cuisine. The three steaming rows of heated trays at the far end of the room looked promising from afar, but their contents were sparse and baffling. Two held liquid – one brown, the other white – and then there were some few scrapings of what could only be oatmeal. Then there were two empty trays, and after that one half-full of hash browns. There were also long plates of muffins and scones and vast bowls of the type of fruit salad you find at McDonald's: cantaloupe, honeydew melon, canned pineapple and red grapes. A large heated tank of was optimistically labeled ROOIBOS and LEMONGRASS but proved to be empty. There were barely twenty-five people in the room, and almost no food. Breakfast had been in session for twenty minutes. I scraped up some oatmeal and topped it with the white liquid – warmed milk – and felt silly for expecting scrambled eggs.

After consuming a meal that needed little chewing (hash browns, oatmeal, water and a banana) I headed over to the Henry Ogden Clark auditorium. I was an “overflow” attendee, having registered late and at a great discount, and as such was supposed to watch the live events on a screen in another room. When I attempted to cross into the overflow room, however, one of the amiable Fairfield police officers milling around told me that it was likely I would be seated in the main auditorium, as it seemed there was enough room for everyone. Thus I began the wait that I would regularly engage in, watching blue-badged “Guests” and green-badged “Visitors” (I never quite understood the distinction between the two) pass down the hall while I waited in orange-badge steerage.

Eventually I was ushered into the room and settled on the same bleachers at the back of the room I had perched on the night before. Robert – hereafter “Bobby,” as Lynch called him – Roth took the stage and delivered another effusive introduction, this one for Hagelin, whom I learned had worked at several prestigious physics labs with acryonym names, such as CERN, and had been the Natural Law party’s candidate for the presidency in 2000 (somewhat less impressively, Hagelin appeared in the films What The Bleep Do We Know and The Secret). The physicist’s visage appeared on two large screens on either side of the stage, a golden map stretching behind him and the words “Raja New York” printed beneath his torso. Balding, with kind blue eyes, he looked exactly like the fellow in the Napster logo.

I am ill equipped to properly summarize his talk, for although he continually mentioned that he “didn’t want to get too technical,” the lecture involved several slides of physics equations, indecipherable charts, and a hand-drawn illustration of some sort of bubbling. To be very short, he explained the scientific proof of the existence of consciousness and of the unified field. Hagelin did not strike me as a charlatan but rather as a man wholly preoccupied with his work, and possibly somewhat blinded by the excitement it gave him. When the audience was invited to ask questions of the physicist, each questioner was projected onto the large screen as they spoke. A young man wanted to know what dark matter had to do with the unified field, and a woman was curious about the fact that many great meditators chose to “drop” their bodies and live solely in the blissful consciousness. Their voices shared a tentative quality and Hagelin’s warm responses visibly softened their worry. Dark matter had no light of it and was not part of the unified field, although it was a natural part of the universe. One could leave their body, but there is so much bliss and joy in life that no one need depart before they were ready.

After the physicist was bid adieu with much fanfare, Roth trilled praise for Lynch and the director appeared on stage. Long lines had already formed behind each of the microphones, and many of the questioners looked strangely similar: men in their late twenties or early thirties armored in nondescript baseball caps and faded heather gray t-shirts, women with a single quirky item of clothing – a red leather jacket, spike heels – to compliment their organic outfits. One called Lynch Dave, some called him David, and most called him Mr. Lynch. They thanked him at the beginning and the end of their queries, and they tried to sneak in a second question when he’d answered their first. They shook and wrung their hands when they spoke and smiled. All of the questioners reached toward David Lynch with their whole bodies, as if they wanted to embrace him, to be nearer to his person.

“Where do you get your ideas?”
“I am a filmmaker, and I have been working on some projects, and I was interested how you motivate people into working on your ideas.”
“Sometimes I have an idea, and I get so excited about having caught the big fish that I can’t cook it. Do you know what I mean?”
“I have watched all of your movies, and I have to say that I like The Straight Story the best. I feel that you have really captured the feeling of the Midwest. I wanted to ask if you lived here before you made that movie?”
To this last, Lynch answered: “No…The Straight Story is the only one of my films that I did not write. At the time I was going with a girl named Mary [Sweeney, Lynch’s editor of many years and the mother of his son Riley, born in 1992] and she had a friend named John Roach from kindergarten, and they were working on a script. I lived in Madison, Wisconsin in the summers, right on the water. And they talked about it, and I wasn’t interested, but then when it was done they asked me to take a look. And then I decided I wanted to do it.”

A woman asked how he planned the color in his movies. Lynch said that he did not, but admitted that it was an important aspect of his films: “Frank Booth wouldn’t exactly wear pink.” Blue Velvet’s titular villain came up in other questions; a man wanted to know how Lynch “got such amazing performances out of actors, particularly Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet.” In almost every answer, Lynch repeated his conviction that an idea, once properly caught, contains all of the specifics of an art project. No element is left to fate of decision; the idea comes fully formed, a little homunculus waiting for incubation. A woman explained that she was an English teacher from Fairfield and asked if Lynch could please explain what Mullholland Drive was about.

The director smiled. “When I was making Eraserhead,” he answered, “I had no idea what it was about. And I thought about it and thought about it, and at this time I was reading the Bible. And one day I found a line that explained to me exactly what Eraserhead was about.” The audience held its breath. “But it doesn’t help for me to explain what the idea means to me. Your reaction is more important and interesting.” A young man with a bleached crew cut and several long strands of prayer beads hung around his neck explained that he had come to David Lynch Weekend the year before, become interested in TM, and was now hoping to attend the school itself. “Things have really gotten better for me,” he told Lynch, smiling. He wanted to know what was the name of the book that had encouraged Lynch’s artistic goals as a young man.

“I’m really happy to hear that,” Lynch answered, beaming, and then named The Art Spirit by Robert Henri again. Lynch took at least five minutes answering each question. He gestured in his inimitable way, wiggling all of the fingers on one or both of his hands like the fronds of an undersea plant. He was patient with the questioners even when they interrupted him or tried to prompt him. Then it was time to ask Donovan questions, and Lynch was led offstage smiling.
The first guy up to the microphone looked to be in his early twenties, and had bleached a random hank of the hair behind his ear. His question was almost incomprehensible and involved something about the politics of Donovan’s performances. He spoke meanderingly for over three minutes, when Donovan crisply interrupted him, saying, “I think I know what you’re talking about, yes.”

Another man addressed Donovan with “Brother, I too am a singer-songwriter, like you.” And then the guy with the bleached hair and the prayer beads was back. “Will you play ‘Ferris Wheel’ tonight?” he wanted to know. Donovan did not project the boundless goodwill that Lynch had; he seemed somehow miffed about the whole situation, as if nobody in the auditorium was giving him his proper due. He gave long, considered answers, however, complete with encouraging if stretched smiles at the end.

We filtered out to lunch, held in a gym shaped like an airplane hanger across the way from the auditorium. There was more food to be had than at breakfast, but it proved disappointingly bland: veggie burgers, a sort of cream of mushroom soup, steamed cauliflower and carrots, and boiled squash. Aside form a pair of regulation-issue plastic salt and pepper shakers – the pepper shaker and pepper itself a dispiriting shade of beige – no seasoning was offered. I was impressed with the strict delineation of waste – biodegradable forks and knives in one bin, food in another – and with the claim that all of the food was organic, and much of it locally grown – but this was the type of mushy, tasteless meal that made people hate vegans. I felt faint and cranky, wishing there was some damn coffee somewhere, and too full of bland starch to try the ice cream being served out of a large white cooler at the center of the gym. When I tried to leave the lunchroom via some open doors at closest to my table, an MUM employee told me that I had to leave through the entrance I had come in.

I was beginning to recognize certain Vedic restrictions in MUM’s campus architecture. In addition to the nifty pagoda-like structure atop several of the buildings, cars could only enter the campus from one direction. The man who told me that I couldn’t exit the building from that direction wore a natty tan suit on his thin runners frame. His hairline was receding somewhat, but otherwise he looked younger than I somehow knew he was. The restricted doors, piles of bland vegetables and eerily healthy men with eager smiles underscored TM’s reputation as a cult in my head. But I gritted my teeth and went out another door.

David Lynch Weekend, Day One

2007-05-27T00:16:00.000-05:00

The woman to my right wore her long silver hair in a sort of anime chignon held up by chopsticks. Wavy tendrils fell down her long neck, on which balanced a smooth walnut head. I watched her large “transitioning” glasses fade clear from a warm, rosy brown. Her coral silk dress fell in generous folds around her yoga-toned body. Stopping before the bleachers at the back of the room, she took a cushion made of saffron fabric from her bag and placed it on the bench. She sat and removed a thin journal from her bag. The book had flowers printed on the front, and a word in black print that I couldn’t make out, but it looked like it said “dreams.”

I was inside Maharishi University of Management’s (MUM) Henry Ogden Clark Auditorium for the opening reception of the second annual David Lynch Weekend. The subtitle of the event was “Exploring the frontiers of consciousness, creativity and the brain,” and the schedule promised seminars on creativity with director David Lynch and Donovan. About three years ago, Lynch became suddenly loquacious about his thirty-year involvement with Transcendental Meditation (TM). In the fall of 2005 the previously interview-wary Lynch undertook a campus tour across America, lecturing about meditation’s effect on his creative process. Fans of the director crowded into theaters with questions about the filmmaker’s most beloved movies and production secrets. Lynch’s answers were both elucidating and evasive, towing the publicity line of mystery and apocryphal stories long since established in Lynch lore: The director does not have a favorite of his films, but Dune is his least favorite. He discovered he wanted to make movies when, as an art student in the late 1960s, he looked at a painting and decided he’d like it to move. A book called The Art Spirit by Robert Henri bolstered his early interest in art. He does not talk about the baby in Eraserhead.

But another, somewhat cuddlier Lynch emerged on his lecture tour. Wiggling his hands in the air, face shining, Lynch explained over and over again – in answer to almost every question – about the blissful process of “diving within” to an “ocean of pure energy” where ideas like “big fish” were abundant for the catching. In 2005, David Lynch founded the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace, an initiative promoting the incorporation of meditation into education. The first David Lynch Weekend was held at MUM (located in Fairfield, Iowa) in March of last year, and in December Lynch published Catching the Big Fish, a sort of creative memoir detailing his relationship with meditation. Along with Lynch, the event’s keynote speaker was John Hagelin, Ph.D., a physicist who claimed to have found scientific evidence of a “unified field” – Lynch’s energy ocean – on the molecular level. For the weekend’s second year, British singer-songwriter Donovan had joined the roster of luminaries.

On the opening night of the second David Lynch Weekend, the average age of an attendee seemed to be around forty-five. Sensible shoes, beige flax outfits and long, straight hair were favored by men and women alike. Lynch Weekend fell on the same three days as prospective student and alumni weekends at MUM. All visitors to the university had passes to the Lynch events. “Student hosts” in flashy green t-shirts congregated around the punch table in the lobby. MUM operates a tobacco-, alcohol-, drug-, and meat-free campus, so the punch was a mixture of white grape juice and apple cider and the students were uniformly earthy, self-assured young people. Although I envied their nattily designed green t-shirts, which featured a triumvirate of stylized portraits of Lynch, Donovan and John Hagelin, their smiling authority proved unreliable; other than directions around the campus, they could provide little in the way of information. “Do you know when the shuttle is running?” I asked one of them. “No,” she answered, “But let me check with someone else.” When she came back, she simply shook her head sadly.

Inside the auditorium, the silver-haired woman scribbled a few words inside her journal and closed it quickly as Robert Roth, the vice president of the David Lynch Foundation and event coordinator for the weekend, took the stage. He deemed the strange couple of Lynch and Donovan “two of the greatest creative artists of our time.” Both were accorded a short video introduction. Donovan’s was a quick-moving montage of images of the musician walking near the ocean, wearing a variety of hats, and singing on television to an audience of contemplative girls in black and white, set to a sound collage of each of his top singles, beginning with “Catch the Wind.” The video also included Dylan’s proclamation of hatred for Donovan from Don’t Look Back and strategically placed pictures of the singer with the Beatles. As a young man, Donovan had a full halo of dark curly hair, a mischievous Pied Piper (whom he played in a Jacques Demy movie) face and snaggleteeth. After Roth murmured through a crescendoing introduction, pronouncing Donovan “the poet…the man that forty years ago returned from India with the mission of spreading the ideals of meditation…the most extraordinary musician,” the man himself entered stage left from behind a thick velvet curtain. His hair has rearranged itself slightly but lost none of its fullness, and Donovan’s eyes have, if anything, become brighter in the lined map of his face. His teeth, presumably, have remained constant. He spoke about muses, five-stringed instruments, “the Goddess” and his wife, Linda, whom he identified as his muse and connection to the Goddess.

Then Lynch’s video intro was cued; the audience was told it had been directed by one Sam Lee, and featured “Lynch’s own music.” What followed was a somewhat blah slideshow of Lynch headshots and candids set to the Twin Peaks theme, intercut with quotes from the director relating to the weekend’s raison d’etre. The music segued into Julee Cruise’s “Mysteries of Love,” the song that plays in the penultimate moments of Blue Velvet, and the content of the photographs changed to shots of Lynch at schools, embracing children. Then with little ado, Lynch also pushed through the curtain, wearing his trademark flyaway pompadour, black suit and skinny tie. He took the podium and remarked that his journey had begun in a mud puddle with a childhood friend named Little Dickie, and joked that there were not many fish to be caught in that pond. “There is a big pond in every human being,” Lynch said. Roth explained that the director and someone named Emily had just arrived from Cannes, where he had debuted a new short film and “been lauded beyond what any of us can imagine.” Both he and Donovan were very tired, but each would answer one pre-selected question, submitted by an audience member.

The question was “What does the creative process feel like for you?” Considering that Catching the Big Fish is essentially a 176-page answer to this question, it seemed a bit redundant, and Lynch responded by paraphrasing the book: “Very, very good,” followed by a long pause. “Nothing is happening, and then something happens. And the whole process is just so blissful. I guess I just could have said blissful.” Donovan explained that when he found himself in connection with the goddess, he began to have poetic thoughts, and it didn’t matter whether what he was doing was any good or not. “But then, I start to think my poetic connection might help another person’s poetic connection, and I want to share it.” The great artists were thanked, and Roth announced there would be desserts in the lobby, followed by some “student entertainment.” I followed the woman with the rose-colored glasses into the lobby, where she delicately nibbled some olive tapenade on a melba toast.

I came to Lynch Weekend largely because of my love of Lynch’s work, but I also admire Donovan; I grew up listening to him in the car with my mother every morning on the way to school. The combination of these two men struck me as an unlikely event, made all the more remarkable by the fact that their pairing took place in small-town Iowa. Transcendental Meditation has sometimes been called a cult. The campus’s corps of smiling thin people in light colored clothing and strict all-vegetarian dining halls made this allegation easy to understand, but as I waited for the shuttle back to my hotel I did not feel as if I were being indoctrinated. “Student entertainment” trailed out of the auditorium in the form of an old-timey electric guitar riff. A girl wearing a prospective student badge talked excitedly to a green-shirted boy. The air held a heady mixture of 1960s idealism and postmodern spiritual seeking. The diverse other attendees, including two Native American school groups, milled around, speaking their own patois of mixed accents and unique vocabulary: “yogic flying,” “energy node,” “troubadour experience.” These people had come to the center of the country to celebrate the power of thought. I watched their shadows streak down and away from inside the shuttle that had finally come, bearing me smoothly back to the hotel.