Writer's block. Is there a more painful thing for a scribe to encounter? Oh sure, the obvious answer is kidney stones - those are a sumbitch on the nether regions, from what I understand - but I am having a total whiteout moment over here, and it's killing me.
It's not just writer's block. Looking back over the blog, there's been no real theme (okay, yes, "myself" is a theme, but it's not one I'm necessarily proud of. Let's hear it for narcissism!); I don't focus on fashion, or music, or TV, food and drink, or the peculiar proclivities of 13-year-old fashion bloggers. Not having a specific niche is nice. I do get to enjoy both ragging on Chuck Klosterman - my inaugural blog post! - and giggling over high school theatre stars. On the other hand, it sort of makes it tough, because no real theme means I can write about anything. Sometimes, freedom from choice isn't all that awesome.
Anyway, I'm still in the middle of a run of serious winter blues, and had two (two!) weird let's-feel-faint episodes this weekend, so physically, I'm a little thousand-yard-stare these days. I'm having a hard time concentrating - especially on school, which is a bummer for a student with one semester left. All I really want to do is hole up in my apartment, order takeout and take baths, but I have obligations. School? Pshaw. Family? They live far! Friends? Meh.
See? Not a happy girl.
Please forgive my lack of awesomeness in this post, since there's a definite reason (writer's block, January blahs, orange-alert level probable dehydration...take your pick), and send positive vibes my way. Or, feel free to suggest topics, since I do love a Lois Lane-style assignment or two. And if you're out there feeling lonely and wintry and altogether like you've been dealt an unjustly low hand, take solace in the fact that I'm right there with you. And take solace that things can only really get better from here. The days are getting longer, you can buy sasparilla in your local corner store, and reading week is right around the corner. C'mon, babies: let's feel awesome together!
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Go Look It Up
While I admittedly have a soft spot for atlases - the hours of fun perusing places I'll never visit, like Vienna or Wisconsin - I also have a fondness for the atlas's verbose twin, the dictionary. Reading Infinite Jest this summer taught me to have one finger on the page and another frantically leafing through my shoddy "student dictionary" which, shockingly, failed to define "erumpent." What a crock.
While my crush on A.J. Jacobs was definitely solidified by his hilariously literal attempt to live the Bible's rules, he really caught my attention when he wrote about reading the Encyclopedia. Lo, that multi-volumed set was a real spine-masher, but he read the sucker. In the process, he irritated his wife, learned that Charles Darwin married his cousin, and got a book deal. I'm not nearly as hardcore about my information acquisition; I prefer to leaf through the dictionary when I'm reduced to trolling for crossword answers, a habit I feel is morally better than just Googling the answer. Full disclosure: my sister and I also have a weekly phone date, where we help each other out with the Globe and Mail's puzzle. We are unrepentant cheaters.
Be it an atlas, an encyclopedia or a dictionary, the fact is, human beings love to fussbudget around with information. I just read an article on the revision of the Oxford English Dictionary, that old flag-bearer and the former home for defintions like the one for "prothodaw," which you can pull out at your next family reunion: it means "a prime simpleton, a noodle of the first rank." Now there's an insult! Apparently the OED is revising, and to make room for nonsense words like "Google," they're tightening up "prothodaw," which is now a businesslike "complete idiot." Nice, but it doesn't sing the way that other one does.
What happens to us when the dictionary changes? I feel a sense of loss for words that no longer make the cut, because we lose tiny bits of our collective past. Editing is good: it keeps us tight, keeps the prose lean and the story sharp. But it also relieves us of moments of precision, or even worse, erudition. Words are fun! Let's keep them around!
My personal favourite is The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce, noted he-man-woman-hater and satirist of the first rank. Written in 1911, Bierce is not exactly a thigh-slapper of the most recent vintage, but still rates a smirk from this university student when he defines a "lecturer" as "one with his hand in your pocket, his tongue in your ear and his faith in your patience." There are other non-canonical dictionaries out there (the Urban one maybe the most notable for our timeslice), but Bierce's is my favourite because it both introduces me to new words (encomiast, anyone?) and makes me smile at contemporary ones ("radicalism: the conservatism of tomorrow injected in the affairs of today.")
Dictionaries are fun to leaf through, because they're organized in such a way that "amanuensis" and "alter ego" are nestled in but good. They're a primo spot for nerdette kids like me to hang out. Dictionaries are all about uncontextualized information, crap that you can spout out at some later date, impressing some (a treasured few), and leaving you, the reader, with a gee-whiz sense of wonder at just how filigreed and amazing something like language can actually be. They work the same way atlases do: creating worlds other than our tiny own, acting as a kaleidescope for the possibilities.
As sources of information, yeah, sure, meh: now we have the internet, so we've built our grand dictionary out of zeroes and ones. On the other hand, the physical act of looking something up in a book has become such a radical throwback that it's almost necessary to luxuriate in the act inself. Taking in the words hidden in our search for information allows us to learn things we didn't know we wanted to learn. In that, the dictionary is far superiour than some johnny-come-lately internet, which faithfully feeds us only what we wanted to know. Dictionaries, in addition to teaching us information, also teach us curiosity. Nice work for a collection of words that don't even tell a story.
While my crush on A.J. Jacobs was definitely solidified by his hilariously literal attempt to live the Bible's rules, he really caught my attention when he wrote about reading the Encyclopedia. Lo, that multi-volumed set was a real spine-masher, but he read the sucker. In the process, he irritated his wife, learned that Charles Darwin married his cousin, and got a book deal. I'm not nearly as hardcore about my information acquisition; I prefer to leaf through the dictionary when I'm reduced to trolling for crossword answers, a habit I feel is morally better than just Googling the answer. Full disclosure: my sister and I also have a weekly phone date, where we help each other out with the Globe and Mail's puzzle. We are unrepentant cheaters.
Be it an atlas, an encyclopedia or a dictionary, the fact is, human beings love to fussbudget around with information. I just read an article on the revision of the Oxford English Dictionary, that old flag-bearer and the former home for defintions like the one for "prothodaw," which you can pull out at your next family reunion: it means "a prime simpleton, a noodle of the first rank." Now there's an insult! Apparently the OED is revising, and to make room for nonsense words like "Google," they're tightening up "prothodaw," which is now a businesslike "complete idiot." Nice, but it doesn't sing the way that other one does.
What happens to us when the dictionary changes? I feel a sense of loss for words that no longer make the cut, because we lose tiny bits of our collective past. Editing is good: it keeps us tight, keeps the prose lean and the story sharp. But it also relieves us of moments of precision, or even worse, erudition. Words are fun! Let's keep them around!
My personal favourite is The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce, noted he-man-woman-hater and satirist of the first rank. Written in 1911, Bierce is not exactly a thigh-slapper of the most recent vintage, but still rates a smirk from this university student when he defines a "lecturer" as "one with his hand in your pocket, his tongue in your ear and his faith in your patience." There are other non-canonical dictionaries out there (the Urban one maybe the most notable for our timeslice), but Bierce's is my favourite because it both introduces me to new words (encomiast, anyone?) and makes me smile at contemporary ones ("radicalism: the conservatism of tomorrow injected in the affairs of today.")
Dictionaries are fun to leaf through, because they're organized in such a way that "amanuensis" and "alter ego" are nestled in but good. They're a primo spot for nerdette kids like me to hang out. Dictionaries are all about uncontextualized information, crap that you can spout out at some later date, impressing some (a treasured few), and leaving you, the reader, with a gee-whiz sense of wonder at just how filigreed and amazing something like language can actually be. They work the same way atlases do: creating worlds other than our tiny own, acting as a kaleidescope for the possibilities.
As sources of information, yeah, sure, meh: now we have the internet, so we've built our grand dictionary out of zeroes and ones. On the other hand, the physical act of looking something up in a book has become such a radical throwback that it's almost necessary to luxuriate in the act inself. Taking in the words hidden in our search for information allows us to learn things we didn't know we wanted to learn. In that, the dictionary is far superiour than some johnny-come-lately internet, which faithfully feeds us only what we wanted to know. Dictionaries, in addition to teaching us information, also teach us curiosity. Nice work for a collection of words that don't even tell a story.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Must-See DVD
I read something when I was in my teens (oh, those halcyon salad days of youth!) that basically posed the question, why is it that people are supposed to respect you when you're well-read, but they're supposed to look down on you when you've watched a bunch of TV? Why is there no such thing as "well-viewed"?
Which, after a couple weeks of getting caught up with Weeds and getting to know Californication, and talking about Lost, is a timely question. There's a sense of televisual urgency at my address. My mom got my dad season one of The Wire for his birthday. I've been reccommended by at least two people in the last two weeks that Dexter is must-see TV. I finished off the rest of Glee and read the recaps of Freaks and Geeks on Television Without Pity, the incomparably excellent source for amazing retellings of episodes - imagine your pithiest friends telling you watch you missed when you went to go visit your sick aunt in the hospital (you idiot) and missed the finale of Chuck because you were busy being a human, with emotions.
Remember "Must-See TV," the Thursday-night lineup on NBC? It had Seinfeld and Friends, which are now almost quaint in their straightforward approach. They're still excellent shows, but in the face of those rowdy cable channels, the networks just can't compete. The TV on the upper channels is so good: fresh writing, interesting actors, and multiple storylines that don't treat the audience like we're morons who can't follow an episode of Starsky & Hutch without getting confused. Television's always been entertaining; now it's got a certain amount of critical and artistic heft to it as well. I'd guess it started when The Sopranos made HBO, just, like, a major player (although that might just be my perception. HBO's been around for a long time, and The Sopranos began when I was in my early teens and just starting to pay attention to this kind of thing. However, I do feel that HBO used to a synonym for "boxing matches and soft-core porn"); it also has to do with DVDs and renting things by the season instead of waiting around at home like a jerk every week. I will gladly give up a couple days in order to power through a season of Big Love, because it's fun and funny and feels like a movie instead of a TV show.
I think that's the appeal in this new generation of TV: it feels like a movie. I don't really watch all that many movies, because movie theatre seats are supremely uncomfortable and I can't lie down, plus 120 minutes is just a little bit outside my attention span but anything less and I feel ripped off. TV, on the other hand, gives people both more and less: shorter little bumps of TV, but longer overall storyline. The episodic nature of TV is what makes it appealing, because you don't have to commit to a whole nine hour block - you can do it in 22-minute chunks.
TV used to be gauche, this lowest-common denominator experience that both united the masses and made us feel stupid. With this fractured explosion of cable channels, however, network TV is over: they're littered with identical procedural shows (CSI: What?, etc.) and dumb-ass reality tripe. But the real action is just starting. This is a new generation of whip-smart and sexy TV, TV that swears and fornicates and shows some T and A and brings us great actors and great writers and over-the-top set design and lush family drama: this is must-see TV.
Which, after a couple weeks of getting caught up with Weeds and getting to know Californication, and talking about Lost, is a timely question. There's a sense of televisual urgency at my address. My mom got my dad season one of The Wire for his birthday. I've been reccommended by at least two people in the last two weeks that Dexter is must-see TV. I finished off the rest of Glee and read the recaps of Freaks and Geeks on Television Without Pity, the incomparably excellent source for amazing retellings of episodes - imagine your pithiest friends telling you watch you missed when you went to go visit your sick aunt in the hospital (you idiot) and missed the finale of Chuck because you were busy being a human, with emotions.
Remember "Must-See TV," the Thursday-night lineup on NBC? It had Seinfeld and Friends, which are now almost quaint in their straightforward approach. They're still excellent shows, but in the face of those rowdy cable channels, the networks just can't compete. The TV on the upper channels is so good: fresh writing, interesting actors, and multiple storylines that don't treat the audience like we're morons who can't follow an episode of Starsky & Hutch without getting confused. Television's always been entertaining; now it's got a certain amount of critical and artistic heft to it as well. I'd guess it started when The Sopranos made HBO, just, like, a major player (although that might just be my perception. HBO's been around for a long time, and The Sopranos began when I was in my early teens and just starting to pay attention to this kind of thing. However, I do feel that HBO used to a synonym for "boxing matches and soft-core porn"); it also has to do with DVDs and renting things by the season instead of waiting around at home like a jerk every week. I will gladly give up a couple days in order to power through a season of Big Love, because it's fun and funny and feels like a movie instead of a TV show.
I think that's the appeal in this new generation of TV: it feels like a movie. I don't really watch all that many movies, because movie theatre seats are supremely uncomfortable and I can't lie down, plus 120 minutes is just a little bit outside my attention span but anything less and I feel ripped off. TV, on the other hand, gives people both more and less: shorter little bumps of TV, but longer overall storyline. The episodic nature of TV is what makes it appealing, because you don't have to commit to a whole nine hour block - you can do it in 22-minute chunks.
TV used to be gauche, this lowest-common denominator experience that both united the masses and made us feel stupid. With this fractured explosion of cable channels, however, network TV is over: they're littered with identical procedural shows (CSI: What?, etc.) and dumb-ass reality tripe. But the real action is just starting. This is a new generation of whip-smart and sexy TV, TV that swears and fornicates and shows some T and A and brings us great actors and great writers and over-the-top set design and lush family drama: this is must-see TV.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
The Winter Of My Discontent
Right now, I have a bunch of tulips sitting in a vase on a side table. They look rough - obviously, they're dead, with the tips of the leaves all dried up and the petals on the floor. And that's sort of how I'm feeling today.
Even though the weather has been amazing and warm, I'm still getting all winter-blah feeling up in here. It's awards season in Hollywood, and while they're off wearing gowns and being tanned, I'm marooned in my house with only my sweatpants and a freezer full of Rolo ice cream to keep me company. I guess it's better than last winter, when my walls were infested with raccoons and they kept having passionate, soap-opera sex and domestic disputes that were clearly audible through the plaster and lathe. Audible, and frightening when they started screaming at each other at three in the morning and it sounded like a horror movie was happening on the other side of the (thin!) wall and it was dark and I was roused from my pre-slumber drifting with icy-cold hands of fear throttling my gut. That was fun.
Winter is just a blah time for some people. That whole Seasonal Affective Disorder - which I don't suffer from, thank god, or else I would be permanently parked under on of those embarassing UV lights that are supposed to "cure" or "fix" your winter blues by bombarding you with vitamin D, or whatever folderol voodoo science it does - is very relatable. I'm less interested in doing things like riding my bike. My metabolism suffers. Everything just sort of winds down. In the summer, people are excited! To be out! Of the house! But come January, most folks hunker down and wait it out.
It's not helping that I've gone out twice in the last two days. Alcohol is a depressant, and while it may get the party started in the evening, it totally bums me out the next day. All I've done so far today is watch episodes of Glee and take a bath. That's not productive. It's not exactly a hangover - I'm not wrapped around the toilet or sweating out vodka or anything - but it's a subtle unbalancing of the day. It's like walking on a big ship. You know something's a little unsteady, but everything looks normal, so it feels extra weird when the looks and the feeling of reality don't quite overlap.
Booze or winter blues, the feeling's the same. There's a frustrated urge to sleep through most of the day, to spend all my time wrapped in a duvet and sighing. That's what I'm doing right now, actually. It's not helped by moaning about it, either. Unlike spats with friends or trouble at work, the feeling of discontent that happens in the short winter days isn't one that can be talked out. We just have to wait. Wait until the buds are on the trees, the grimy snow finally melts away, the clocks have been adjusted, and the parkas have been stashed in the closet for the season. Winter is a waiting game, and unfortunately, today I feel like I'm losing.
Even though the weather has been amazing and warm, I'm still getting all winter-blah feeling up in here. It's awards season in Hollywood, and while they're off wearing gowns and being tanned, I'm marooned in my house with only my sweatpants and a freezer full of Rolo ice cream to keep me company. I guess it's better than last winter, when my walls were infested with raccoons and they kept having passionate, soap-opera sex and domestic disputes that were clearly audible through the plaster and lathe. Audible, and frightening when they started screaming at each other at three in the morning and it sounded like a horror movie was happening on the other side of the (thin!) wall and it was dark and I was roused from my pre-slumber drifting with icy-cold hands of fear throttling my gut. That was fun.
Winter is just a blah time for some people. That whole Seasonal Affective Disorder - which I don't suffer from, thank god, or else I would be permanently parked under on of those embarassing UV lights that are supposed to "cure" or "fix" your winter blues by bombarding you with vitamin D, or whatever folderol voodoo science it does - is very relatable. I'm less interested in doing things like riding my bike. My metabolism suffers. Everything just sort of winds down. In the summer, people are excited! To be out! Of the house! But come January, most folks hunker down and wait it out.
It's not helping that I've gone out twice in the last two days. Alcohol is a depressant, and while it may get the party started in the evening, it totally bums me out the next day. All I've done so far today is watch episodes of Glee and take a bath. That's not productive. It's not exactly a hangover - I'm not wrapped around the toilet or sweating out vodka or anything - but it's a subtle unbalancing of the day. It's like walking on a big ship. You know something's a little unsteady, but everything looks normal, so it feels extra weird when the looks and the feeling of reality don't quite overlap.
Booze or winter blues, the feeling's the same. There's a frustrated urge to sleep through most of the day, to spend all my time wrapped in a duvet and sighing. That's what I'm doing right now, actually. It's not helped by moaning about it, either. Unlike spats with friends or trouble at work, the feeling of discontent that happens in the short winter days isn't one that can be talked out. We just have to wait. Wait until the buds are on the trees, the grimy snow finally melts away, the clocks have been adjusted, and the parkas have been stashed in the closet for the season. Winter is a waiting game, and unfortunately, today I feel like I'm losing.
Friday, January 22, 2010
The Boyfriend Brigade
Last weekend, I was out with a friend, decompressing from a dinner with friends, when I started whining. "I want a boyfriend, I want a boyfriend," I snivelled. This girl-move is so attractive that several young men immediately leapt before me and prostrated themselves on the dirty Bistro patio, shouting, "Pick me! Pick me!" Ladies magazines of the world, take note. Steepling my fingers and raising one eyebrow, I performed a visual inspection of the candidates and chose according to height, weight, depth, presumed overlapping interest in music, a caring soul (which can be detected by pore size, for the underinformed) and the ability to carry on semi-coherent conversation with my parents. Having made my selection, we celebrated with grilled cheese sandwiches and are now engaged to be wed.
Oof. No. When am I going to learn that saying something doesn't make it so? Remember that whole "I'm going to be a triathlete" fiasco? Yeah, saying that led to jack squat. I can't even raise one eyebrow.
But this is an interesting moment for me, because it's been a long while since I've felt like dating anyone. A quick primer in My So-Called Dating Life: three ex-boyfriends, one monster heartbreak 2.5 years ago, much kissing, and loads of squeamishness re: commitment. That monster heartbreak shook me like an Etch-A-Sketch, leaving me, as the French say, totally fucked vis-a-vis the love. It's taken me a long-ass time to come back into the fold; not only was I skittish about having a boyfriend, I was peevish about not having one. That's a lot of ish to deal with.
I'm not going to turn this into an advertisement for myself - if I was desperate, I would take out one of those back-page ads in the NOW magazine - but just the realization that I even wanted to hang out with someone, partner-wise, was kind of a big one. I'm not going to be jumping on the next man's shadow I see, but feeling like the vise around the part of the heart that governs romance (is that the ventricle? Probably not) has loosed is one of great relief.
So. Now I face a quandary. I feel picklish about wanting a boyfriend, because I feel like one of those characters in a rom-com that gazes wistfully out a rain-streaked window while dreaming of something - someone - that may never come. I mean, at the ripe old age of 26, is weird to feel like a romantic washout?
Not to get all Sex And The City on people, what with the stupid rhetorical questions and so on, but how does this work? Dating is complicated (and understatements are fun!), and unfortunately, I'm actually getting old enough that a statistically significant number of "the good ones" are shacked up with loves of their own. And, like, more power to them - the good ones get snagged so early precisely because they're good guys. I used to believe one of those crazy corollaries. You know the tune, so sing along: because I hadn't been snapped up like this morning's fish, I was somehow riddled with flaws and 100% unloveable. Sigh.
The truth is, I might be overly picky and kind of neurotic, but I'm not an asshole. I was holding out on dating because, for whatever reason, I wasn't ready. Maybe it was the heartbreak. Maybe I was too young to really commit to someone. Maybe I needed to get a little more grounded. Maybe I needed to work the phrase "pitching woo" into my dating vocabulary. (I totally said "pitching woo" tonight and felt awesomely retro.) Maybe it's a melange, a blend of all these things and more. Whatever it was, I feel like I'm over it. Bring on the boyfriends: I'm ready for you.
Oof. No. When am I going to learn that saying something doesn't make it so? Remember that whole "I'm going to be a triathlete" fiasco? Yeah, saying that led to jack squat. I can't even raise one eyebrow.
But this is an interesting moment for me, because it's been a long while since I've felt like dating anyone. A quick primer in My So-Called Dating Life: three ex-boyfriends, one monster heartbreak 2.5 years ago, much kissing, and loads of squeamishness re: commitment. That monster heartbreak shook me like an Etch-A-Sketch, leaving me, as the French say, totally fucked vis-a-vis the love. It's taken me a long-ass time to come back into the fold; not only was I skittish about having a boyfriend, I was peevish about not having one. That's a lot of ish to deal with.
I'm not going to turn this into an advertisement for myself - if I was desperate, I would take out one of those back-page ads in the NOW magazine - but just the realization that I even wanted to hang out with someone, partner-wise, was kind of a big one. I'm not going to be jumping on the next man's shadow I see, but feeling like the vise around the part of the heart that governs romance (is that the ventricle? Probably not) has loosed is one of great relief.
So. Now I face a quandary. I feel picklish about wanting a boyfriend, because I feel like one of those characters in a rom-com that gazes wistfully out a rain-streaked window while dreaming of something - someone - that may never come. I mean, at the ripe old age of 26, is weird to feel like a romantic washout?
Not to get all Sex And The City on people, what with the stupid rhetorical questions and so on, but how does this work? Dating is complicated (and understatements are fun!), and unfortunately, I'm actually getting old enough that a statistically significant number of "the good ones" are shacked up with loves of their own. And, like, more power to them - the good ones get snagged so early precisely because they're good guys. I used to believe one of those crazy corollaries. You know the tune, so sing along: because I hadn't been snapped up like this morning's fish, I was somehow riddled with flaws and 100% unloveable. Sigh.
The truth is, I might be overly picky and kind of neurotic, but I'm not an asshole. I was holding out on dating because, for whatever reason, I wasn't ready. Maybe it was the heartbreak. Maybe I was too young to really commit to someone. Maybe I needed to get a little more grounded. Maybe I needed to work the phrase "pitching woo" into my dating vocabulary. (I totally said "pitching woo" tonight and felt awesomely retro.) Maybe it's a melange, a blend of all these things and more. Whatever it was, I feel like I'm over it. Bring on the boyfriends: I'm ready for you.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Lynch Mob
After re-reading for, like, the zillionth time the essay David Foster Wallace wrote about David Lynch, I finally bit the bullet and watched some. Aside from the Wallace piece, and general pop-culture rumblings about Lynch being A Weird Guy, the only thing I knew about D.Lyn was from a friend who had watched Blue Velvet a few years back and absolutely despised it. Which, as Wallace points out in his essay, isn't an uncommon reaction to the Lynch oeuvre, since his movies are bizarre and upsetting and just plain old hard-to-understand.
I decided to start with what's unquestionably Lynch's most family-friendly offering, the 1990 show Twin Peaks. Since it was a network television show way before Law and Order was broadcasting mutilated breast implants, Twin Peaks has a quaintness to it. It's almost strangely wholesome, even though "bad girl" Laura Palmer snorted blow and worked at a brothel. The strangest elements come from strange juxtapositions and unsettling moments - hospital food that looks like mustard, for example, or a characters blue-and-red sunglasses that look like those 1950s 3D movie glasses. Neither gets an explanation, which, as Wallace explained, is pretty much a David Lynch trademark: strange subterranean rumblings and mechanical clankings, incongruous character motifs, grotesque and unusual looking characters, which apparently are Lynch's stock in trade.
I like it. Special Agent Dale Cooper, played by the straight-shooting Kyle MacLachlan, is kind of hilarious in his squareness, and the sultry, sexy girls are erotic in a very 1950s way - lots of sweaters with conical bosoms, even some saddle shoes thrown in the mix. Lara Flynn Boyle, who later became one of the Skeletors on The Practice was practically curvy; Sherilyn Fenn, who went on to pose for Playboy, is delicious.
The show is unquestionably weird, but the weirdness generally springs from the kind of place that most art comes from: people are constantly furrowing their brow and sighing "I could do that" about most modern/abstract art, but the fact is, they don't. Lynch's odd moments spring from that same well; when he has a high schooler breakdance out of frame in the pilot episode, it's funny and weird and honest at the same time, because high school kids do weird shit all the time, and to depict them as automatonic droids whose only function is to advance the plot would be selling them out. His odd moments feel true. They seem to reflect the kind of oddness that real people deal with during the day-to-day.
Twin Peaks is, before all other things, a soap opera. It's got that whole who-killed-Laura-Palmer element, but the mystery fades into the background ase characters fall in and out of love, beat each other up, have visions, and rely on characters named th things like "The Log Lady" to give them guidance. To be honest, it's kind of like a miles-better version of that sudsy guilty pleasure Passions, which used possessions and talking puppets as major plot points and which was like a daytime Lynch-lite show.
Having raced through a season of TP in about ten minutes, I'm now way more interested in seeing films like Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, because I know they're going to be weird in a really specific way. I can handle weird and bizarre and incongruous; I can handle Lynchian. Ultimately, real life is Lynchian: weird, coincidental, dangerous, and not quite what it seems.
I decided to start with what's unquestionably Lynch's most family-friendly offering, the 1990 show Twin Peaks. Since it was a network television show way before Law and Order was broadcasting mutilated breast implants, Twin Peaks has a quaintness to it. It's almost strangely wholesome, even though "bad girl" Laura Palmer snorted blow and worked at a brothel. The strangest elements come from strange juxtapositions and unsettling moments - hospital food that looks like mustard, for example, or a characters blue-and-red sunglasses that look like those 1950s 3D movie glasses. Neither gets an explanation, which, as Wallace explained, is pretty much a David Lynch trademark: strange subterranean rumblings and mechanical clankings, incongruous character motifs, grotesque and unusual looking characters, which apparently are Lynch's stock in trade.
I like it. Special Agent Dale Cooper, played by the straight-shooting Kyle MacLachlan, is kind of hilarious in his squareness, and the sultry, sexy girls are erotic in a very 1950s way - lots of sweaters with conical bosoms, even some saddle shoes thrown in the mix. Lara Flynn Boyle, who later became one of the Skeletors on The Practice was practically curvy; Sherilyn Fenn, who went on to pose for Playboy, is delicious.
The show is unquestionably weird, but the weirdness generally springs from the kind of place that most art comes from: people are constantly furrowing their brow and sighing "I could do that" about most modern/abstract art, but the fact is, they don't. Lynch's odd moments spring from that same well; when he has a high schooler breakdance out of frame in the pilot episode, it's funny and weird and honest at the same time, because high school kids do weird shit all the time, and to depict them as automatonic droids whose only function is to advance the plot would be selling them out. His odd moments feel true. They seem to reflect the kind of oddness that real people deal with during the day-to-day.
Twin Peaks is, before all other things, a soap opera. It's got that whole who-killed-Laura-Palmer element, but the mystery fades into the background ase characters fall in and out of love, beat each other up, have visions, and rely on characters named th things like "The Log Lady" to give them guidance. To be honest, it's kind of like a miles-better version of that sudsy guilty pleasure Passions, which used possessions and talking puppets as major plot points and which was like a daytime Lynch-lite show.
Having raced through a season of TP in about ten minutes, I'm now way more interested in seeing films like Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, because I know they're going to be weird in a really specific way. I can handle weird and bizarre and incongruous; I can handle Lynchian. Ultimately, real life is Lynchian: weird, coincidental, dangerous, and not quite what it seems.
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Bitch, Bitch, Bitch
There's something so tiring about being, like, involved and shit.
Let me preface this: I spent most of the last 18 hours in basements, doing stuff I love, with bikes and housing co-ops and all the love jams that I love jamming out on. But: basements are terrible places to be, and even loving bikes and housing co-ops doesn't negate the horrible no-natural-light factor of the whole thing. Plus, I spent a ton of money on takeout food, and drank two cups of coffee, and was overcaffeinated and under-vitamin-D'ed. Plus, my apartment is a mess. Plus, I'm bloated. Plus, I'm having one of those "I love my life, but why can't it be just a titch better" kind of days that mess with the best of heads. At the best of times, I am only a middling head.
It was a challenge.
There's nothing that irks me more that people who do what they love but complain the whole time (see: McLaren, Leah, who is contantly whinging about screwing up expensive cuts of meat when trying to cook them, etc., as if she has forgotten what it's like to hold two packs of chicken breast in Loblaws, hefting each, pursing the lips and making "these are expensive" types of faces), because, let's face it, life can be a challenge sometimes. It's January. My ass is cold. I got my new health card in the mail and in the photo, my head is square. I could be a Playmobil woman. This isn't a laundry list of things that are sucky about my life; it's a list of things that are annoying on their own; when they're heaped all over one calendar date, it feels like a total mess.
So: I bitch. There's something so primal about the bitch session. Just throwing your head back and howling at the sky, as though letting a little coyote loose will help. Often, it does. I tend to talk loud and fast when I get going. Some - others - favour the laconic drawl, as if drawing out the tales of woe will make them flavourful and rich. Others stew silently, but that is not my style. I like wild, Italianate hand gestures and shouting. It helps if you have compadres, folks who were in the trenches with you on the bad day, folks who can commiserate with the perceived crappiness and put-upon'edness and simultaneously reinforce that you're not a headcase for feeling like a martyr, and remind you that things aren't so bad after all. After all, nobody died.
I like to verbally hose down my hapless audience, since apparently the cure for my bads days goes something like Coke Zero + ridiculous multilayered outfit x (promise of beer later)^ some foodstuff covered in cheese / TALKING ABOUT IT LOUD AND FAST = ahhhh....bliss. Like the children's rhyme says: you can't go under it...can't go around it. You just gotta go through it.
Let me preface this: I spent most of the last 18 hours in basements, doing stuff I love, with bikes and housing co-ops and all the love jams that I love jamming out on. But: basements are terrible places to be, and even loving bikes and housing co-ops doesn't negate the horrible no-natural-light factor of the whole thing. Plus, I spent a ton of money on takeout food, and drank two cups of coffee, and was overcaffeinated and under-vitamin-D'ed. Plus, my apartment is a mess. Plus, I'm bloated. Plus, I'm having one of those "I love my life, but why can't it be just a titch better" kind of days that mess with the best of heads. At the best of times, I am only a middling head.
It was a challenge.
There's nothing that irks me more that people who do what they love but complain the whole time (see: McLaren, Leah, who is contantly whinging about screwing up expensive cuts of meat when trying to cook them, etc., as if she has forgotten what it's like to hold two packs of chicken breast in Loblaws, hefting each, pursing the lips and making "these are expensive" types of faces), because, let's face it, life can be a challenge sometimes. It's January. My ass is cold. I got my new health card in the mail and in the photo, my head is square. I could be a Playmobil woman. This isn't a laundry list of things that are sucky about my life; it's a list of things that are annoying on their own; when they're heaped all over one calendar date, it feels like a total mess.
So: I bitch. There's something so primal about the bitch session. Just throwing your head back and howling at the sky, as though letting a little coyote loose will help. Often, it does. I tend to talk loud and fast when I get going. Some - others - favour the laconic drawl, as if drawing out the tales of woe will make them flavourful and rich. Others stew silently, but that is not my style. I like wild, Italianate hand gestures and shouting. It helps if you have compadres, folks who were in the trenches with you on the bad day, folks who can commiserate with the perceived crappiness and put-upon'edness and simultaneously reinforce that you're not a headcase for feeling like a martyr, and remind you that things aren't so bad after all. After all, nobody died.
I like to verbally hose down my hapless audience, since apparently the cure for my bads days goes something like Coke Zero + ridiculous multilayered outfit x (promise of beer later)^ some foodstuff covered in cheese / TALKING ABOUT IT LOUD AND FAST = ahhhh....bliss. Like the children's rhyme says: you can't go under it...can't go around it. You just gotta go through it.
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