last weekend

Last weekend was pretty damn fun. I was promising a roundup, so I guess this is going to be it. What was nice about the weekend was that I spent a lot of time with people I don't normally hang out with. Friday after working in the San Francisco office I went to Monk's Kettle, a new restaurant/bar in my neighborhood. It's actually kind of classy, which is weird because my neighborhood is sort of anti-class (in a very self conscious, hipster way). I mean, there are classy restaurants in the 'hood, but pretty much all bars are kind of dives. Monk's Kettle has a lot of pretty good beer on tap and in bottles, but we did wait for almost two hours for a table (luckily we had beer). I had a pulled pork sandwich for dinner. It was not amazing but not bad. Still, not sure how often I'd go back there just cause it's so crowded and not cheap, and Toronado has better beers anyway. But I went with two girls from my work and their boyfriends, which was fun and refreshing. Afterwards I met Justin and we walked up to the Knockout, where I'd never been before, for this kind of rad oldies/doo wop/soul night where we witnessed, among other things, a girl dressed in a sequined leotard and nothing else. She was rocking out hardcore.

I was up later than I planned Friday, so Saturday I woke up late and James was on our couch still (he'd crashed there the night before) and so he and Dan and I went to the Irving Street Cafe in the inner Sunset, which is basically a diner. I got two pancakes, two pieces of bacon and a scrambled eggs for $5.50!! Where can you get that anymore anywhere?! Dan was reminiscing about Illinois the whole time. The food was good, too. Pretty sweet greasy spoon stuff. The rest of the afternoon Dan and I watched Planet Earth, until I left for Berkeley. Peattie's brother in law was doing a reading of some short stories, and so Peattie, his roommate Greg, and I went to Triple Rock for beer and pastrami before the reading at Pegasus. Ammon (the brother-in-law) was the best writer of the bunch and I picked up his little self-published book for $5. Peattie's other roommate was there too with his girlfriend, so all of us San Franciscans, and Peattie's family (parents & sister) ended up at the Albatross, which as I understand it is pretty much THE grad student bar in Berkeley. They have board games that you can rent from the bar, and so we played a pretty good round of Scrabble. Peattie & I were on a team, and we ended up with two Ys, the Q, the Z, and the X during the course of the game and we won. I think Scrabble is way more fun in person than on Facebook, but you have to get it going so I'll continue with Facebook. We rode home in a VW bug which smelled like crayons (true story) and listened to Bohemian Rhapsody. It was pretty sweet, and I thought my night was over, but instead when I got home Ace was there with her visiting friend Charlotte and two guys I didn't recognize, drinking sake. I was up until almost 4am just hanging out.

Brunch at Boogaloo's the next day, where we were joined by the guys from the day before, Braden & Pat, and then afterwards Ace and Charlotte were headed to Sausalito and the rest of us decided, why not? Justin almost joined but didn't make the ferry, although he made a valiant attempt. Sausalito is pretty dull, but it's pretty and beach towny and we went to a game store that sold a bunch of children's books I hadn't seen in years, as well as "Hungry Caterpillar" stickers and mood rings, which I totally bought. (Right now, I am "romantic.") We had bloody marys on a patio bar, and then caught the ferry back, where the girls and I had dinner at Ti Couz (buckwheat crepes, I had one with ratatouille in it, YUM). The night ended with the first episode of "The Wire," which I watched with Justin because we are trying to be cultural now and well-informed about quality media. The first ep was really good, and I am already pretty hooked. Like I need more tv in my life.

Still, the weekend was great overall. I felt really good about stepping out of my comfort zone a bit. Things like hopping on a ferry on a whim are the kinds of things I want to do more in the city... that's part of what makes it fun to live there. Proximity to everything.

Some pics from the Saus:

The crew on the ferry (sadly Charlotte's eyes are closed).

Really.

On our way back to the city, the skyline.

Boat! I like getting boats in pictures because I'm a nerd and sailboats make me think of what it would be like to summer in the cape.

Lovely.
I got the bird on accident, but I like getting birds in pictures too. It's like I totally planned the asymmetry. There aren't any pictures of people because I felt weird documenting a hang with total strangers.

Checking in...

Have fallen terribly behind on blogging. I have tons of stuff I want to write about, but this week is CRAZY busy at work and I haven't had the time to read things on the internet or write about them. Yeah, what is that all about?

I was talking to my friend Peattie today and he mentioned the idea of collecting quotes as contenders for the best quote of 2008. We already have two, so I figure, I might as well blog them.

1) Justin, January 6 at 1am, "FUCK THE GRAIN!" in response to me telling him that the best way to solve a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle with about 30% white space was to look at the faint paint grain on each piece
2) Me, January 16 around noon, "I like being nice more than I like being a good employee."

Peattie nominated the second one, but I think it sounds like things I say all the time. I think I like the idea of doing this, kind of a way to document some of the best times of this year.

Observations & Lessons

This morning I made a total idiot of myself in the kitchen because there were these oranges that looked really lumpy and felt really soft and disturbing. Danielle (my co-worker) was there so she asked the guy doing the food stocking if the oranges were supposed to be so soft. I was just going to give up and eat an apple, because the bananas are not ripe enough, and the oranges were confusingly soft, but then finally when the food stock guy didn't know, Danielle just opened the orange and we discovered it was a mandarin orange. Who knew?! There was no label. Then I ate half of it and discovered, I don't think I like mandarin oranges. Or rather, I think I prefer them soaked in syrup out of a can.

In other news, the CBS Early Show has the cheesiest titles. Yesterday they had a woman on who was talking about this crappy album she made called "Skinny Songs" which is literally about losing weight and intended to be motivational, and the title of the segment was "Weapons of Mass Reduction." Seriously, it's awful. The things you suffer through when you are at the gym. You know, that and exercise.

Superb Bird of Parasise

PLANET EARTH - Bird Of Paradise

THIS is the bird I was trying to post a picture of yesterday. Yes, it is freaking sweet.

Planet Earth is awesome

Ok, I realize that everyone else has already seen Planet Earth. I, however, am overloaded by media and stuff to watch and Buffy and whatever, and so I did not get around to watching it until Saturday, despite threatening to do so for years. Now I can tell you what everyone else already has: Planet Earth is fucking amazing. I literally have to buy the DVDs now (although I'm actually holding off since I feel like they'd be better on blu-ray, and I don't want to buy them twice). I could watch them over and over again. I learned so much about weird and amazing animals! (Like this! This is a bird! I swear. It's doing a mating dance. I couldn't remember its name so this is the best picture I could find.) I cringed, I (almost) cried (elephants separated from their mom are really sad), I was cuted to death by baby polar bears. Seriously, watch it watch it watch it. It is amazing.

Cities everywhere

This is old, but my roommate had e-mailed it to me and I hadn't gotten to it until now. It's a little short feature from the Times about, basically, how communities and cities in the U.S. look the same everywhere. It makes me think of when my grandma spent some time taking pictures up and down Whittier Boulevard. I wonder sometimes if, pulled out of context, these ugly towns and streets and storefronts could be kind of pretty in a way (like Victoria does with random spots in San Francisco, which I have seen before and never thought of as pretty, but sometimes she makes them so). But for the most part, they aren't, and this video is correct, they look the same everywhere. In a way, it's sort of good ol' Americana, and in another way it's sad because of the lonesomeness of the landscapes (it makes me think of Ghost World, actually, which takes place in LA but which could have been anywhere, and which is a movie about lonesomeness if there ever was one), and in another way it's sad because these places are ugly, and in other way it's sad because of the lack of community. It makes me very happy that I live on a street full of people who care about the street. Anyway, it just make me think.

P.S.

This one is good too. And so very true. It's happened to me multiple times. (Related is the "oh shit, someone else I know is engaged" syndrome.)

This post is for another season.

This sounds bad but this reminds me a little bit of my parents. Not because of the divorce part, thankfully. Just because of my dad's attitude about Christmas decorations. Once he just put a pile of lights out on the front step.

Then again, this year he did this:

(via Left Handed Toons, which is really entertaining as well as yet another fun stick-figure cartoon site in addition to, well, all of these)

Poem

My mom sent me this poem and I love it.

Home is so Sad

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.

--Philip Larkin

Internet letting me down.

In a disturbing turn of events, any website that is not a Google affiliated one is being incredibly, painfully slow. That throws a wrench into my blogging plan. Generally speaking today I'm in a bad mood -- the only way I can describe it is that I have the "mean reds," to quote Holly Golightly, and so perhaps it's better I withhold my bile from my wider Internet audience. That said, I think the lack of blogging will only make the reds meaner. Stay tuned.

Breaking news

For those who care, my friend Justin finally got an apartment, with an apparently stunning view of the park. I felt the need to broadcast this. Finally!

My weekend, and a video

Yes, I have been away this entire weekend! What is that all about... I think what it's about is, I went into the weekend with a to-do list and came out of the weekend with... the same to-do list. Except for one item (going on CatalogChoice.org and removing myself from mailing lists for catalogs from companies I've never even heard of. Basically I'm unsubscribing from all but J. Crew, Anthropologie, and Urban Outfitters, because I really just need those ones). However, instead of doing all those things I did a lot of other things. I'll report in on all that soon. In the meantime, look, a funny video with John Mayer in it:



(My roommate sent this to me because he knows I have this guilty love of John Mayer and everything that he does. His blog is really funny, and I really think if I knew him we'd be friends. It's really my only guilty pleasure because most other guilty pleasures I actually am not guilty about because it's like they are made for guilty pleasure -- like the OC or Gossip Girl or something. Whereas John Mayer is a sincere object, at least musically, and while I think he's good he is also roundly mocked by cool people, so I feel guilty anyway. But really, I like John Mayer and I don't care if you think that's lame.)

Two pictures

Both from sites I found through Rachel's tumblr.

This one reminds me of "Once," if it took place in Spain. Those beginning scenes where he's playing guitar in the shopping district in the cold really, really are exactly what Dublin is like. Especially if you are in said shopping district once most of the stores have already started to close. (Kind of like how the weird bluish color of everything in London in Love Actually is exactly the right exact color of London in winter.)

This one just looks pretty damn awesome. The things you can do with a good camera. It's like, unreal.

Beaten down, backed into a corner

I don’t for a moment begrudge Hillary her victory on Tuesday. But if victory came for the reasons we’ve been led to believe – because women voters ultimately saw in her, exhausted and near defeat, a countenance that mirrored their own – then I hate what that victory says about the state of their lives and the nature of the emotions they carry forward into this race. I hate the thought that women feel beaten down, backed into a corner, overwhelmed and near to breaking point, as Hillary appeared to be in the debate Saturday night. And I hate even more that they’ve got to see a strong, smart and savvy woman cut down to size before they can embrace her as one of their own.

-Judith Warner, in her "Domestic Disturbances" blog on NYTimes.com

Ok, I'm not going to argue about "who it was" who gave Hillary her victory -- there is enough speculation and rage out there already. But I will say that this gave me pause. It feels a little bit like she's talking about me.

(via)

On being yuppie scum

Funny that Rachel posted this, because I've been planning since Tuesday night to write about how we have a housekeeper now.

!!!

Explanation: We live in filth. We have rarely swept or swiffered or whatever the floors since we moved in in July. Since we have a tiny kitchen it looks like a mess no matter what. We have basically never fully cleaned our house, and finally Dan had a friend who had a cleaning lady come in once a month to clean his house and it was like $60 and totally worth it. So we called her, Sandra is her name, and she came and cleaned our whole house on Tuesday. I came home and almost had a heart attack, it was so clean. She not only cleaned the whole common area, but she cleaned our rooms, which included making the bed and stacking up all my piles of stuff in neat piles instead of in messy piles. It was amazing. My first thought was, I want to come home to this every day. My second thought was, Oh my God, I can't believe I just thought that. I went through a series of other thoughts including: "Wow, it's like, if we are only going to get this done once a month I guess I should do it for myself all the other days of the month," and "Well, at least this way we have a check to prevent us from descending into total disorder the rest of the month and "I need to make this my goal." Then somewhere in there I realized, imagine this woman, who barely speaks English and cleans rooms for a living, coming into my room and cleaned it all up and put my PILES OF EXPENSIVE, USELESS CRAP AWAY. Seriously, I am a fucking yuppie. I have more than I need of everything. The number of my magazine subscriptions alone should condemn me to some kind of yuppie hell. I had this sudden moment of self-loathing combined with a (yuppie) instinct to organize everything so as to make my (comparatively) obscene abundance/wealth/excess/yuppieness less visible to the naked eye. I promptly resolved to go through and donate clothing to charity, recycle stacks of magazines (although I am still reluctant to trash my New Yorkers), box up any items I don't regularly use and put them in the closet, and keep my room as clean as it was when I walked in the door on Tuesday. I then researched file organizers at thecontainerstore.com. Kill me now.

(Side note: Rachel? You have someone do your own laundry?)

More on Hillary

Interesting article in the Times about women's votes for Hillary. The chart (it's on the left hand side) showing various differences in the types of people voting for Hillary and Obama (poll-wise) is the most interesting part.

So, I may as well say it. I'm conflicted. I'm trying to figure out what my vote for Obama means. I don't want to get caught up in this hype, but I want to question my motives for not voting for Hillary. If that makes any sense.

(Two reactions to the article here and here.)

Christian & Johnny

Gee. I'm pretty sure I'll see this movie:

Christian Bale, who after 3:10 to Yuma and The Dark Knight apparently hasn't had enough of grimacing heroically while his more flamboyant co-star has all the fun, signs on to Michael Mann's period gangster epic Public Enemies as a lawman leading a manhunt for Johnny Depp's John Dillinger.

(via)

PopMatters on Chuck & Huck

In trying to apprehend the appeal of the Huckabee candidacy, New York Times columnist David Brooks noted in a 04 January op-ed that the Arkansas governor was our first “ironic evangelical”: “funny, campy…and not at war with modern culture.” This may be true, but as the primary season wears on, it’s worth remembering that the Late Night With Conan O’Brien sketch that re-canonized Chuck Norris as an ironic god in the pop-culture pantheon consisted of the show mocking a clip of Walker, Texas Ranger in which a small boy casually announces to an elderly couple, “Walker told me I have AIDS.” The scene is both horrifying and hysterical—doubly so when you realize that Chuck Norris is so ridiculous that he makes children with AIDS seem momentarily hilarious.

Given that Huckabee’s own views on AIDS (and women and homosexuality) are so preposterous that he manages somehow to come across as ridiculous rather than horrifying, the governor should hope that our culture’s love affair with Family Guy-esque absurdity continues through the primary season. The rest of us can simply hope that now that the age of irony has been officially embraced by two of the least cool things on Earth—presidential politics and fundamentalist Christianity—its end is finally upon us. If Chuck Norris pulls that off, it’ll be a fact worth remembering.

PopMatters always amazes me, not because I always agree or because it always makes the best case or argument or something, but just by taking things to a new level (Family Guy? Chuck Norris? the death of irony? Huckabee? Whaaat?). (via)

Make Your Own Path

I quite like this "Make Your Own Path" poster from Keep Calm. (Also, this one.) Actually, more than the poster I like this photo of the poster being printed (from FFFFOUND! obviously, my new obsession).


It makes me want to make my own letterpress.

(via)

Finding your own way

I tend to avoid things like this because, well, as much as I agree that men and women are different, I hate to encourage more stereotypes. Still, I thought this part rang true:

Studies over the past decade have shown that women are likelier to rely on landmarks and visual cues, and men on maps, cardinal directions (such as north and south) and gauges of distance.

All my male friends judge things based on directions really easily -- they can tell which direction they are going in without any apparent landmarks, and tell me things like "head east on that street," which means absolutely nothing to me unless there sun is in the sky or I have some way of knowing that I'm already pointed north, or something, so I can gauge from that. I'm really bad at judging directions once I have to reorient myself: for example, if I get out of a subway station or a bus, I don't know which side of the street I'm on or what direction I'm facing, so I can easily start marching off in the wrong direction. (That's how, in London, Sean and I walked like five blocks away from our hostel out of the Tube station, with about five suitcases, despite the fact that I claimed I knew the city really well.)

(via)

Hear hear

Article summing up Presidential candidates' beliefs about evolution. Pretty interesting. I agree with the article's author about this one:

My favorite response from any candidate about the evolution/creationism debate was from former Sen. Mike Gravel (Alaska). When LiveScience asked the senator if he thought creationism should be taught in public schools, Gravel replied, ""Oh God, no. Oh, Jesus. We thought we had made a big advance with the Scopes monkey trial....My God, evolution is a fact, and if these people are disturbed by being the descendants of monkeys and fishes, they've got a mental problem. We can't afford the psychiatric bill for them. That ends the story as far as I'm concerned."

(via)

GigPosters

I discovered this site GigPosters on FFFFOUND! From what I can tell, it's a site with uploads of posters done for various bands' shows. Just images, no purchasing, tragically (it would be impossible, anyway, there are so many). If I could buy any of the posters, I would buy like a hundred. Here are some I discovered by searching for just three artist/band names, uncreatively:

Gotta love werewolves...

I think this one is my favorite. It reminds me of the Teddy Bears' Picnic and Where the Wild Things Are. I REALLY want a print of it.

Like the text of his name here.

Whale!

Orange, and birds. Two of my favorite things.

I just like the sort of retro Victorianness of this one.

Can't figure out what this one reminds me of. Somewhat Goreyesque but it actually reminds me of like a children's book or something.

An unexpected favorite.

More here, here, here, and everywhere.

I think I realize part of the reason I like all of these is that they are sort of children's bookish. Now on to search for them. (I do know of a couple of cool poster stores online for bands like this, and I recognized quite a few of the GigPosters prints from those stores... unfortunately they all sell out pretty easily, it seems.)

(On a related note, why do the Fillmore's posters suck so badly?)

Juno Opening Credits

One fun thing about Juno was the opening credits. Here's the sequence, by Shadowplay Studio.

(via)

Scary teddies, and blasts from the past

This teddy bear in a suitcase freaks me out.


It reminds me of the giant teddy bear in that Park Ji Yoon video that my roommate Silvia was so into our freshman year. (She taught us the dance. I was really bad at it. I'm trying to forget that right now.) If you want to see a weird video for a Korean pop song, watch away:



(via NOTCOT)

Bill Murray

Pretty awesome.


Print by Jeff Boyes.

(via NOTCOT)

I like waking up to the smell of bacon, sue me.

Wow. Michael Scott would be thrilled:

I enjoy having breakfast in bed. I like waking up to the smell of bacon, sue me. And since, I don’t have a butler, I have to do it myself. So … most nights before I go to bed, I will lay six strips of bacon out on my George Foreman grill. Then I go to sleep. When I wake up, I plug in the grill. I go back to sleep again. Then, I wake up, to the smell of crackling bacon. It is delicious, it’s good for me, it’s the perfect way to start the day. Today, I got up, I stepped onto the grill, and it clamped down on my foot, that’s it. I don’t see what’s so hard to believe about that.

(via)

On being an English major

6 Possible Undergraduate Essay Questions on "No Country for Old Men" (spoilers)

I always walk out of difficult or good or interesting films thinking about how I'd write about them in a paper -- same with books. Sometimes I wonder if that means I should be going back for my English PhD, and sometimes I wonder if I just need to become a critic. In the meantime, I blog.

(via)

Evil Huckabee

True statement. This had actually been bugging me a bit myself recently, but I couldn't quite make my brain wrap around it. 24 fans, check this out: Huckabee looks disturbingly like President Logan from 24 (somewhat ironically, he looks like evil Logan before Logan became a born-again Christian. Except, I never finished season 6, so maybe Logan is still evil.)

(via)

Rebutting Steinem

Interesting, pissed-off article in Slate rebutting Gloria Steinem's Hillary op-ed:

"Gender," writes Gloria Steinem on the op-ed page of the Jan. 8 New York Times, "is probably the most restricting force in American life." That is incorrect. Poverty is the most restricting force in American life. It's become somewhat unfashionable to point this out, but I don't see how it could be otherwise. Given the choice between being born poor and being born female, which would you choose?

Point taken (but of course that doesn't mean sexism doesn't exist.)

(via Bookforum)

Utterly random

Ok, I get that it's a tropical fruit, but is there a banana season? I've had bananas two days in a row that were kind of weirdly flavorless and extra-mealy.

Internet Love-Hate

In related news, I so love and hate the Internet. Comments on YouTube suck, but comments on so many blogs are really insightful and well-put. I refer to the comments on the Jezebel article I just linked to. I particularly liked this one, this one, and this one so far (the third I feel like Dad will appreciate).

Am I the broken record, or is the rest of the press?

Having a day of annoyance with political journalism. I feel like the press has, like, 5 templates for stories (the "comeback," the "not out of the race yet" the "well what it comes down to everyone really wants change, even Republicans, they just have to decide who they think will give them the change they want" the "if he doesn't win the next one he's out" and the "black man or white woman?" are the ones that come to mind), and they just plug in a candidate into each template, depending on who is ahead in the polls that day. It's sort of tiresome. I was interested to hear the exit poll data from NH yesterday, but heard a lot of things that sounded familiar (the one thing that jumped out at me was that the lower-income groups voted for Clinton, not Edwards, but then of course there's the "older women vote for Hillary, younger women vote for Obama" thing which, whether it's true or not, is starting to sound trite). I guess it's just that, predictably, in this post-Hillary-tears-on-TV world, that's all anyone can talk about. I'm a little tired today of wondering about the bias of this paper or radio commentator or columnist or news site. Most of that, I think is me being annoyed about the Hillary tears debate. It's bringing up a lot of complicated bullshit over this whole woman candidate thing. Was it weakness or emotional strength? Whatever. I liked it, and so did a lot of other people, but I keep asking myself whether people liked it or didn't like it for the right reasons. On NPR this morning they interviewed a woman from NH who voted for Hillary. She decided Saturday morning, and soon after her decision her daughter called. Her daughter had volunteered for Obama. She told her mom, "Mom, when I was a kid, I told you I'd never call myself a feminist, and you told me 'How ungrateful.'" Then she told her mom she'd changed her mind and was voting for Hillary. I keep thinking about this stuff because I don't think any of it is clear cut. I want to support women in leadership roles, but I don't think Hillary is right for this role right now.

So there's a lot of stir over this shit. Maureen Dowd's op-ed today in the Times was pretty unbearable, in my opinion. Moe at Jezebel posted a rant about Hillary supporters that made me kind of sad, since Jezebel's one of my favorite sites and I hate to see women hating on other women so much, especially since I don't see supporting Hillary like it's the end of the world. (This post did reinforce my belief that while I love reading Moe's writing on Jezebel, I just don't know if I could actually stomach her in real life. She has a weird set of opinions sometimes.) I am upset about this stuff not because I am a Hillary supporter, but because I am disturbed by the number of people who truly hate her, who disbelieve everything she says, who make everything about her gender. It feels backwards. Now, with Obama, people definitely do talk about his race, but such talk lacks the viciousness of the anti-Clinton rhetoric. And I don't think you can say that this is all residual from the Bill Clinton era. Not at all.

It makes me sad that this is even a subject. It makes me sad that my support of Obama puts me, in some people's opinions, in a group of "young women in denial" about the state of sexism in our nation. It makes me sad for Hillary, and for our country, too.

Sorry, as usual this is rather jumbled and probably misinformed. I'm just venting.

(via Feministing)

The Savages

Continuing with Movie Madness week, I saw "The Savages" last night. Sheesh. I'm still kind of processing it. It's one of those movies that kind of stuns you into a depressed, terrified silence. It's funny, yes, there are definitely some funny parts. (One of Laura Linney's lines towards the end in particular.) I walked out and said two things: "I kind of want to kill myself now," and "I feel like calling my parents and telling them I love them." That's because, obviously, the film is about two siblings whose once-abusive and absentee father is diagnosed with dementia. They scoop him up from Sun City, Arizona (which is pretty much identical to the opening sequence of "Weeds" only with old people) and take him back to Buffalo, NY, where John (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a professor (he teaches "theatre of social unrest" to quote Wendy, Linney's character). It's a movie about aging, and having to grow up, and guilt and responsibility, and a lot of things, but it seems kind of reductive to put it that way. I found myself relating to Wendy more than perhaps I should (she pops Xanax, steals a dead woman's Percocet, has a lukewarm affair with a married man, and is generally anxious and obsessive and desperate to impose some kind of control over a situation that is beyond her reach). She's an aspiring playwright working as a temp in New York, and I suddenly had flashes of myself in an administrative job in twenty-five years. The movie ends up being a bit more about her than her brother, whose prosaic attitude (and, I suspect, not a little bit of repression and academic detachment) carries him through the crisis with more aplomb. But the nitty gritty of their own career and love crises was second fiddle to the central issue, obviously. It was hard to watch them put their dad in a nursing home, to see him in the hospital, this man who you understand from their comments was once basically an asshole, diminished and frail now, confused, obediently (for the most part) allowing aides to undress him and put him in bed and lead him in stretching exercises. It was scary. It was a little too realistic, by which I mean it made you think about things you don't want to think about. I won't belabor the point, but I think part of what made it hard to watch was imagining my parents and grandparents having to do this for their parents or for each other. It felt like this heavy, generational pull and weight. As Justin put it, what made it so depressing was that this is a very real possible future for any of us.

It was a good movie, actually a great movie. The acting, as you'd expect, is excellent. I have a beef with about the last 15 seconds of the movie, plotwise, but that's about it. But this blog post feels very stiff, not my usual style, and I think part of it is just that this is a really difficult subject to talk about, for me and in general. In that light it's amazing what the writer-director has managed to do with this movie... to make it bearable, even almost light-hearted at times, utterly humanized, provocative in its plainness and sadness and realism, and to do so without gloss or polish.

Yep, you can say that Oscar season movies are treating me well right now. (Tonight, I'm seeing "I'm Not There," after which point I think the movie rush will slow down a bit.)

*sigh*

Guess my Hillary-heavy post was prescient. Boo.

Gloria on Hillary

This blog has taken on a Hillary slant today, hasn't it?! Just got around to reading Gloria Steinem's op-ed in the Times today and it's quite the rallying cry. All I'm saying is, sometimes I wonder.

So why is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one? The reasons are as pervasive as the air we breathe: because sexism is still confused with nature as racism once was; because anything that affects males is seen as more serious than anything that affects “only” the female half of the human race; because children are still raised mostly by women (to put it mildly) so men especially tend to feel they are regressing to childhood when dealing with a powerful woman; because racism stereotyped black men as more “masculine” for so long that some white men find their presence to be masculinity-affirming (as long as there aren’t too many of them); and because there is still no “right” way to be a woman in public power without being considered a you-know-what.

(thanks to Justin for pushing me to read it earlier than I otherwise would)

Two Book Lists

The "50 greatest British writers since 1945" -- the ones I've read are bolded
(via Pages Turned, who likes lists as well as I do)

1. Philip Larkin
2. George Orwell
3. William Golding
4. Ted Hughes (does it count if I've only read a poem or two?)
5. Doris Lessing
6. J. R. R. Tolkien
7. V. S. Naipaul
8. Muriel Spark
9. Kingsley Amis
10. Angela Carter ("The Bloody Chamber" waits in my to-read pile)
11. C. S. Lewis (Advice from my adoring audience: should I read the rest of the Narnia books? I've only read the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe)
12. Iris Murdoch
13. Salman Rushdie
14. Ian Fleming
15. Jan Morris
16. Roald Dahl
17. Anthony Burgess
18. Mervyn Peake
19. Martin Amis
20. Anthony Powell
21. Alan Sillitoe
22. John Le Carré
23. Penelope Fitzgerald
24. Philippa Pearce
25. Barbara Pym
26. Beryl Bainbridge
27. J. G. Ballard
28. Alan Garner
29. Alasdair Gray
30. John Fowles
31. Derek Walcott
32. Kazuo Ishiguro
33. Anita Brookner
34. A. S. Byatt
35. Ian McEwan
36. Geoffrey Hill
37. Hanif Kureshi
38. Iain Banks
39. George Mackay Brown
40. A. J. P. Taylor
41. Isaiah Berlin
42. J. K. Rowling
43. Philip Pullman
44. Julian Barnes
45. Colin Thubron
46. Bruce Chatwin
47. Alice Oswald
48. Benjamin Zephaniah
49. Rosemary Sutcliff
50. Michael Moorcock

I literally don't know who half of these people are. I recognize more in the "runner-up" category (here, with some interesting comments).

100 "Most Influential" (although if you check the comments here you'll see it was originally titled just "Influential") Books by Women (again, titles I've read in bold)

1. Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind
2. Anne Rice, Interview With the Vampire
3. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
4. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
5. Virginia Woolf, The Waves
6. Virginia Woolf, Orlando
7. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
8. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
9. Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
10. Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome
11. Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness
12. Nadine Gordimer, Burger’s Daughter (does it count if I barely remember it, read it in one night, and didn't particularly like or understand it?)
13. Harriette Simpson Arnow, The Dollmaker
14. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
15. Willa Cather, My Ántonia
16. Erica Jong, Fear of Flying
17. Erica Jong, Fanny
18. Joy Kogawa, Obasan
19. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
20. Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child
21. Doris Lessing, The Grass Is Singing
22. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
23. Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time
24. Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres
25. Lore Segal, Her First American
26. Alice Walker, The Color Purple
27. Alice Walker, The Third Life of Grange Copeland
28. Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon
29. Muriel Spark, Memento Mori
30. Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
31. Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina
32. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
33. Susan Fromberg Shaeffer, Anya
34. Cynthia Ozick, Trust
35. Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club
36. Amy Tan, The Kitchen God’s Wife
37. Ann Beattie, Chilly Scenes of Winter
38. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
39. Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer
40. Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays
41. Mary McCarthy, The Group
42. Mary McCarthy, The Company She Keeps
43. Grace Paley, The Little Disturbances of Man
44. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
45. Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
46. Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart
47. Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood
48. Mona Simpson, Anywhere But Here
49. Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
50. Toni Morrison, Beloved
51. Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm
52. Sylvia Townsend Warner, Mr. Fortune’s Maggot
53. Katherine Anne Porter, Ship of Fools
54. Laura Riding, Progress of Stories
55. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust
56. Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower
57. Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits
58. A.S. Byatt, Possession
59. Pat Barker, The Ghost Road
60. Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle
61. Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac
62. Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
63. Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca
64. Katherine Dunn, Geek Love
65. Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle
66. Barbara Pym, Excellent Women
67. Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
68. Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
69. Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist
70. Nancy Willard, Things Invisible to See
71. Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry
72. Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Disturbances in the Field
73. Rosellen Brown, Civil Wars
74. Harriet Doerr, Stones for Ibarra
75. Harriet Doerr, The Mountain Lion
76. Stevie Smith. Novel on Yellow Paper
77. E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News
78. Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem
79. P.D. James, The Children of Men
80. Ursula Hegi, Stones From the River
81. Fay Weldon, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
82. Katherine Mansfield, Collected Stories
83. Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills
84. Louise Erdrich, The Beet Queen
85. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
86. Edna O’Brien, The Country Girls Trilogy
87. Margaret Drabble, The Realms of Gold
88. Margaret Drabble, The Waterfall
89. Dawn Powell, The Locusts Have No King
90. Marilyn French, The Women’s Room
91. Eudora Welty, The Optimist’s Daughter
92. Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries
93. Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John
94. Tillie Olsen, Tell Me a Riddle
95. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
96. Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head
97. Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day
98. Alice Hoffman, The Drowning Season
99. Sue Townsend, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole
100. Penelope Mortimer, The Pumpkin Eater

Pages Turned suggests adding one of our own to the list. Here's mine:
101. Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
(I would also add on "The Morgesons" by Elizabeth Stoddard, which I read for one of my favorite classes at school. And, on the subject of that class, I'm actually shocked that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" isn't on this list. I don't love it or anything, but I'm surprised it's not there. Finally, if I had my druthers, I'd add Nancy Willard's "The High Rise Glorious Skittle Skat Roarious Sky Pie Angel Food Cake" but I suppose children's books aren't allowed.)

More on Hillary

Read this:

Victory in November's election to succeed U.S. President George W. Bush would make Clinton the first U.S. female president after 43 male heads of state.

But that possibility could be fading if primary voters opt for the promise of hope and change projected by Obama over Clinton's experience and readiness to lead.

Those issues rather than gender will determine whether the U.S. senator from New York and wife of former President Bill Clinton stands or falls, according to Naomi Wolf, author of the 1991 bestseller "The Beauty Myth" and other books.

"None of the polling or the focus groups indicate that people are ... (snubbing) her because she is a woman but because of a deficit in how she is projecting leadership," Wolf said.

"If anything, she is too entrenched, too competent a leader. She ... has been on the world stage and people (voters) are sick of people who are ... on the world stage," she said.

Now think about it in the context of this and this.

Media coverage of politics, more than anything else, makes me repeat the mantra "Not everything is as it seems" to myself.

I feel like my prolific posting of late could start annoying people.

FFFFOUND!

I could play around on FFFFOUND! all day.


This one made me do a bit of a double take. FFFFOUND! is too much for me to read daily, minutely, but I now have it bookmarked at the top of my browser so I can check in and find a gem now and then. Too bad it is in private beta and I am not hip enough.

Beards

Can't say what it is but I'm sort of into guys with beards lately. Is that weird? I think it kind of is and I can't really name any examples per se, but I just feel like a good beard really does the trick sometimes. Anyway, this is all just a segue into posting about how I think Conan O'Brien looks good with a beard.

I haven't watched Conan in years, but even without writers he can still do that crazy little dance at the beginning of the monologue, which, let's face it, is pretty much my favorite part about his show anyway. The beard makes his hair look even poofier, which may be the only slight downside. Go here to watch his monologue from last week's return.

There was also a funny article about "strike beards" in this week's New Yorker. (Yes, that same issue.) I know for a fact that B.J. Novak had a beard last month because he went to the Facebook holiday party and that's the report I got -- but it's unclear if he's also doing that for the strike or if it's just maintaining his Corporate Ryan look.

(photo via)

Cristina on Hillary

My friend Cristina has some really insightful things to say about Hillary Clinton. Excerpted:

I’m having lots of tissues with the whole presidential things. It seems that everyone I know is voting for obama (clearly i only know liberals so this is skewed), which I am ok with but I get a little annoyed when I hear why people are not voting for hillary “I juts don’t like her personality." "i think she's cold." "i don't trust a menopausal woman." "She's not emotional enough." "what emotion she does she is fake." All of this makes me really upset because i don't actually think that she is being judged by the same standard that all the men who are running are being judged by. She truly can't fucking win because everything she does is viewed as being too much and too little and it really pisses me off. I mean basically what it comes down to is she’s a woman and therefore whatever she does will be judged in that way.

And now the whole tearing up thing.

I'm not asking people to vote for someone just because she has a vagina but i'm saying that we should really look at why we are voting for someone else. i think that if Hillary were to win, anything bad that would happen would be blamed on her being a woman. But if Obama were to win anything bad would be blamed on his character. But as a woman our characters are inextricably tied to our womanhood, and this makes it really hard to get anywhere in a male oriented world.

i'm just real annoyed is all i'm saying because basically this is all some fucking sexist bullshit.

This is what I'm talking about.

New Yorker Roundup

I supposed I should preface this by saying that I am either a bad exerciser or a good reader. When I use the elliptical machine at work, I like to read a magazine with it. Today, that magazine was the Dec 7th issue of The New Yorker. This not only reveals that I'm probably not a very vigorous ellipticizer, but also excuses me for being really into this issue thus far, because it could be just the endorphins. Still.

I really liked this Talk of the Town -- one of the funnier I've read recently, but filled with pertinent and somewhat scary information about the religious slants of our political candidates, specifically Romney and Huckabee. I'm more scared of Huckabee than Romney, for that whole not believing in evolution thing, but I am more grumpy about Romney's hedging about, well, everything, in order to diffuse fears of his Mormonism. An excerpt:

Romney himself warned, in a speech, titled “Faith in America,” that he delivered on December 6th, “There are some who would have a Presidential candidate describe and explain his church’s distinctive doctrines. To do so would enable the very religious test the founders prohibited.” The weasel word here is “distinctive.” Romney had no problem describing his church’s not-so-distinctive doctrines. “There is one fundamental question,” he continued, as if he were speaking on tax cuts, “about which I often am asked. What do I believe about Jesus Christ? I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Saviour of mankind.” (But please don’t ask about Jesus’ post-Resurrection travel schedule.)

Another article I found pretty fascinating was the Political Scene piece "Old Habits" on Giuliani. I admit I don't pay a lot of attention to him -- I think partly because the array of supposed and actual scandals surrounding him is just too diverse and confusing for me to digest it all. This article, however, sums them all up (at least, all the political ones, from patronage hires to financial iffiness to how well he actually prepared for 9/11). It definitely made him sound much more like a boss man during the Gilded Age than like a good Presidential candidate. But quite frankly, I'm pretty baffled by his campaign strategies thus far, and he still feels like a wild card to me. I haven't been following the Republican candidates as closely as the Democrats, but I have a (totally uninformed) feeling that as this campaign progresses, that's the race that's going to be more interesting.

I've been a bit behind on my New Yorkers because of the holiday but am catching up well and remembering again how much I love reading it every week. Stumbled across this blog post this morning, "How to read the New Yorker in 10 easy steps" and wasn't too impressed, although I do find it always kind of amusing to talk to people about how they read their New Yorkers. I read it almost always in page order, starting with flipping through the short reviews in "Goings On About Town," and ending up with the reviews in the back. I sometimes do skip the fiction, and I either read the poems last, having passed them during my reading of the meaty articles, or before said meaty articles, because that way I won't forget to go back for them. I think my friend Jordi said once he always reads the reviews first, and I know Justin starts with Talk of the Town and moves on to any profile of an actor (at least, I remember him saying that once) or maybe politician. I find it odd that my reading is so linear -- as I get older I find these very nit-picky, perfectionist, procedural, planning parts of my head that I never thought I possessed. (I also read books of essays or short stories in order, and never skip them.) It's very strange.

(via)

Atonement

I finally saw Atonement tonight, with Becca. I've been waiting for this movie since I finally read the book, back in August or something. I read the book knowing that there was going to be a movie adaptation, and I expected it to be good, but I was actually surprised by how good it was. Sure, there were a few minor things I missed (I did miss some of the scenes in France), but by the end I didn't care. Partly that's because I had sort of forgotten the "twist" (it seems sort of demeaning to call it a twist, it's more like a punch in the gut), and then suddenly there was Vanessa Redgrave, doing a monologue against an all black background, breaking my heart. It really was that good.

There were other things I liked about it, of course -- and I don't want to give away the end of the movie, either, so I will mention those instead of rhapsodizing about the last five minutes. The music was pretty amazing -- aside from just a few overly-swelling string sections, there was innovative use of a typewriter's sound for percussion, if you can believe that, which modernized the movie a bit and was really arresting. And the cast was great as well. All versions of Briony were pitch-perfect, and Keira Knightley, as she should, walked that line between annoying and impetuous and pissed off and beautiful (although I really am distracted by how thin she is, in everything I see her in). James McAvoy walked that line between a little scarily angry/righteous and properly devastated. I felt like all of the three main characters, actually, were very accurate to the book. And finally, the movie was just gorgeous... the English country home scenes, bathed in sunlight, veiled in thick old glass, illuminated by little glowing lamps just bright enough, shadowed in dark wood paneling; the scenes in France, which I do vaguely wish there were more of because there is so much tragedy and horror in those scenes of the book, but which were bleak and still beautiful. (The photo in this post is not the exact shot in the movie, but I couldn't find the exact screenshot.) The lighting was great -- from flashing lights in the tube, all the shadowy moments in the beginning, lamps lighting down a hallway in turn.

I know a lot of people who are writing this movie off as too much of a romance, too sweeping. It is that, but it is a lot more.

Hillary

I will admit it: I kind of had a moment of warmth towards Hillary when I watched this clip of her "tearing up" in New Hampshire.

(It reminded me of my occasional nagging guilt that perhaps I am partially swayed by society's resentment of Hillary for being a woman in a man's field, and that it's all those sort of weirdly female self-hating things that make me dislike her, for, you know, something like her stridency and aggression. Because I honestly think if she always seemed this genuine, I would like her more, but then again, another way to look at this clip is that she is being more traditionally "female," soft-spoken, emotional, even a little fragile. So which is it that made me warm up to her? This is my inner debate.)

I'm still an Obama girl, though. Do you think either Clinton or Obama would a) ask the other to be their running mate or b) accept if asked? Just a random, uninformed thought.

(video from Justin)

Les Cousins Dangereux

If I were on Tumblr (in a way where I actually posted things instead of just idly checking my dashboard), I would reblog this photo that Rach just posted. In fact, I am doing that now, just, not in a trendy way.

Seriously, Justin and I are re-watching (well, I am re-watching, he will be watching for the first time as soon as we're out of the first season) Arrested Development (now that he lives literally next door - it is a little ridiculous) and it's really even better than you remember. Michael Cera is slightly pudgier and way more underage in it than in this picture, but he is still inexplicably hilarious.

(By way of explanation, the title of this post comes from this episode...)

Now, your daily dose of trivia

Like, literally, this is trivial:

Ew.

(Few things that come to mind. 1) He's 30? Makes sense, but really, Jess? 2) This makes their characters on the show seem mildly creepier. 3) I think this makes me more ok with having given up watching Heroes.)

Some thoughts on thoughts on body image.

Yesterday, I went bookstore browsing briefly, planning to buy the second book in the Twilight series. It wasn't available where I was, so I just got something else. I picked up the book Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, which I have been meaning to read ever since it came out, and which has gotten rave reviews in a variety of circles, read the blurbs on the back from folks like Arianna Huffington, and put it back down.

I think the problem is that with all my education, it feels cliche to be worried about eating disorders. We all know what we are supposed to think about our bodies. We are supposed to love them. We are not supposed to feel bad about them. We are supposed to eat when we are hungry, give into that craving, exercise because it feels good. But the truth is that's really hard to do, and there are about a million factors going into how we feel about our physical selves. I remember a time when I could write honestly that I didn't feel inferior when I looked in a magazine and saw nothing but slim models. That time, unfortunately, is long gone. Somewhere in the middle of college, it disappeared. I'm still wondering how exactly that transformation took place, but sometime in 2002 I became yet another woman in this world who doesn't see food or an exercise machine or a thin girl in a coffee shop for what they are, but for what they mean for me.

So I think part of the reason I've been putting off reading Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters is that I feel like I know the score. And that is just another way of saying that I'm in denial. Part of me doesn't want to read about the tyranny of the diet industry because I still buy into it, or to read about how fucked up our society is about weight and beauty and thinness, because I am afraid of how much that will reflect my own beliefs. I thought about this yesterday as I gingerly replaced the book on the shelf, and instead picked up a copy of Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia.

This morning, I read a short excerpt in the Utne Reader from Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters. I do think parts of it are the old saw. But I am really trying to think about it, and I think we need the old saw. I hate it when I see my smart, funny, beautiful women friends reading shit like Glamour and Cosmo, even though I forgive myself for reading Lucky and Self. (Because, you know, these are body-positive magazines in my head.) I hate feeling ambivalent every time I eat a meal. I hate that my male friends think it's weird when I talk about this, but all date thin women. I hate that for women, our bodies are inseparable from our shopping habits, our social lives, our careers, whatever. I hate that this is considered a "women's issue." It all drives me crazy. So I am going to go back and buy that book and read it, and hopefully it challenges me as much as I hope it will.

Our all-or-nothing nation is built on foundations of fantasy. Our imaginations are harnessed to America’s favorite adolescent fantasy: how much prettier, thinner, richer, and more successful we will be one day. This perpetual American daydream is written in the language of “somedays.” Someday whispers us to sleep at night, gets us through a boring workday, makes our little lives bearable. The hundreds of ads the average American sees every day brainwash us into believing that we need more shiny, new things and, of course, food—glorious piles of chocolate chip cookies, decadent ice cream, burgers the size of elephants. “Someday” soothes insecurities, numbs discomfort, and keeps perfect girls running obediently in the hamster wheel of preoccupation with their weight. Someday we will be thin. Translation: Someday we will be happy, loved, and powerful.

--Courtney E. Martin

(from the Utne Reader, via Feministing)

Raymond Carver

I'm behind on my New Yorkers (by, like, a week or two), but I'm finally wrapping up the double fiction issue that came out at Christmas. I had been writing off the whole Raymond Carver-and-his-editor controversy (I love that in the book world this is a controversy), but ended up finding the piece interesting. For those of you who don't pay attention to decades-old literary gossip, Carver's editor, Gordon Lish, did a lot of cutting. Like, 4o percent of the stories lot. There are some who say, therefore, that the editor deserves credit for a lot of Carver's success, his "minimalist" style, etc. Some others would argue that the role of the editor is complex and this is not much different from other editor-author relationships. Some would say that the editor is trying to take credit for this, but Carver is still Carver. Some say the writing would have been better left less touched, longer, rambling-ier. The article sums up the controversy, but more interestingly, the magazine published excerpts of letters Carver sent to Lish over a 15-year-ish period of time. The longest one is a really rambling, impassioned letter sent after Lish had severely cut down the stories for the collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love; Carver was pleading with Lish to halt the publication entirely. It's pretty amazing, really, to get this window into Carver's mind, given his alcoholism and general fragile state, and also to see how he writes when he's overemotional and stressed out -- it repeats itself and it's sort of rambling and strung out-seeming. It makes me think I should read more letter collections, except quite frankly, I have too much to read already. Still, this is recommended reading if you are a writer, Carver fan, or book nerd.

I love this.

My sister and I are staying in Grandpa Sawtooth's old house until our father, Chief Bigtree, gets back from the Mainland. It's our first summer alone in the swamp. "You girls will be fine," the Chief slurred. "Feed the gators, don't talk to strangers. Lock the door at night." The Chief must have forgotten that it's a screen door at Grandpa's -- there is no key, no lock. The old house is a rust-checkered yellow bungalow at the edge of the wild bird estuary. It has a single, airless room; three crude, palmetto windows, with mosquito-blackened sills; a tin roof that hums with the memory of rain. I love it here. Whenever the wind gusts in off the river, the sky rains leaves and feathers. During mating season, the bedroom window rattles with the ardor of birds.

--from "Ava Wrestles the Alligator," the first story in Karen Russell's St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

There Will Be Blood

I saw There Will Be Blood yesterday. Hoo boy. It was a pretty amazing movie. It looked amazing -- imagine the possibilities with gushing oil wells, oil fires in the middle of the night, gurgling, lazily bubbling pools of oil, people streaked with, you guessed it, oil, all in the middle of alternately dry and lush California scrubland where it takes place. It sounded amazing -- the music is sometimes country-bluegrass sounding, sometimes straight out of a horror film, sometimes straight classical, and then, often enough that you never settle down, dissonant and terrifying for seemingly no reason. Daniel Day-Lewis is amazing, and his character Daniel Plainview's development (if that's the word for it) throughout the movie is subtle and pretty damn scary. (And even darkly funny.)

For the record, I am pro-ending. It's shocking and gruesome and absurd. There was some debate about whether or not the ending is inconsistent with the rest of the film for some reason. It does kind of take the film to a new level -- just the setting is a big change from the rest of the movie, suddenly (almost) genteel and ostentatious and wealthy. But to my mind, there was no way to get around having an ending like that. That's the inevitable, and if it is over the top, well, just think of the rest of the movie, which was just teetering on the edge of madness and obsession. If you've seen the movie, and want to see some of the critics' opinions on the ending (I particularly like the quote from the LA Weekly guy), go here. Otherwise, just see the movie.

Yes.

"You must constantly ask yourself these questions: Who am I around? What are they doing to me? What have they got me reading? What have they got me saying? Where do they have me going? What do they have me thinking? And most important, what do they have me becoming? Then ask yourself the big question: Is that okay? Your life does not get better by chance, it gets better by change."

--Jim Rohn

(via via)

Remember what I said about memes

I don't have any image editing software on this computer, or really, more accurately, if I did I wouldn't know it since I'm still learning to speak Mac. But this is a cool one.

1. The first article title on the Wikipedia Random Articles page is the name of your band.
2. The last four words of the very last quotation on the Random Quotations page is the title of your album.
3. The third picture in Flickr’s Interesting Photos From The Last 7 Days will be your album cover.
4. Use your graphics program of choice to throw them together, and post the result.

My band name is Thor Girl, album title is "Of the Same Side." And the picture is this one. I imagine I'm definitely some kind of grrl rock. With that name...

(via Peter Knox, who I was in the Columbia Publishing Course with and then through some twist of Gawker-fueled fate became a minor internet celebrity for a day, and then was somehow quoted in my friend Rachel's blog, so I ended up giving his blog another chance. These Tumblr folks... it's like Web 2.0 limited to the New York metropolitan area.)

Photos of Africa

Another kottke.org connection (can you tell I am going a little nutso with the links today):

Michael Poliza's Flickr set of (mostly) aerial photos of Africa. It is really worth browsing... there are a lot of "holy shit, that is beautiful/otherworldly/mystifying" moments and a few "are you sure this isn't digitally created rather than a picture of a real thing?" moments. It reminds me how little I know about that entire continent, and I don't even know where I'd start trying to learn more. I hope one day I will be able to see at least a fraction of the things contained in this slideshow.

Go here, and click "view as slideshow."

(via)

To-Do-listing

It's rather appropriate I posted my resolutions yesterday, since yesterday I also saw Sasha Cagen speak at Google. I have pretty much loved her ever since, long ago, I stumbled across her quirkyalone website and it resonated with me. (Yes, I did write an article about it for my Daily column back in the day, which I cringe while linking to) Her latest book is called "To-Do List," named after a now-defunct magazine and ongoing blog somewhat in the vein of PostSecret. I wasn't totally jazzed about the new book, just because for a while I was keeping up with the blog but it had infrequent posts and I got impatient. However, I was surprised by how good the book looked (I didn't manage to get ahold of a copy), and I was pleasantly pleased with Sasha herself. She is pretty and kind of chatty and normal and the bit of me that was always paranoid that "quirkyalone" could be a coverup for "really weird" was satisfied by her human-ness. She sort of speaks with a slight self-conscious twist in her mouth, but she is a natural speaker, especially on the subject of to-do lists (she calls herself a to-do-listologist). Throughout the talk she highlighted a few lists from the book as well as some statistics she's gathered about list-making. It was one of those moments where every minute I had to turn to my friend next to me and say "Oh shit, I do that." The talk isn't posted on YouTube yet (I'll post it when it's up), but some highlights:

-List makers are predominantly, overwhelmingly female. It's around an 80-20 ratio of women to men.
-Around 60% of list makers cross off items on the list, and maybe around 30% check off the items. Some people even draw boxes and then put checkmarks in the boxes. (I do not do this. I am a crosser.)
-a shocking percentage of people (something like 50%) have written lists of what they are looking for in an ideal mate... and some actually reference it throughout their life & relationships

It made me think about the kinds of lists I make, and some of the lists I want to make. Isn't it odd that even my list-making is aspirational? I mean, I have thought many times about making those "what I want to do with my life" lists or "potential jobs for me" lists (I kind of did that in my resolutions), or "places I want to go in my life" lists. But I kind of think it would end up being depressing, or feel pointless. Why write the list if you aren't immediately going to implement it?

I stumbled across this website today that is a graphic demonstration of someone's doings throughout 2006 -- a "2006 Annual Report." (It's old news, I suppose, but it was in Jason Kottke's Best Links of 2007, where I found it.) It's reminiscent of the chart of relationships that was an Internet hit earlier this year, except, how on earth does this dude keep track of all this stuff? (Girlfriends are easier to remember than the numbers and brands of beer you drank in a whole year.) But anyway, it made me want to keep track of it... to encapsulate my year through visualized data. Which is such a strange way to think about life... it seems better spent living it than recapping it.

I think Sasha Cagen's on to something when it comes to these list-making instincts of ours. I don't write many more lists besides to-dos, but I think in list form sometimes. We are strange creatures, we humans.

UPDATE: It occurs to me that I am even weirder about list-making since I've always been a sucker for e-mail "slambook" type quizzes, now hiply known in the blogosphere as memes. You've seen some of those here, and I have a bunch I've been planning to get to stored up in my Google Reader. It never ends.

Juno

Yeah, like everyone else in the country I'm obsessed with Juno now too. I was talking to a girl yesterday about it, and she noted that she was annoyed with it the same way she was annoyed by Gilmore Girls -- too witty. Granted. But whatever brief annoyance I had in the beginning of the movie was over by the end, when I just kind of fell head over heels for it. I've seen it twice and am already itching for it to come out on DVD.

Because I've been watching them today, then, help yourself to a couple of Juno-related links.

Proof that some people (ok, Ellen Page) do kind of talk like Juno talks:



(via Diablo Cody's Myspace blog)

Song from the end of the movie, with a handy selection of scenes: (DO NOT watch these things unless you've seen the movie, cause it will ruin it.)



Then a few gems from "The Pussy Ranch," Diablo Cody's blog (God, I hate myself for jumping on this bandwagon):
-Yes, the reference to "Tino" in the movie was totally a MSCL reference. I'm so happy.
-Juno's friend Leah's obsession with older men ("teachers") expressed itself in her wall collages that you couldn't see in the movie -- see a close-up here

Rain

It's been raining and windy as hell all day, and there are a few big giant branches (they are at the size where I think they are technically "limbs") that have broken off and are lying in my street. But suddenly about five minutes ago the sky through my window just lit up and became this lovely sunrisey peach color, like, at sunset, because if you don't do it at sunset when would you, the sun is giving it its last shot to break through the clouds. It is losing, but it's losing in a lovely sad way.

Clearly I've been alone all day.