Me: This Coco Chanel biopic I'm watching is so laughable I wish you were here to mock it. Right now I'm watching Angry Tango Dancing with Jealous Onlooker

Me: Celebrity Fit Club had better character development than this

He: Who's dancing with what?

Me: Coco is dancing with her French-army horse-breeding guy while the guy's polo-chapion British friend watches. The Englishman has just bested Coco's boyfriend at chess. Now a powerful storm has blown open the windows of the chateau, toppling the candles and shrouding the room in darkness!

Me: I paused the movie just to key all that in

He: This is a true story?

Me: Supposedly based on the supposed life of the supposed Coco Chanel, oui. I think they're airing it because of renewed interest in Coco due to the new Audrey Tautou movie. It's on the Lifetime channel: TV for vulvas

He: I need to start driving a vulva.

Me: My vulva made me put on pants to spare her the sight of this movie.

Me: OMG, currently she is jury-rigging couture clothes out of curtains a la Scarlett O'Hara, I shit you not

He: Nahhhh.

He: Nahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Me: Also, Old Coco is played by Shirley MacLaine

He: Really? Isn't she top talent?

Me: Malcolm McDowell is in it too. It's a MacFestival of top McTalent.

He: And some malcontents.

He: Is there any malfeasance?

Me: This whole movie is malfeasance!

[NB: At this point I turned off the TV. I made it to 1:06 of this three-hour extravaganza, which was surprisingly lacking in good-looking clothes.]

With many thanks to Kiehl's Express Your Pow! site (the best use of javascript since OfficeMax's now-defunct Elf Yourself promo), I present three comix by yours truly.

Postscript: Fourth comic added.

We read comic books in my Contemporary Literature class, which is the sort of thing that makes English one of the most mockable fields of study. (One year, our departmental t-shirts read: "English: It's Not Just a Muffin, it's a Major." This was either shortly before or after Philosophy used the slogan "We're in it for the money.") These were non-comedic comics: Maus by Art Spiegelman. For those of you unfamiliar with the story, Maus recounts the story of Spiegelman's grandfather, a Holocaust survivor. In the books, Jews are represented by mice; Nazis, cats.

Temporally, the book moves between World War II and the present day. In the present-day passages, Art dramatizes a few visits to his psychologist. The psychologist character takes in a lot of stray cats, and feline forms wander through the panels.

A fellow student, whom I'll call Brad because I have forgotten his name and Brad is a quintessential bullheaded dude moniker, was insistent that the stray cats were connected to the cat-Nazis, that there was a coded message from Spiegelman there. Brad was turning his head inside out trying to figure out why the psychologist would be harboring Nazi cats.

"I don't think it's symbolic," I said. "If we assume this is a true story, I think it's a mistake to look for symbolism in everything. The character is based on a real person, who may very well have had a soft spot for cats. You've gotta assume that people become psychologists because they are capable of deep empathy and want to help those who've suffered recover. That dovetails with taking in abandoned animals, too."

"I can't believe you don't think the cats are significant," Brad retorted.

"Well, there's nothing in the story that suggests the shrink was a Nazi sympathizer. Quite the opposite."

The discussion shifted, me mentally noting that Brad was dumber than me but otherwise assigning no importance to the exchange. The professor didn't take a side, but he later wrote me a powerful recommendation when I applied to grad school, so I like to think that he did take a side in his heart, and it was mine.

Let's fast-forward several weeks. It's near the end of the quarter and we've moved onto something else; Iris Murdoch's The Message to the Planet. Brad came into class one day brandishing a Maus postcard.

"I wrote to Art Spiegelman to ask him about the psychologist's cats," he said to the class at large.

Holy shit, I thought. My holy shit dates the story; in a post-internet, post-Twitter world, we communicate fluidly with Very Important Persons. It was only a few years after this incident that Elizabeth Wurtzel, having read my review of Prozac Nation, would email me to thank me for my thoughts. (Which was strange, since I'd said I found her story contrived. Years after that, More, Now, Again came out, and I found that not only was her first book indeed contrived, she had written to me under the influence of a massive cocaine habit, which made the email's content fall into place. But once more, I digress.)

It's hard to say what surprised me more: that Brad had been burning to settle to the debate to the extent where he took out his typewriter and pounded out a letter, or that Spiegelman had graced Brad with a reply. I didn't know any published authors at the time and assumed they were busy with other things, like counting their royalties or attending soirées in their honor. This naiveté was in part what led me to conclude that majoring in English was a viable option.

"I finally got his reply today," Brad said. He read it aloud. It was brief, what with its being a postcard. I will endeavor to recreate it as close to verbatim as possible:

Dear Brad:
Thanks for writing. To answer your question, my psychologist just happened to adopt a lot of cats. They don't represent Nazis--it's just a coincidence that I used a cat/mouse metaphor for the book. Wish I could have been a fly on the wall for your discussion!
--Art Spiegelman.

When the faces of my fellow students rotated in my direction, I shrugged and said to the closest one, "Well, there's our answer."

At this point, I could have easily pulled an IN YOUR FACE, BRAD, and it was, in fact, generally in my nature to do so at the time. Mitigating circumstance: I knew that, in Brad's shoes, there was no way in hell I would've brought that postcard to class and admitted I'd been reading too much into things, and that sometimes a cat was just a cat.

Some days, I swear the only bright spot in my life is knowing that soon it will be warm enough outside to wear this shirt.

( Read more... )

I'm getting through Katharine Hepburn's autobiography gradually. Since it doesn't follow any strict timeline or narrative, it's easy to put it down, read an entire, different book, then return to Katharine. One page Hepburn will be at Bryn Mawr, on the next in Hollywood, then you hit page 32 and she's fourteen years old and cutting her eldest brother down from where she found him hanging dead from an attic rafter. The book reads like it was transcribed word-for-word from audiotapes, or jotted down on receipts and envelope-backs, then went directly to print untouched by an editor's blue pencil.

I know you think that's me saying the book's no good, what with me being an editor. I'm instead fond of its meandering garden-path narrative. It bittersweetly reminds me of talking to my Gran. (The syntax does grate at times--in the excerpt below, she ends her first interrogative sentence with a period, and oh do I want my blue pencil then.) It's a neo-Impressionist picture of Hepburn's years, thousands of strokes and daubs that each look carelessly dashed off but create a perfect whole.

I opened Me today and tucked my bookmark into the final pages, as is my wont. But this time my eye fell on the title of one of the final chapters, and that title caught my eye, drew me in, and I fell to reading it and wept the whole way through. So if you feel the need for a good cry this evening, or whenever you come across this, but the tears aren't coming unaided, continue:

( Read more... )

The 2006 documentary The Bridge: parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9.

Sunday I got a call from mrsloane asking if I'd like to accompany him on a hospital visit to his cousin Bonnie, recently out of surgery. Since there are few things I love more than being in the passenger seat of a car for a long drive on a sunny afternoon--my paternal grandfather was a Labrador retriever, which explains not only this proclivity, but also my penchant for bodies of water and frankfurters--I said yes.

Bonnie was in a pretty good mood for someone wearing pressurized shoes and sporting seven holes in her abdomen. I'd say she must've been getting some great pain meds, but in addition to being sanguine she was completely lucid. We chatted about burial plots, office temps, and some cheerier matters. Sloane played with her singing, illuminated stuffed chicken. Bonnie took an occasional shotglass of cranberry juice. (Cruelly, the hospital doles out nourishment in tiny plastic containers that look exactly like Jell-O shots.) I admired her sphygmomanometer.

Afterward, we took Pacific Highway South home. This was a kind indulgence on Sloane's part--he pulled up to Pac Highway with the apparent intention of driving right through it to get back on I-5, but I said, "Let's take this all the way home." Classless at this makes me, if I have a Memory Lane, it's Pacific Highway--the stretch between Kent's Five Corners and Sea-Tac, the very opposite of a Miracle Mile.

Five Corners is where I had my first real job: at Burger King, running the broiler (I can verify the flames firsthand) and later the front counter. Coincidentally, I was reminiscing about these days recently when I had a professional wrestler from North Carolina add me as a Facebook friend. He turned out to be a guy I'd dated briefly in 1986; I didn't recognize his name because his FB account is under his pro wrestling pseudonym. When he used his real name on FB, he explained, wrestling fans would track him down and make trouble. "I'm one of the Bad Guys," he explained genially. He ended this explanation with a compliment every woman should hear the year she enters middle age: You're just as pretty as you were the day we met at Burger King.

We didn't stop at Burger King, though.  We dined at a Wendy's further north. (Not the Wendy's in which I had my second real job, one which actually required me to dress like Wendy, complete with red wig and striped smock, and hells how I wish my mom wasn't in possession of the sole photographic evidence of this job because I would love to illustrate this post with that image.) This particular Wendy's, unlike the franchise I worked in, was across the street from a strip club.

"Let's go to Déjà Vu after this," I said, meditatively chewing a chicken nugget and staring out the window at that swath of pink neon. And, much as when I suggested we turn left earlier, Sloane kindly indulged me. Neither of us could've anticipated what happened next.( Read more... )

While searching for an unrelated file yesterday, I ran across an old post of mine that dates back to America's Next Top Model, Cycle 6. In it, I draw comparisons between ANTM and a short-lived competitive-reality show called Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Model Search that had aired a few months prior. I used to watch SISMS every week with my jaw on the floor, thinking that nothing like it had transpired before or since. Scant years later, its level of jaw-droppitude no longer even registers on the current competitive-reality scale-- but SISMS is the clear progenitor of ridiculously cruel/cruelly ridiculous fare such as The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency and Rock of Love Bus.

( Read more... )

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any--lifted from the no
of all nothing--human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

-- E. E. Cummings

Good for what ails you.

( Read more... )

"My sister Peg said that once she was sitting crying because our sister Marion and a friend wouldn't let her play with them. 'I don't blame them,' said Mother. 'You're a moaner.' Peg learned her lesson."

--Katharine Hepburn, Me: Stories of My Life

The leopard-print fleece throw is Oswald's favorite daytime hangout. Let's see what happens when the professional usurper decides he wants the best seat in the house.

Gus gains ground early on, but Oswald just sits there with a single paw extended, passively irritating Gus until the "fight" resumes. Their claws aren't even extended, hence the quotation marks. It's a "fight" as much as tossing a cotton ball at your brother is a "fight." Enjoy.

( Read more... )

In addition to pulling the plug on my laptop, Gus also steals pens for attention. (Once one has eliminated the contemporary writing implement, it's only natural to go after the traditional one.) Again, I know I feed this impulse by laughing at his antics and chasing him, but you try to resist pursuing a cat with saucer-big eyes who's brandishing a rollerball in his jaws like some jacked-up Labrador retriever.

Recently I bought a spiral-bound notebook, and after jotting something down in it I threaded the pen through the wire and went back to what I was doing. Caging pens in notebook wire used to prevent Gus from snagging them, until he figured out that he could free them by steadying the notebook with a paw and bending the pen clip outward with his mouth. This new notebook, though, has a wire spiral that's precisely the diameter of the caps on my current brand of pen. I was pretty sure an opposable thumb would be required to separate the two. Let's see what happens.