"Serious" writer with "serious" glasses.

In the course of internetting regarding mass market books for my last post, I came across several articles that mentioned “Franzenfreude.”  This non-word was created as part of a Twitter campaign waged by mass market faves Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner.  The two were questioning why “chick-lit” books, books that deal with women-centric themes, get ignored by the literary establishment while similar books written by men get considered serious works of fiction.  Men like Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections, Freedom, and every other books that “teaches us about ourselves.”  Franzenfreud.

I have some opinions about this matter, namely that JPic and JWein may be dismissively considered “chick-lit” for reasons beyond their women-centric themes.  Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld, after all, is a female-centric book that is without question also serious literature.  Sittenfeld has a freakishly magnificent eye for detail and nuance, of course, a quality that is probably lacking from most of JPic’s otherwise entertaining fare.

I don't see your glasses, Picoult.

In any case, the Franzenfreud controversy started me thinking more broadly about the division between highbrow and lowbrow literature and what qualifies as what.  Thinking about this, in turn, has made it clear that despite my best pretentions, much of what I enjoy reading is patently lowbrow.  Lowbrow reading, after all, has the benefit of being as fun as watching television without the disadvantage of rotting your brain.

So, in honor of Franzenfreud, I have decided to recommend five of my favorite lowbrow books.  I considered “lowbrow” reading to be anything popular that does NOT aim to teach us about ourselves and is geared primarily towards being entertaining.  I did consider books outside of the mass market frame because mindless comedy reads are rarely released in this form, but at least one of the following books could comfortably be called “chick-lit.”

I think most of what is below will satisfy even the highbrows among us.

1. I Just Want My Pants Back – David J. Rosen

This is the book that inspired me to write this post.  I’ve recommended it many a time, both to friends with better taste than me and those with worse.  Nobody on either side of the aisle has ever responded with anything but love for this hilarious romp.  Yeah, it’s a romp.  That’s all.

I Just Want My Pants Back is about a 20-something directionless slacker.  Granted the topic holds relevance to the lives of almost every person I know, but the story covers only cliché areas like work and dating.  But it teaches us about the part of the human condition called laughter, okay Franzen?

Several years ago some bigwigs thought they could turn Pant’s hilarity into a TV series, and, predictably, produced a show of shockingly poor quality.  One unfortunate result was that the book now appears to be even lower-brow than before, if that was possible.

So read this book as if no television producer has ever heard of it and let all your pretensions go while you laugh for four hours straight.  It should not take longer than that to read, but if you’re a slow reader be forewarned: It is impossible to put this book down.  Clear your day.

2. Personal Days – Ed Park

Remember when we were all supposed to read Then We Came To The End, by Joshua Ferris because it was witty and cutting and somehow we still felt sad for most of it? (Full disclosure: I LOVED Then We Came To The End.  I read it more than once.  It just made me sad, okay?)

Well Personal Days is the lighter option.  You’ll be reminded of the emptiness that is your life and the insanity that is corporate thinking, but wont have to worry about picking apart the larger meaning regarding human nature and tragedy.  You’ll feel like you spent six hours huddled around a water cooler gossiping in the most satisfying possible way, no emotional rollercoaster and later depression necessary.

3. Girls of Riyadh – Rajaa Alsanea

Did you enjoy reading Sex and the City?  I didn’t.  Some things are better suited to television.

I surprised myself, then, when I picked up a lipstick red edition of Girls of Riyadh at an airport bookstore in the Middle East.  The novel should ostensibly have been just as boring as Sex and the City with the additional annoyance of having footnotes to explain all the weird Saudi references.  It is not particularly well written (or translated) and falls very comfortably into the chick-lit cannon.

BUT (!), this novel is about four girls dressing, dating, and giggling in SAUDI ARABIA.  It was, as expected, a totally mindless read, but it offered the most relevant, interesting, and relatable portrait of Saudi Arabia I have ever been a party to.  There are not many books that give accounts of young life in closed nations.  My knowledge of Saudi Arabia has always been notoriously bereft of people.  I literally had no sense of what everybody there did everyday for most of my life.  This book changed that.

4. That Old Cape Magic – Richard Russo

I just have a soft spot for this read.  I find Richard Russo a little tedious most of the time but this just flew by and made me kind of happy and nostalgic.  I still can’t put my finger on why.

I also understand that most of Russo’s books are considered “real” literature.  Something, however, about the popularity of That Old Cape Magic and its beach-reading style story made me feel like it was okay to include it in this list.

5. This Is Where I Leave You – Jonathan Tropper

Be forewarned: This is a book about death.

Fortunately, it is also a book about hilarity.   It somehow walks this line without being crass, disrespectful, or unduly depressing.

You know how when somebody close to you dies, you suddenly realize how many books, television shows, and movies out there are about death?  And it becomes annoyingly clear that you will be reminded of your own loss every single day by some unsuspecting pop cultural item.

I read the book on a plane on my way back to Los Angeles after dealing with a loss.  I bought it without reading the back because it was prominently displayed (I have a real issue with doing this.  See post above.)   Naturally I was dismayed to discover that I was going to have to re-live the awful month I had just passed in book form.

Somehow after reading Tropper’s account, however, I felt both better and worse and exactly how I wanted to feel.  I’d recommend this book to anybody who is dealing with death or, conversely, not dealing with death at all.  So, like, anybody in general.

Stay tuned for Tania’s picks at some later date!

Toodles!

-L

Untrustworthy

When I asked customer service whether they had this edition, I got a surprising response.  Not only did they not carry it, but they assured me in their obnoxious bookseller voice that the publisher had “never released the book in mass market size.”  Like, at all.

I hate being told I am wrong, but there was a good thing that came out of this exchange – I learned the industry name for those cute paperback editions that are $6-$8 cheaper than their glossy giant (ie. clunky) cousins.  Still, B&N was not being a friend because I had absolutely seen “Dreams of My Father,” in mass market size.  It had been sitting in a very real, very existing airport newsstand.

Appropriately Dog-Eared. Wrong Book To Be Carrying.

Since the day I was LIED TO by B&N, I have been obsessed with finding modern literature in tiny size.  Aside from being lighter, cheaper, and cuter than traditional paperbacks, they are what I always imagined I would be reading yellowing copies of in my bohemian 20s.  This image was definitely related to the fact that the popular children’s series I grew up on, “The Baby-Sitters Club” and “The Boxcar Children,” were regular trade paperbacks while the classics we read later in school were usually mass markets.  Mass market books were my first experience with “grown-up” reading material, and I still think reading dog-eared tiny books makes for a delightfully on-point bohemian intellectual visual.  Plus it leaves one hand free to paint and/or sip black coffee.

Mass market paperbacks appeared just in time to hit the Beats generation and feel Greenwich Village-y.  They were initially a depression and wartime innovation, back when books were primarily sold as hardcovers by specialized dealers.  Used for reprints of popular books and classics, these cute editions used less paper than hardcovers (which during the war was a major consideration) and were affordable to a larger consumer base.  They were intended to be sold alongside magazines in places like drugstores, supermarkets, and Woolworth’s, not in the major bookstores of the day.  In fact many mass market publishers came from the magazine world.  This is probably why it seems so appallingly obvious that nobody with a literary background has ever been in charge of releasing these titles.  (The proportion of sensationalistic and genre crap among these editions is…to venture a conservative guess, really high.)

By the mid-1940s, mass market books were a booming business, and in the late 1940s the first original works were published as mass market paperbacks.  A lot of now famous authors began their careers as mass market writers.  Anybody heard of a man named Ray Bradbury?  Kurt Vonnegut?  He was the first author to publish a mass market book that was later sold in hardcover.

Tom Clancy Practicing Espionage

Regardless, being a mass market author has never offered much in the way of respect.  Mass market publishing found a home in genre fiction while trade paperbacks (the bigger paperbacks) were used for second runs of hardcover works.  Basically, mass market books grew to target cliché bored housewives who read poorly written romance novels and silly mysteries while waiting for the laundry to dry.  Oh, and commuters.  To this day, most literary authors try NOT to be published in mass market size because they worry they wont be taken seriously if their books get sold next to Tom Clancy novels and maiden/sailor romances.  This is probably stupid of them since mass market authors often make much bigger money than self-important “literary” types (Tom Clancy probably owns a boat or something), but who am I to judge?

So the facts don’t look good for somebody in my situation.  Somebody who loves adorable paperbacks but still has what I like to call “taste.”  Good books are rarely published to look cute.  Still, the overwhelming evidence that I am crazy has not deterred me from looking.  Frankly, having an appropriately bohemian adulthood is more important to me than reality.  And these books are around, just in random places.  It turns out, for example, that lots of real, readable, popular but good books get sold in mass market size in other countries.  Mass market books are cheaper to ship, after all, and the bulk of book shopping done by English speakers abroad is in airports, a traditional mass market retailer.

Still, do US travelers not have a need for lighter (actual weight-wise, not topic-wise) reading material?  Are US travellers so susceptible to symbolic acts of commerce that we willingly pay $6 more just to avoid looking like we are reading a romance novel?

Well, yes.  Obviously.

The Type of Photography You Can Do With Mass Market Books

Still, discovering mass market copies of books I purchased in regular paperback in the states and lugged a great distance always stings.  I brought my usual four books with me to Lebanon only to learn that at least two of them (the two heaviest weight and topic-wise) were for sale in Beirut in mass market size.  They were smaller, made of recycled paper, and half the price.  I read them in giant-size, left my giant copies in Lebanon, and filled up on highbrow mass market lit and a few paperbacks that are still in hardcover in the states.  Of course if you talk to Barnes & Noble none of this ever happened because my new books do not exist.  So enjoy paying $15 a pop suckers!

And my book?  Yes it DOES fit in my tiny purse.  And yes, it is Paul Auster.

Buy Things!

You know the mall, right? It’s like a 15 minute drive from you. Located on Rt. NUMBER right next to Lowes? The fluorescent-lit indoor garden filled with palms? Food court full of fast-food stalls and chain coffee shops? Modern world’s answer to the need for public restrooms and enforced civility? To the right is a visual reference.

This picture is of the ABC Mall in Beirut, Lebanon, not AWESOME BUYING CENTER in SUBURB, SoCal, but I forgive you for the mistake. Mall architecture is pretty much the same everywhere. And by that I mean that all malls feel vaguely desolate despite being optimistically lavish and somehow simultaneously Midwestern-looking.

This uniformity is intentional.

The architectural wonder that we know as the mall has roots in ancient souks and markets of course, but the version that we know today was pioneered in 1956 by an Austrian immigrant named Victor Gruen (who, fun fact, hung out with the likes of Albert Einstein and several other members of the intellectual elite of Holocaust-escapees). It all began, not surprisingly, in a suburb in middle America.

Though strip malls started popping up right alongside the first personal automobiles and markets have always been a part of civic life in American cities, until the mid-1900s most shopping took place in downtowns, where people could walk from store to store and wave to each other. With the end of the war and the rise of the personal automobile, people began leaving the city to live in idyllic boxy ranch houses on postage-stamp-sized grassy lots and, lo and behold, it turned out that downtowns lacked sufficient parking and, cleared of people, invited vice.

Gruen believed strongly that massive civic design projects were a good way to impact behavior, which was very Austrian of him. He set out to save the suburb from a similar fate and/or irrelevance by designing an indoor shopping center (the word mall would not come into parlance until later) in the suburb of Edina, Minnesota. The Southdale Center was intended to be set among meticulously developed apartment complexes, hospitals, and schools. Essentially what he set out to create was the polar opposite of the modern-day mall – a carefully developed, functional downtown. The New Yorker, in a 2004 profile on Gruen, describes:

“Southdale was not a suburban alternative to downtown Minneapolis. It was the Minneapolis downtown you would get if you started over and corrected all the mistakes that were made the first time around.”

An Actual Souk

What Gruen ended up with, underestimating the American love of poor land use and open space, was the first fully enclosed, practically useless, garden-courtyard-sporting parking lot.

Gruen’s mall was just one building, but his design took on a life of it’s own thanks to an absurd tax code change that made owning unprofitable malls an advantageous tax write-off. So, as these things happen, boxy buildings spread and spread to all sorts of random unnecessary places. Gruen was very frustrated with this turn and eventually moved back to Austria. There, he discovered that his design had preceded him and was in the process of killing downtown business in Austria as well. Oh well!

Either way, Gruen’s design is now as central to American youth culture as peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and unnaturally yellow powdered mac and cheese. Central enough that a kid like myself from Manhattan, who did not grow up in proximity to a mall, yearned for years to participate in the rite of passage that is hanging around the food court with your friends. I tried it a couple of times and found it surprisingly unfulfilling.

Generally, when I visit malls now I find them an oppressive a reminder of all that is wrong with American culture. So yeah, I’m a tool.

For some reason, however, all bets are off when I visit malls in other countries. International malls, despite being just as flavorless as their counterparts in the states, make me happy.

Yes. Happy.

You’ll notice I was AT the ABC mall in Beirut long enough to get the picture above AND this one of another mall in Beirut:

Joyeux Noël!

See, Gruen’s mall changed the world. And yes, we all agree that the modern-day mall and sprawl is bad for people, cities, and civilization. Yet the mall is an architectural experience that creates the same social experience everywhere. Local culture does not rule in a mall – mall culture rules. It’s not a local market. There is no bargaining. You don’t need local knowledge to know how much things should cost. Things are the price they are and everybody pays that price and making money is the only goal.

Now, despite what pre-teens the world over believe, mall culture and American culture are not the same thing and for me especially, malls do not harken back to my youth in any direct way. They still, however, remind me of home because they remind me of American television and all of the things I was supposed to be doing as a teenager. In a mall I understand my surroundings in same way as everybody else in the world. Despite the self-loathing this causes me, it’s somewhere I belong even in places where my foreignness is obvious. This is comforting especially during extended stays abroad, which despite being valuable and interesting, become exhausting. Feeling confused and out of place all the time, after all, is draining.

So Victor Gruen destroyed the country but made the world a friendlier place.

In Beirut, where I spent the last month, the ancient souk is gone. There is something called the “Beirut Souks,” but it is a newly developed mall built atop the former town marketplace, which was destroyed during the civil war. The fact that clothing stores seem to constitute an appropriate replacement for the former town center is sort of jarring, but then again I spent a day shopping there so who am I to say?

Oh, and you can now get sushi there so it’s not all bad.

Happy New Year Readbots!

-L

1. We are lazy.

2. Holiday stuff.

BUT DO NOT STRESS!  This drought will not go on much longer because, believe me, I am having THOUGHTS and I’m certain Tania is too.  Contrary to popular belief, we can’t just turn it off because Santa is coming to town.  We are stuck with these thoughts all year.

Until we get the energy to commit those thoughts to paper, however, we have you covered.  Here, for example, is a new Huffington Post essay I wrote on a topic irrelevant to this blog.  Surely it will tide you over.  Or not.  Whatever.

LINK CLICKING OPPORTUNITY RIGHT HERE: Healthcare and the Marcellus Shale — Fracking’s Consequences in Upstate New York

Happy Holidays from DWG!

Recession Specials For "Special" People and More!

Friends, countrymen, patriots, traitors, and lima beans, it’s another edition of Today’s News!  Contained within is important information about science, health, culture, weddings, and more…

As always, past editions are archived here and the present edition is available to all below the jump (Now with new 10pm addendum)!

Scientists Make HUGE Discovery On Mars – No, despite the implication of this headline, this story is not an elaborate set-up for a penis joke.  In fact, for members of the scientific/nerd community it is reporting some important and exciting news (I think).

For members of the non-scientific community, however, this story is mostly reporting on the fact that the science community should spend a little more time with real people so they can learn about how normal human specimens talk.  Aside from the (presumably) exciting news, the most notable thing about this article is the repeated and often inappropriate use of the term “slam-dunk” as in “rover finds slam-dunk evidence” and “this tells a slam-dunk story…” (both actual examples).

Issue 1: There is no such thing as a “slam-dunk story.”  There is a “great” story.  There is even such a thing as an “informative” story.  Your story cannot be “slam-dunk.”

Issue 2: Is there not a more scientific equivalent of the term “slam-dunk” that can be applied here?  I don’t like to mix my basketball and rocket science.

10 Celebrities You’d Never Know Are Latino – When I saw this headline, I immediately assumed that this list was essential to my understanding of American pop culture.  That my mind would be blown.

MEXICAN

Turns out that knowing Louis C.K. is half Mexican has been sort of a wash for me since noon, when I first read about this. Furthermore, my understanding of the character Rory Gilmore has not been impacted by the knowledge that Alexis Bledel, who is sort of a non-entity as an actual non-character person, learned Spanish before English.

What has increased, however, is my knowledge of the number of people who are (questionably) famous for no real reason. (Odette Yustman?  Vanessa Marcil?  Who are these people?  All I know: THEY ARE LATINAS.)

Sophistication In Action

WATCH: Couple Says ‘I Do’ At Local Starbucks - You have to be careful when your un-clever friends marry.  They often get convinced of their own  comedic genius by coming up with ideas like, “Oh, my fiance and I once went to a laundromat together.  We should totally get married there!”  Ideas that no sane friend/animal/or inanimate object in the victinity should nod agreeably in response to.

Should you find yourself in this situation as a friend/thing, your charge is simple.  Tell the person their idea was a good exercise in brain-use and move on to real suggestions like getting married in a garden or at city hall or just somewhere not ridiculous.

The video beyond this link is really a cautionary tale.  This “Starbucks” couple and those depicted in the pictures below obviously lack friends, pets, AND inanimate objects.  So while I question this being front page news, I understand HuffPo’s need to warn others about the powers of unchecked idiocy.  They really do have their eye on the safety of the general public.

Are Non-Stick Pans Safe? – Why do people insist on asking questions like this?  Nobody wants these answers.

I already own non-stick pans, so this article will either give me the go-ahead to continue life as usual and will have been a waste of time to read OR it will launch me into a spiral of worry and depression as  I learn that I  am giving myself cancer by cooking but continue to be too cheap to replace my kitchenware.  I don’t like those odds.

10 Questions To Ask Yourself Before You Date Anyone -  1. Should I be reading this article on Huffington Post?  Is there nothing better I could be doing to prepare for my life as a dating person?

If you answered this in the affirmative, you should not date anyone.  This one question test is (c) Lila, professional genius thinker.

WATCH: Student Freaks Out In The Library During Finals Week - Awesome.  ’Nuff said.

***10pm ADDENDUM***:

Staggering Number Of Women Are Pregnant And Don’t Know It- This treasure JUST arrived on the Huffington Post main page in the serious news column and I absolutely had to share in the name of common decency and all that is holy.

According to this article, 1 in 2500 women who are pregnant do not know it and:

“…have no symptoms — no weight gain, no nausea, and little to no abdominal swelling. They may still have their periods, or have always had irregular periods. If they have symptoms, they’re so subtle as to be easily mistaken for something else. Indigestion, perhaps.”

THIS IS HAPPENING?

I did hear a story about a third degree friend having an unexpected baby and assumed, like a sane person, that the tale had been grossly exaggerated by the time it got to me.  That knowledge did not stop me from passing it along with further embellishment, but WHAT IT THE STORY I HEARD WAS TRUE??  Can you have any medical condition without symptoms?  And how are you to tell the difference between a baby and a giant life-sucking tumor?  HYPOCHONDRIA ALERT!  Disaster.  Blech!

-Lila Lou

This seems to be the longest trailer in the history of the world.  How, you ask, could that be considering it is under 3 minutes, a completely normal length in world time?

I’ll explain.  I’m talking about thought-time.

It is really unusual to find a trailer that walks the fine line of being totally nonsensical while simultaneously giving away the entire plot of the film it advertises.

See initially, the “War Horse” trailer appears to be for several different movies. One of these movies is about a horse and a boy, one is about a war, and there seems to be some indication that there is a movie about a lovelorn girl somewhere in there.  The trailer gives no indication of any sort of cohesive story that might bind these disparate elements because it is just a series of random shots of people, animals and explosions.  It feels so long because it makes no sense and three minutes of non-sense-making is excessive.

Still, the Spielberg-ish overly-cinematic music and presence of an animal tell you all that you need to know.

Between the music, the idyllic pasture, the boy, the horse, and the soldiers, we can assume this is a movie is about a boy who loves his horse then finds himself heartbroken when said horse is conscripted by a goofy-looking stage-army.  Then the horse breaks free because of it’s wild and heroic nature, and finds the boy using its killer sense of direction and daring good fortune.  Naturally, during his darkest hour, when he imagines he cannot miss his horse any more, a wise old man will tell the boy, “You have to look forward or you’ll never get home.”  That’s what that is about.

Once you’ve done all the assuming that the cliched shots in this trailer telegraph, you’ve seen the entire movie.  A lengthy, formulaic, predictable movie full of irritating platitudes.  A movie that is long in thought-time because it is so easy to figure out and yet so long to sit through.

This trailer also successfully telegraphs one more thing.  Tania described the situation perfectly (and then I editorialized): It’s the type of film that you WILL cry at twice, but your second round of tears will be because you hate yourself.    The emotional roller coaster you can expect to be put on will be exhausting, and by extension just the thought of this movie is exhausting.

For myself, I say this:  I can already tell that “War Horse” will be an entirely plot-driven movie.  The boy, soldiers, and wise old man are going to be caricatures.  The horse is going to be a horse.  The war is going to be the tension.  This has all been engineered to make me feel certain ways.  This is why I hate movies with plots.

And if plots have to exist, Spielberg, can you just make ET again?

On a semi-related note: Normally any amount of dramatic trailer music makes me cry.  I sometimes even cry at AT&T commercials.  This is a genetic condition that afflicts my entire family.

Despite the clear signal to cry at the end of this trailer, however, I found myself unable to stop laughing.  That is because, once you’ve realized you are watching a trailer that is a parody of a trailer about the cheesiest possible thing in the world, you are rewarded with the hilariously overdone sunset silhouette action shot of the war horse.  Sort of like a signal that you were correct and about where the trailer was going and a reward for being a person with a great sense of humor.  Highly recommend watching the ENTIRE thing for that moment.

But now… I am back to blogging!

Ben Franklin butter statue. Nothing as American as cardiac arrest!

In case you missed it, a little over a week ago there was this big holiday known as American Arterial Distress Day, or something like that. After stuffing myself full of delicious, delicious animal fat courtesy of friend and blog reader Brent (hi Brent!), I atoned for my crass excess by having one the most pretentious weekends of all time.

Said pretension consisted of reading four-or-so back issues of The New Yorker that had piled up next to my bed and taking a quick tour of mid-century European cinema. Films viewed were Blow-Up, The 400 Blows, and Breathless. In case you’re keeping track, that’s Antonioni, Truffaut and Godard in a two-day period. And yes I think my own farts smell just delightful, thank you very much.

I’m not here to wax poetic about the brilliance of the films and my feelings about them, because so very much has been said about these films already.  No, I am here to talk about the fact that there is always something kind of disorienting and anticlimactic about coming to “the classics” late, or once you are of sufficient age to have already watched a lot of movies. This weekend was the second time I’d been confronted by this phenomenon in recent days; the first was when I watched Citizen Kane last month for the first time since I was 13.

Warning: this child will escape with your soul

The problem isn’t with my perception of the quality of these films; I’m not here to tell you that Citizen Kane or The 400 Blows just don’t stand the test of time — they do. The issue is more that these “iconic,” “revolutionary” films have been so ceaselessly imitated in the past 50-70 years that even when watching them for the first time, I had the feeling I’d seen it all before. There is this sense, especially with French New Wave, of watching one art-house cliché after another: jump cuts, tracking shots, improvised dialogue, blurring of the three-act structure, and so on and so forth.

As I watched, I had to step back and remind myself that when these films were made such techniques  were not yet clichés, and only became so because of the influence these films had on subsequent directors. There are some really great films that knocked off the New Wave style (see: Bonnie and Clyde) but there have also been innumerable bad ones and countless that are merely ok — succeeding with the technique but somehow missing the heart, and therefore just coming across as self-consciously “arty.” Getting the style but missing the substance, if you will. And having long since gotten tired of the film-school pretensions of every middling American director with serious ideas about “cinema”, it took a moment for my knee-jerk eyerolling at Antonioni’s hyper stylized, photo-like compositions to subside and for me to realize he was actually really doing something with that sensibility.

Making art about making art = meta

But this, of course, is the classic penalty of being “influential” — countless lesser  artists imitate your work until your creations are doomed to be seen as unoriginal by the younger generations, whose eyes have been clouded by decades of derivative nonsense.  And you can only hope that some of them are smart enough to tell the difference between a knock off and the genuine article. Like the difference between a $20,000 Birkin and some leather thing with fasteners they sell at Zara, for example. As someone with discerning taste, I clearly have a whole closet full of Birkins. Just like Victoria Beckham. I’m so on point with my metaphors today.

ICON STATUS

But again, this isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy my trip down one of cinephilia’s Yellow Brick Roads. The New Wave stuff in particular prompted me to spend a good hour tolling the internet for black-and-white photos of Paris, fantasizing about my past life as a gamine, ruffian-chic bohemian strolling down the left bank with a cigarette dangling from my lips and a string of tall-dark ne’er-do-wells trailing heartbroken in my wake.

As we have discussed, I have a problem with that sort of thing.

Now for many reasons that are covered later, there is no actual “breaking through” with somebody who is aware of and embracing their iconic status.  Sure.  Still, this simple exchange struck me as interesting.

Google Test: Marilyn - Images are all blond and heavily stylized. One is of our modern day Marilyn, Britney Spears.

This PA is being told, “no, we’re all friends here, call me by my first name.”  Yet in reality, Marilyn’s first name did not have that type of value.  It was a fake name,  part of her image.  A name the public owned because it was created for their consumption and tailored to their desires.

I’m sure the name change was partially intentional, that Monroe willingly swore off going by Norma Jeane Baker because it was a dumpy name associated with a depressing past that she understandably wanted to leave behind.

Google Test: Norma Jeane - Images are younger, brunette, un-touched by a surgeon’s knife and less heavily made up. Norma looks like a real person.

Still, Norma’s story is what gives all the context to what “Marilyn” became (isolated, drugged out, constantly getting married and/or having affairs, but also very committed to social equality issues).  Norma Jeane’s life was depressing and common and sad and that became Marilyn Monroe’s life, which was exceptional and glamorous and sad.  But Norma was the one that was a real person.  To really have understood and known Marilyn, and specifically her slow unraveling, you’d have to have known Norma, but nobody really did aside from some wacky people in depressing parts of California.

The practice of taking a stage name is not as widespread as it once was.  Classic movie stars almost always took them (there is a list here) but in this day and age, celebrities generally go by their real names unless they fall into one of these categories:

1. People with names that are foreign and/or hard to spell or say (Freddie Mercury = Farrokh Bulsara, Jennifer Aniston = Jennifer Anastasskis)

2. Rappers (50 Cent = Curtis Jackson)

3. Rock stars (Marilyn Manson = Brian Warner)

4. People with extremely Jewish-sounding last names (Woody Allen = Allen Konigsberg, Bob Dylan = Robert Allen Zimmerman)

5. People whose real names are ridiculous (Mel Gibson = Columcille Gibson)

6. Wrestlers (Hulk Hogan = Terry Bollea)

7. People who have the same name as somebody who is already famous or is already registered with the Screen Actor’s Guild (Nathan Lane = Joseph Lane, Michael Keaton = Michael Douglas, Katy Perry = Katheryn Hudson)

Still, the stage name thing is an interesting phenomenon in LA.  Even with their diminished presence I’ve already had more than one roommate who has gone by a stage name in regular-person company.  The nature of the entertainment industry requires every person must be in a constant state of selling themselves, so since everybody in LA is part of the entertainment industry it makes sense that people would try to brand themselves even among friends.

But to my non-LA sensibilities, this practice has always seemed sort of rude and weird.  It is like asking the people you are close to to be friends with your megalomaniac half-self.  That was, unintentionally, what Marilyn was asking that PA to do in the movie.  To be friends with an empty-feeling glamourous person whose disconnection from reality was terminal and whose only obligation was to be entertaining.

Of course for mega-stars, the alternative is to brand themselves using their real name, which doesn’t always work out so well.  Take my favorite mental case Brit Brit.  Her image is just as contrived as Marilyn’s, but she does not have a regular person she can remember she once was.  She is and always has been “Britney,” though that has meant many different things.  As a child it meant being a daughter and sister, as a teenager it meant being a chaste sex symbol, as an adult it has meant being a very public nutcase.  NOT having a stage name must be confusing to her sense of identity because language does not allow her to compartmentalize her various roles.  They are all rolled into one word – Britney, no Spears necessary.

A wig can change so much...

As far as stage names go, don’t laugh, but “Hannah Montana” is sort of the wholesome Disney-style exaggerated ideal in my mind.  In life she gets to be a fully formed person and in her half-life she gets to be a rock star.  That would be sweet.  Marilyn probably did not ever get to spend another moment being Norma Jeane once her train began rolling, and she probably felt very lost for most of her time as Marilyn.  Searching for connection is difficult when you literally aren’t yourself.

I once watched a hilarious fight break out between two of my housemates during which a regularly-named roommate began forcibly calling a stage-named roommate by her real name.  That’s when she knew he wasn’t playing Mr. Nice Guy anymore.  When he was willing to refer to her as a person with two regular names and parents and a family instead of an artist whose music he liked.

Once things got REAL, she read the writing on the wall and moved out, taking her regular self with her.  And though I had found her sort of entertaining, there was something empowering about being reminded that the persona was just a name.  I think she might have appreciated the reminder too.  It’s a reminder Marilyn probably could have used.

Toodles, friends!

-L. Nordstromius

Yup, Jail. Read on...

Straight from the internet trenches, it’s another edition of “Today’s News,” from the gold standard in mingling important stuff with irrelevant blather, Huffington Post.  (Past editions are archived here.)

Here are some front page stories you might have missed while you were reading about Herman Cain’s sexual escapades:

Are UFOs Coming For Our Gold? –  Here is the scenario: Aliens have been, according to participants at the UFO Science and Consciousness Conference (THAT IS A THING?), stealing our gold for thousands of years.

Accurate Alien Depiction

Brush up on your Glorp skills, America, and prepare to hand over your gold bricks to the little green men.  Remember, with aliens it is always better to go quietly.  If there is one thing I know from movies, they have far superior weaponry and very big brains.

BUT THERE IS MORE!  The organizers of this UFO/silly insanity conference believe the gold theft conspiracy involves people too.  DUM DUM DUUUUUUM.

“All the governments in the world are puppets and instruments to implement the will of a small group of individuals. The royal political bloodline goes back thousand of years.”

So far this guy sounds a bit like he is echoing the sentiments of some nerdy version of Occupy.  I’ll bite.  Continue please…

Tellinger insists that extraterrestrials visited out planet in search of gold about 300,000 years ago, cloned their genetic make-up and gave rise to mankind. Ever since, they’ve been in contact with world leaders.

You are losing me…

Laura Eisenhower, who describes herself as the great-granddaughter of president Dwight Eisenhower, claims world leaders have experienced close contact with aliens, signing treaties with them every decade.

Aaaaaaand…..lost.

By the way, I love that this woman simply “describes herself” as Eisenhower’s great-granddaughter.  Like the fact that she is saying world leaders talk to aliens discredits any other claims she may be making, even those about her provenance.

Our Future?

WATCH: Flying Robots Will Build Enormous Art Piece – This is the most terrifying thing I have ever seen.  It is supposedly a fleet of robots designed to help build art installation pieces, but what I see is tiny flying tennis racquet pieces that act like insects and have no agenda other than to make you nervous and fly too close to your face.

What if THOSE are the robots that develop free-will?  Then we’ve invented a super-species of metal insect.  Thanks a lot, guys.

WATCH: World’s Largest Model Railroad Features Figurines Having Sex – For those of you wishing to satisfy your HuffPo-generated curiosity about what a German rendition of two miniature figurines having sex looks like, this is not the video for you.  This is a video of model trains tooting and meandering into train stations.  I’m not sure where the sex comes in.

Meanwhile, this video confirms what I’ve known for a long time, which is that people with German accents sound just like robots when they speak English.  Angry robots.

Strippers Dressed As Lawyers Sneak Into Federal Prison – One important non-robot news item…

Apparently what this headline describes not just an isolated incident, but an ongoing situation.  According to the serious reporting done in this piece, this Miami maximum security prison is “overrun” and “plagued” by strippers.  In fact, it seems that bringing a fake paralegal/stripper/hooker to your client meetings had been de rigor for dealing with incarcerated Miami-types until some non-stripper-friendly/stupid meany attorneys realized they might be losing business over it.

It may shock you to find that criminals prefer lawyers who get them strippers.  It may also shock you to find that bringing a stripper with you to visit your incarcerated client isn’t really super illegal.  It’s just kind of business as usual in Miami.  To be fair, I assume you can also get a stripper at the dentist and/or grocery store there.

According to these meany lawyers/moral police (OXYMORON), “The visitor rooms have been taking over by South American pole dancers.”  THE HUMANITY!

More of this

Around certain parts (these parts, far parts, near parts) I am known to have somewhat unconventional taste in films.  This is because I am a ridiculous wimp and have an aversion to yelling, suspense, violence, or the suggestion thereof.  Regular-person movies like “Super 8” find me twisting 360 degrees in my $16 theater seat and cause panic-dreams for weeks.

Naturally then, when choosing a movie, I am not drawn towards films with plots or a series of actions that further said plot.  I prefer to watch regular people go through subtle emotional trials only to end up either largely unchanged or changed in a way that is impossible to describe with any specificity.

Many people are not familiar with my preferred genre because it has almost no appeal to anybody looking for a movie with clear entertainment value.  Still, as a public service I have decided to list my favorite movies and explain why they are so awesome.

[A word of warning: Mentioning these movies WILL make you appear more cultured and important at various gatherings, however you will also sound like an insufferable tool.  Luckily for me, being insufferable is how I roll.  You, however, should use your best judgment.]

THE TOP 5

1. The Company – This Altman flick stars Neve Campbell post-relevance and a younger, raffish fellow named James Franco.  I am one of only seven people who saw this in the theater and I enjoyed it but assumed that I would never hear of it again.

Thank God, however,  that Asian DVD bootleggers don’t have their finger on the pulse in any way shape or form because in 2004, when I spent a college semester in Vietnam, I found “The Company” widely featured in every bootleg DVD store in the city.  Naturally, I scooped it up so that I could inflict it on my friends at will.

Just keep hanging out...

“The Company” features everything I love about movies with no superfluous plot-related distractions of any sort.  Neve is a dancer with the Joffrey Ballet (DANCE MOVIE!) in Chicago (CITY LIFE MOVIE!).  She meets James Franco (HANDSOME MAN MOVIE!), who is a sous chef somewhere (FOOD MOVIE!).  She dances.  She bowls at one point.  She takes a bath.  Her mom comes for a visit.  Then it ends.  And man, is it awesome.

[Note for the anti-piracy folk:  In Vietnam regular DVDs are not available.  It is only possible to buy hilariously packaged bootlegs and there is nothing to do after 8pm except watch them.  I also own a bootleg copy of “Vanity Fair” in which the subtitles belong to Top Gun.]

2. Rachel Getting Married – This widely acclaimed film features Anne Hathaway as the troubled younger sister of a bride-to-be.  Sadly, however, the film is mostly remembered for causing widespread nausea among big-screen audiences.  The handheld camerawork is really, really, really…handheld.  Like “we put the cameraman on a boat to shoot this but we stayed on dry land” handeheld.

We get it.  Real life doesn’t happen in stable sweeping shots.  Whatever.  I still like keeping my lunch inside of my stomach.

Anyway, because of the possibility that “Rachel” would make friends sick, it was a controversial film to recommend to people while it was still in theaters.  Now that its is only available on DVD, however, it is possible to enjoy it on a screen small enough to look away from if necessary.  If you have an old 13” tube TV, this is a good opportunity to drag that sucker out into the light, grab a copy of “Rachel,” and give it a whirl.  You won’t be sorry you did.

3. The Trip – One of my favorite things about this movie is that it lacks a narrative to such a degree that it is not even clear to the viewer whether the film is fiction or non-fiction.  My uninformed take is that it is some combination thereof, with the two main characters based on the men playing them minus a few minor background details.

Why not?

Essentially, the important plot details are that two famous British comedians take a culinary trip to various restaurants in the English countryside and tell jokes.  If you enjoy British people, humor, bad impressions, eccentric behavior, SUVs, or restaurants, you will not even notice that this film has zero going on besides driving, eating, and laughing.  You will, in fact, appreciate the lack of a story for allowing so much time for all of the comedic digressions.

4. Tiny Furniture – To be honest, if you did not grow up in Manhattan around the same time I did, graduate from a similar type of college, then move back home to New York in the late 2000s to realize that your beloved birthplace was unaffordable and your life was going nowhere, you probably wont enjoy this film.  Everything that happens is sort of depressing but also not that big a deal and the main character is frustratingly unmotivated to do anything about anything.

Still, just as I openly admit to only enjoying books about people from New York who are just like me, I find films about people like me to be especially wonderful and entertaining because I am a meglomaniac.  Plus, without any sort of plot getting in the way, “Tiny Furniture” was just one long opportunity to reminisce about…like, last year.

5. Somewhere – This movie was the breakout role for Elle Fanning, Dakota’s 7 ft tall younger sister.  She plays the daughter of an actor living at the Chateau Marmont whose debaucherous life is out of control but not so out of control as to create the need for a plot.  A perfect balance of slow-moving non-necessary scenes and vague insight into the empty life of a Hollywood cliché figure.

My only gripe with this movie and the reason it only comes in at number 5 is that, in true Sofia Coppola style, the opening scene is an unmoving single take of a car going around a track for over 500 hours.  That’s too long, Sofia.  It’s not wonder you did not have time to work a plot into this movie.

That said, keep up the good work.

So feel free to mention my work in your next film theory class.  This post includes the kind of in depth, thoughtful commentary that film academics live for, right?

You are WELCOME.

-Lila