And your writer's block, it do't mean shit

So the obligatory what-I-got-for-Decemberween:

-camera
-boots
-moleskine journals
-purse
-blouse
-sweater
-e.e. cummings
-symbol book
-two decks of blank playing cards
-makeup
-sharpie 4-pack
-camera bag
-candy
-the dark knight
-card deck of cocktail recipes
-threadless shirt
-watch
-socks
-4 bottles of unibroue

um that's all i can remember for right now! i think that's it. go me. i also gave some pretty sweet-ass gifts, if i don't mind sayin' so meself. the best part is that they can all fit in a suitcase! aw yiss!

the blank cards and sharpies, by the way, are for the tarot deck that i am designing; hopefully it'll be done by january.

(what a useless post, right?)

I know this is an odd phrase, but the facts were these. These were the facts.

Let's just say that, in regard to this season of Pushing Daisies, I am suddenly both pleasantly surprised and surprisingly pleased. Though I haven't watched the entire series yet, just the first two or three and then the last few that are online at abc.com, I've found a suitable flavor to wash out the funky taste that the first impression had left in my mouth. Perhaps its because I know that it's been canceled after this season, but it looks like they've dropped the silliness and terrible CGI and added in a few nice twists and turns. Yeah, a lot of it is a bit too coincidental (I don't want to spoil anything, but I will say that the season's two themes are Family and Trust, and that they crop up in obvious but well-intended ways. However, if this series ends without resolving the problems with trust and happiness surrounding one Olive Snook, then I will be seriously upset. I was going to make a list called Five Things To Love About Pushing Daisies That Are Not Lee Pace, but it would just be Olive Olive Olive Olive Olive. In fact, as great and quirky as the show is, I don't think I would like it half as much if it didn't have Kristen Chenoweth's bubble of joy bouncing around in it.

And beside that point, what happened to Digby the dog?

But since I am in the mood for list-making, here goes:


Five Things To Love About Mad Men That Are Not Don Draper And Joan Holloway



AMC's Mad Men is no longer that sleeper hit that only the cool kids talk about liking. It's the first basic cable show to take home the Best Drama Emmy, and as far as I'm concerned, it's the best show on television. Let's be fair, though, I only watch like three actual shows that are currently running, Mad Men, Pushing Daisies, and 30 Rock. Of the three, Mad Men is the most consistently pleasing, it has two solid seasons under its belt and a promising third one to come, it doesn't seem to have any sharks to jump, and for once I've found a drama that doesn't seem to guilt me into watching another episode. Mad Men goes along at a steady pace, there are no chung chungs or cliffhangers. It's a mature show, that seems to show enough respect for its audience to earn its popularity. However, when you ask someone what's so great about Mad Men, they usually come up with something like this:

Or this:


True, those are both Hot Things. And though Mad Men could easily be balanced on the perfect chin of Don Draper or the smashing curves of Joan Holloway, they are not what makes the show great. Aside, of course, from the aforementioned pacing, writing, and plot structure (especially that surrounding Don Draper, which is safe on this side of Back Story Unbelievability), here are five things that should entice you to adore the show:



5. Roger Sterling
Where Don Draper is a womanizer and a drunk, we can forgive him. I mean, look at the guy: Don's got a face that would crumble Mt. Rushmore. Then there's his awful past, his stunted creativity....there are plenty of things about Don Draper's detached personality that would point him in the direction of philanderer. If nothing else, he does it so that he can reach out to other people, understand them, dominate them, whatever. For Don Draper, there is always something going on beneath those steely eyes.

But Roger Sterling? He is just a dirty old man. And I love him for it. Where people like Don and Pete fool around in order to feel whole or accepted, Roger Sterling does so out of privilege. He is a constant drunk, makes passes at every woman he sees, chain smokes like John Wayne, all because he is just entitled to; born into wealth that he keeps afloat by relying on Don Draper's creativity and Bert Cooper's organization. I mean, the man has a heart attack from too much horsing around with a young woman, then only three years later we see him up to the same tricks, promising to marry a 20-year old secretary once he divorces his wife. Roger is the face of the so-called Greatest Generation, but seems to hold no pride at all; a man who seems to be mostly an empty shell full of smoke and booze and lies. He is detestable at the same time as he is charming, affable an unsettling at the same time; a man who is trying hard as he can to hold on to any sort of power and privilege that he has.



4. Smoking and DrinkingAh, to live in the good ol' days. Back when Bayer was just morphine, methanphetamines weren't bad yet, and everyone–everyone–smoked like a chimney and drank like a fish. Men, women, old, young, pregnant, all of them wander through the scenes holding highball glasses and lucy strikes. Even doctors light up while conducting an examination. Now I'm not saying that I am a drunk or that I am a serious smoker, but I can't deny that the idea of living in a time where you could add that much dramatic emphasis to yourself–inside, outside, on a train, plane, bus, office, restaurant–creates a different, almost alien atmosphere, where nothing was dangerous (this is best shown in the first episode, where the Mad Men must deal with the terrible new discovery that smoking -gasp!- causes cancer).


3. Betty Draper

A beautiful face can cover a seriously tainted self, and nowhere is that more true than the slowly awakening Betty Draper, wife of Don, former model, and Perfect Homemaker. Betty, with her Grace-Kelly looks and soft, laughing voice is a character that, doubtless, every woman in the neighborhood would envy. She seems oblivious to her husband's past and his infidelities, yet we learn that she knows all about the latter. She has nervous breakdowns fueled by her inability to accept the death of her mother, with whom she had a troubled, emotionally straining relationship. She often appears to be an oblivious mother, though much of that is likely to be a sign of the times. She talks about insipid things to her neighborhood group of mothers, and at first sight seems to be elitist, vain, and prejudiced; yet bit by bit this is worn away and we can start to read the lying tone in Betty's voice, and we start to understand that, in her quest to be the perfect looking woman and the perfect housewife, she has forgotten to be herself. This one thing that ties all of Mad Men's characters together: they all have work personalities, which fit them into whatever niche needs filling, then there is the person beneath that, the personality that motivates them. Betty is a great example of this because, unlike the men who can leave work and go drink or mess around in order to blow off a little steam, Betty has to work full-time as Mrs. Donald Draper–which is why her breakdown is all the more sudden and self-destructive.

2. The 1960s
The Swingin' 60s or whatever you want to call them are a tough decade to record on film. Too often do writers or directors try to Forrest Gump the whole deal, having characters in Vietnam and marching in Alabama while also being involved in, say, the Space Race and the counterculture. Mad Men succeeds because it avoids stereotyping the 60s, presenting instead what seems to be a purely honest portrayal of the early years of the decade. They don't go the predictable route and create a Feminist or an African-American character who shakes things up and changes people's hearts. Even though that was happening at the time, no doubt, that doesn't mean that every company was affected by it. In the first season the Sterling-Cooper staff is assigned to work on Nixon's campaign against Kennedy, no one questions it or stands up for JFK. Salvatore, the show's main homosexual character, is closeted and seems to be insistent on staying that way, even when a young co-worker at S.C. comes out in the break room. Counter-culture of any kind is almost completely absent. The only exception is a young Bohemian artist with whom Don has an affair in the first season. Though Don meets with her friends and fellow bohos, he takes nothing from their movement, scoffing at her boyfriend's droll "Would you like to join us? We're going to get high and listen to Miles." and their insistence on pegging him as part of "the machine". He laughs at their hopeless radicalism and leaves, content to go back to his comfortable life inside the machine. Aside from the general treatment of 60s society, Mad Men stays almost photographically true to the look of the era, down to the button. Men tend to be a little more round, and women are more curvy. Glasses are thick, hair is slick–there are no pratfalls to draw in a modern audience, Joan Holloway looks like a sex symbol despite being more curvaceous than Jessica Alba, and with good reason. Mad Men re-creates the 1960s but doesn't re-imagine it so that it can sell out to any 21st ideal, it is what it is.



1. Pete Campbell
Pete Campbell is the perfect secondary character: at first he seems like nothing more than a piece of gum stuck on Don Draper's shoe sole, part of the secondary What Everyone Else In The Office Is Doing plotline. But then time goes on and you start to see that Pete Campbell is so much more than that, he is a wad of gum with a consciousness and a desire to do right but the immaturity to keep him from knowing how. That's Pete Campbell: he is the ultimate man-child. Not the Rogen-esque "I don't want to stop playing video games and be responsible and I like poop jokes" sort of man-child, but a more complex and sympathetic sort: Pete is a little boy in man's shoes, and he is desperately trying to get his feet to grow out enough to fit them. Out of the three main male characters–Don Draper, Roger Sterling, and himself–Pete is the only one not to have fought in a war. He is a newlywed and his infidelity with Peggy is not out of desperation like Don's or Roger's, but out of a loneliness that turns into love. Pete carries a persona of the perfect man, the slick salesman with a buttery voice, but when he speaks candidly–to his family, or to Peggy–his voice is soft and almost raspy, as though he is tired of talking. He is a bundle of male insecurities and immaturity, which is what you could say for a lot of people except that Pete, like Betty Draper, rarely has an outlet for himself. He hardly has the chance; Pete is not completely immature, much of his stuntedness comes from a lack of control. He is alway under the thumb of someone else; be it his father, mother, wife, boss, father-in-law. The only person who could have that sway over him and doesn't exploit it is Peggy, who seems to be the only person that Pete cares about. At first, of course, you hate Pete Campbell. You hate his blue suit and his slick voice, his perfect hair and boyish good looks. But then you get it: under all that façade is just a little boy who wants to be a strong and independent man, but is crushed too often by the feet of everyone in his life. His struggle, though less pronounced, is much like Betty's, and I secretly watch every episode for his sake.

Christmas cleaning! Yuletide readings! Fa la la la la oh dear I'm boring.

I changed around the side bar, mostly for my own benefit. I feel all constructive all of a sudden. Also, I get to change my books into books that I don't really have to read, because except for one upcoming easy final, this semester is finito.

Anyway I've been getting in the Christmas mood lately. Well, that and I move out of this lovely hell-house on Tuesday...I swear to gosh, I have an awful landlord who seems to enjoy breathing down people's necks, and thankfully I'm getting out. I mean it's gotten so bad that I'm afraid to make myself dinner because he's always down there, ready to passively-aggressively insult me for, like, not cleaning the lint trap in the dryer. So I just stay in my room and make tea and eat cliff bars and brood. So, long story short: lots of brooding.

Don't ever live with your landlord. Just don't. He walks around in my room when I'm not here.

So that's getting over with. I'm moving further away from school, near Commercial Drive, in the most adorable basement suite (I know, right?) with only one other person. I will start cooking full meals! Of course, this means that I have to get packed up and get most of that done tomorrow, since people are coming to look at the room Saturday and Sunday. It will be fun, though! Hasta la vista, butt-for-brains.

Oh, right, the books. Well I went around thriftin', which for me means shopping for clothes but buying books. Bought my own copy of The Awakening, and then got O! Pioneers by Willa Cather which so far is lovely, Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco which is pretty good so far but like smarter than I will ever be, but I like the language, and Lady Chatterly's Lover by D.H. Lawrence, which is apparently tittilating. That, and I'm re-reading The Bell Jar since it's in my Feminism class next semester, and it would be nice to find out what it was that blew my mind so much when I was 14. To be frank: The Bell Jar was integral to my coming of age. It was my "literature can be beautiful" and "god I want to write like this". It's probably what got me started into seriously considering English Literature for formal study, and one that I'll throw on my list of things that made me want to be a writer more. But honestly, I don't remember much of it.

On top of those I've got Tess of the D'Ubervilles, which I picked up at a book sale at school (fill up a bag for five bucks!), where I also got a collection of Transcendentalist essays, a history of the American South from 1800 to the Civil War, and a history of the American Fronteir. Oh, and I'm still going through Dorothy Parker's short stories.

Plus my mother is lending me Campbell's Hero With A Thousand Faces and V by Thomas Pynchon.

And I can spend two weeks of Christmas Break reading as much of that list as I possibly can. I can feel in my bones that next semester's gonna be reading-heavy, and I want to get as much me-reading time in as possible, along with me-writing time, and sleep. And work.

Man it's like I don't ever want friends.

Oh and I started working on another writing project. What.

That effing movie

Twilight

Okay, look. I know that I say, sometimes, that I'm open-minded, and that I'm glad to hear everyone out, and blahbitty blah. But look: With this movie, I am a hater. H8RZ. Here's what I remember about it:

Opening scene: Shitty narration by Kristen Stewart, who is playing the outstandingly bored Isabella Swan. Yes, that is her name. Shitty narration tells us that baby Bella has to go to Pissbucket Town, Washington, to live with her father.

Things to know about the town: small population, everyone eats in a diner. Her father, who is also boring (THAT'S where she gets it) spends his time drinking knockoff PBR and brooding about fuck knows what. Bella goes to school, where she tries to be alone and aloof yet somehow attracts the biggest collection of Cool High School Kid Stereotypes. They talk like gangstas, they talk about the school paper, and they worry about prom. And they think that Bella, whose character would make a three-toed sloth look like fucking Hamlet, is the greatest shit that has ever landed in their rainy, lonely, grey town, and all the men decide to call her their "home girl" and ask her out, though her obvious superiority and beauty makes them nervous.

Oh, by the way: even though everyone talks about how Pissbucket, WA is nothing but rainfall, you don't see a single umbrella or windshield wiper in the whole movie. This in itself is a perfect metaphor for Twilight: it always looks like either the sun is going to shine through or a torrential rain is gonna fall, but in the end it's just grey. Grey. Grey.

Enter the Cullen family. These are a group of "foster children" who go to Pissbucket High. They are all pasty white, keep to themselves, don't eat, and don't ever show up to school when the sun is out.

See, they're Vampires. And no one has clued into that in the least.

All the Cullens are paired up with each other, except for one, because he makes weird faces and looks too feminine. His nom de lame is Edward. All the women want him but he denies their advances. Then he meets Bella in Bio and Barfs (almost). Bella is moderately insulted by this and vows to confront Eddy Blahzzard about it, but he doesn't show for, I dunno, like a week. Maybe two.

Meanwhile some dude gets killed by what everyone thinks is an animal, BUT since we saw it happen we know...it was a bunch of vampires! Thanks, movies!

So Edward shows up again and he and Bella spend a whole class biting their lips and gazing at each other, then he runs off for no. Reason. At. All. Then Bella plugs in her iPod and goes to her truck (why did she need the iPod if she's just gettin in her car? Did it take that long to walk from class?) but she catches sight of Edward and stares at him so fucking hard that she doesn't notice the big fucking van that comes careening around the corner of a parking lot (parking lots full of people: the perfect place to take a curve at 55), so Edward saves her and then runs off, though really if he hadn't been staring back at her maybe she could have stepped out of the way. But there's Bella for you: since she is a female protagonist, she must be helpless and completely in the hands of this passive agressive douchebag vampire.

Anyway some boring shit happens and Edward's a total dick but she's still drawn to him (cause that's how love happens; am I right, ladies?), then she and the Sweet Valley High gang go to the beach (cause they surf more than just the web! ZING!). She asks Edward to come but he doesn't show, and this oddity is explained by her Native American Buddy. You know who the Native Americans are, because they all have long hair. So anway, the Vampires don't come to the beach cause the indians don't like them.

Why don't the indians like them? Because the local tribe is descended from WOLVES.

Do you think that Stephanie Meyer ever met a Native American? I mean, aside from the weird Mormon version of them (ZING!).

So these wolf-natives (spoiler: apparently they turn out to be WEREWOLVES! OMG, so creative! Bite me.) met the Cullen clan like a hundred years ago, when the Cullens were dressed like scenesters circa 2002 (seriously), so the wolf-man-people-clan told them to piss off, which they did.

So Bella does some Detective Googling and goes to Port Notsuchashittytown to get a book on Native Legends so that she can get to the bottom of this whole whodang. (Hey Bella: he's a vampire and he's totally a dick) When she leaves the bookstore she gets almost-raped by about seven guys, and can't do anything to help herself until Eddy shows up in his silver Prius to kick some rapist ass. He takes her to dinner, they get kinda close, then on the way home find out that another dude got attacked by an "animal". Bella talks to her dad, Capt. Boring 'Stache and he, knowing that two middle-aged men who work in big abandoned shipyards have been killed, gives some pepper spray to his seventeen year old daughter for when she is in high school.

Another bout of all-night Googling for the truth, and Bella suddenly realizes: Teh Edward is a Vampire! Holy fucking jesus balls! She confronts him about that, and he agrees that yes, he is among the Undead. Or rather, the Uninteresting. In order to show her what a monsterous, disgusting, beastly being he truly is in order that she might understand his godless nature, he rips open his shirt.

Why don't vampires go out in the sunlight? Well people usually think that this is because they will burn up or turn to dust and that it will kill them. "You dummies," Says Stephanie Meyer, "It's because they are made of sparkles!"

Glitter Vampires. Be very afraid.

Edward goes on to tell Bella that he is drawn to her and vants to suck-a her blood, cause she smells crazy good. Bella thinks this is a reason to be BFFs, or at least dating. They hang out in the forest. They hang out at school. They hang out at Edward's family's house, where everyone is dating everyone, which is not in the least bit weird. They listen to what Stephanie Meyer must have found when she googled "classical music". Edward jumps around with Bella on his back, like he's a mix between a koala and a monkey.

Then one night Edward gets into Bella's room and they start makin' out. But he stops himself before he gets too into it...after all, what if he tries to kill her?

This is what I hated about the movie (and I can presume the book as well) the most. Everyone knows that vampires are sexy; after all, Dracula was just a big shiny metaphor for Victorian sexual frustration. Put that in the hands of an uber-Christian, and what do you get? A thinly veiled message of celibacy. Because if I kiss you too much, I might want to bite you (fuck you)! And that would mean death! It is bad and we should not do it. But hey, talking is great. Just chatting about, you know, Debussy and, like, not sex. Sex is bad. Can't we just be happy without it? I hope so. I'm sure we can, so long as we love each other. Without touching.

Look, I got no problem with people wanting to wait until marriage or whatever. But don't take the ultimate symbol of human lust and sexuality and make is some wimpy guy who's happy just watching you sleep. Every night. Without you knowing it.

So then the vampires have a baseball game for no apparent fucking reason. So that they could play a Muse song? So that they could show that they are strong and fast? Baseball? What's wrong with Vampire Soccer? Or Vampire Wii? Or what about Vampire Polo? Shit, I'd love that. But baseball is just a weird choice, especially when everyone, even the bad vampires (you know they're bad cause they're dour) who show up seem to agree that playing baseball will just be the best way to end a day.

But oh no! One of the bad vampires, Shirtless, gets a whiff of Bella's shampoo and decides that he wants to kill the heck out of her. Begin the dullest chase scene ever, ending in a ballet studio in Pheonix (guess what: Vampires DO have reflections oh jolly), where Bella gets bitten, Shirtless gets killed (suprisingly easily), Edward has to suck the poison out of Bella's bite and almost loses is but he holds back from drinking her blood because he is BETTER THAN THAT. Bella survives with a broken leg (what?) and they go to prom.

At prom Bella is all "hey I wanna be a vampire so's I can like get all sexy with you and never have to leave you and the way you and your wimpy family act it doesn't seem THAT bad anyway" and Edward's like "you don't want that." And Bella's like "yes Edward you are right I don't. Please make all my decisions for me."

The fucking end.



Why are so many tweenies eating this shit up like it's chocolate? It's a terrible representation of vampires (I know, there aren't that many good representations of them anyway but still). It's got Rag Doll Brainless Bella Swan as its female protagonist, hell, as its narrator, and her obsessive and controlling boyfriend who she can't do girlfriend-boyfriend things with. In a perfect world, even if this crap had been published, it wouldn't have gotten much further than an insignificant spot on the YA section in your local B&N. You know, I actually saw somewhere online someone was like "hey, if you like Twilight you should check out Dracula by Bram Stoker", and I wanted to smack them with a Moleskine notebook. Maybe you should check it out? Dude. That's like "hey, if you liked The Da Vinci Code maybe you should check out Paradise Lost.

In conclusion: I laughed my cruel little heart out at the bad acting and thin plot of Twilight, but avoid liking it or giving it any merit. In the meantime, somebody find me a decent vampire yarn.

And no, not Anne Rice or Anita Blake.