Thoughts That Come Unbidden Department

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Archives for 2008

Cartoons on the web

I wish all cartoonists had a tip jar or swag or something you could buy to help support their art. There are so many good cartoons out there:

to name a few.

And then there is Toothpaste For Dinner by Drew. Sometimes belly-laugh funny, sometimes simply relevant, always makes you think. Below is today’s

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It made me laugh. What can I say, it’s been that kind of day.

For Those About To Rock (We Salute You)

Somewhere in the third act of Oliver Stone’s The Doors Jim Morrison (Val Kilmer) asks the question “what is wrong with being a large mammal?” By this point in the narrative it’s March 1969 and Morrison is well into the drug abuse/alcoholism/rampant self-indulgence phase of his career. One of his handlers makes the trenchant observation that “rock is cock.” And now that I’ve joined the ranks of those who pay for radio, in my case XM, and I have access to hard rock playlists again I’m increasingly wondering why that has to be true.

I’ve been a headbanger most of my life, including that crucial period in the late-1980s when MTV’s unflinching, objectifying eye provided me with enough half-dressed, oversexualized portrayals of women to get me comfortable with the male perspective. While MTV and the largely white and, Lita Ford and Heart aside, male dominated world of metal/hard rock, gave me as a young lesbian in a culturally conservative environment a safe outlet through which I could look at and desire women, I find that two decades later no matter how much the music has changed, and it has changed enough to notice, the atmosphere in which that music is served has gotten even more misogynist and objectifying to the point where I’d call it degrading.

Nearly two years of slowly exploring the current hard rock environment has revealed a soundscape that is markedly different from the spandex and eyeliner fueled world of Headbanger’s Ball. True, there are the requisite number of songs about sex and drugs, but there’s another strain that runs through hard rock these days. Songs that deal with frustration, with existential angst, with the noise that modern life can create inside your head are a far cry from the party, party, party world of Motley Crue, Winger, and Def Leppard. While all of these songs feature the heavy bass, aggressive percussion, throaty vocals, and fuzzy guitars common to all hard rock, what they don’t have is that female presence that is prerequisite to misogyny. Yet, the DJs that play this music insist on injecting that snarky frat-boy mentality into their broadcasts. What else can you call it when a band gets introduced as “soon to be signing your sister’s tits?”

What I question is not why this music is delivered in this environment; indeed, the answer to any why question about a cultural trend is “because someone thinks there is money to be made from doing it that way.” More, what I question is why women put up with this shit?

In discussions with my uncle, rest his shocking, smart soul, about culture we would inevitably come around to the women are 51% of the population shoal, the sticking point for me about why women don’t wield more cultural power. Depending upon how much wine we’d both had he’d point out, quite rightly, that while women may hold a small edge in total population we control 100% of the p*ssy. So why is it that women tolerate this treatment? Yeah, it’s nice to be appreciated it but culturally we’ve reached a point where the appreciation isn’t even vaguely real; hell, it the veneer on it isn’t even dry enough to pass the smear test.

It just astonishes me in an era of ever-dwindling music dollar, you’d think that the music industry, that includes broadcasters, would be doing everything they can to court every possible dollar. Instead, hard rock seems committed to a broadcast model, something that greatly influences sales because after all if I can’t hear it, like it, and decide I want it I can’t frakking buy it (after all, it’s not like seeing a cute “top” from the aisle in the mall and stepping into the store), that alienates a potentially huge shopper base.

I guess I’ll just have to keep sending the boys at Squizz rude e-mails when their insecure, frat-boy crap intrudes on the listening experience.

Is it real or is it memoir?

Almost everyone who has written fiction with any sort of dedication has had the fantasy. You hold the book in your hand. The dust jacket crinkles a bit as you weight the volume by the spine and find that it is heavier than you imagined it would be. You don’t quite register your name on the cover but there it is just the same.

You open it and the spine creaks just a bit in that special way that only a brand new book can. The paper is heavy, at least 24lb bond as you flip passed the mandatory blank page, the frontispiece that in previous eras would have held an engraving because there was no four-color photo on the dust jacket.

You turn the title page to the dedication and yes, there is the list you slaved over, you considered so carefully – should you list your mother first or your girlfriend; will that creative writing teacher who was so important to you even remember that you took her class?

And in this fantasy as you hold this book in your hand you imagine sending it to all the people you want to share your joy with and to all the people who told you that you shouldn’t bother to write another word just so you’ll have the deep, abiding pleasure of knowing that they know that you proved them wrong. Sometimes in this fantasy your name is foil embossed on the dust jacket instead of just printed.

I have this fantasy periodically and I now realize that I’ve been going about it all wrong. Instead of writing fiction what I need to do is write fiction that is plausible as memoir, sell it as such, and then recant publicly, preferably on Oprah, or perhaps in The New York Times.

Sarah McGrath, the editor at Riverhead who worked with Ms. Seltzer for three years on the book, said she was stunned to discover that the author had lied.

“It’s very upsetting to us because we spent so much time with this person and we felt such sympathy for her and she would talk about how she didn’t have any money or any heat and we completely bought into that and thought we were doing something good by bringing her story to light,” Ms. McGrath said.

“There’s a huge personal betrayal here as well as a professional one,” she said.

It sort of makes me wonder, does McGrath not realize that she, too, is responsible for a professional betrayal? Just what obligation does a book publishing company have to the book-buying public? More to the point, when did all media become unreliable?

I ceased to believe anything I saw on television over a decade ago. At the time I was working in a video post production house, you know, the kind where they cut together commercials – “Act fast and will throw in a bonus CD for only $1.99!” – and other more highbrow fare. Most of it, though, was corporate videos, those boring, brutish things you often have to sit through at the company retreat, the ones that make you wonder how much fatter your check would have been had they not blown all that money on the 15 minute corporate video.

It was during an editing session for one of these where I stopped believing my eyes, at least with respect to anything I saw on a television screen: we made the Senior Vice President taller and thinner. Yes, right there in the effects box we added at least three inches to the top and took as many off the sides of a pudgy, balding little executive.

It used to be that you could trust what you saw in print. Yes, journalism is never truly objective but you had some semblance of security that you were at least getting objective facts – a man was robbed, someone held a press conference – about an event if not about what the event means. And it used to be that you could trust your books. You took biographies with a grain of salt as they were often written by someone with an ulterior motive whether that motive be laudatory or disparaging.

Fiction was fiction and it was labeled as such. None of this James Frey, JT LeRoy, Margaret Seltzer bullshit. Thirty years ago no one would have dreamed of faking a holocaust memoir in which she claimed to have lived with wolves – actual wolves not metaphorical ones – after her parents were killed by the Nazis.

More, what does it say about us that fiction writers have to struggle to get published, that journals like McSweeney’s are publishing authors like Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates who have absolutely no need for a hand up yet fiction, interesting, evolved fiction is having to pass itself off as “true story” material?

Because even though Florida eventually makes you crazy winter makes you crazy faster

Observations from eight warm, relaxing days in South Beach:

  • Reputation can only take a place so far.
  • No one in the state of Florida knows how to drive. Period.
  • If you aren’t originally from Florida and you started out knowing how to drive eventually, after enough time in the state, you forget everything you ever learned about how to drive.
  • The Food Network can’t event manage their way out of a wet paper bag. Well, what else would you call starting to set up for a four day event nine days before it starts and still not being finished 12 hours before opening? Oh, by all means, with all that “planning” make sure to put the Porta-Potties in the sun for a wine and food festival that is on the beach in 85+ degree heat. I’m sure that smelled great by Sunday.
  • Pasta is easy, good pasta is an art.
  • Thank God for mirrored sunglasses.
  • Why yes, I think it is about to cocktail or possibly gelato. Maybe both but not at the same time.
  • Life would be so much better if we always got the disco nap from 3pm to 4pm.
  • Sometimes the best thing you can do is just be present where ever you happen to be.

And now…back to reality.