Choire Sicha

meltzer: The Secret Life of the American Teenage Rock Star: A review of Kristin Hersh’s memoir,...

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 08:54:49 -0400

The Secret Life of the American Teenage Rock Star: A review of Kristin Hersh’s memoir, Rat Girl.

I loved it so much. Everyone should read this book. Even if you think you don’t care about the Throwing Muses. Or teen pregnancy. Or bipolar disorder. Or adolescent girls.

YES YES YES.

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Tue, 31 Aug 2010 22:12:48 -0400

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matthewgallaway: So today my second copy of ‘Coming and Crying’...

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 21:43:31 -0400

matthewgallaway:

So today my second copy of ‘Coming and Crying’ arrived, because I bought one and also received a contributor copy (I have a story in it, obv), and I wanted to take a few seconds to say that I’m very proud to be a part of it (which is why I added it to the stack of other books I’ve been a part of this year, which in some ways make life worth living, particularly if you’re over the age of ___ and you have to trudge to an office every day and even if you generally like your job — which I do, for the record! — you must slog through the same conversations about ___ and ___ and revenue and capitalism — but never in theoretical terms, because there’s no logic to it — that are the foundations of the modern workplace, sadly). Meaghan and Melissa did a great job putting this book together, and as someone who’s put out albums (as in vinyl, baby!) and CDs (fuck you, CDs) and zines and all sorts of other shit just for the sake of doing it, you should know that it’s a lot of work that nobody really ever gets paid for (or almost never), which makes it both better and worse (than paying jobs). Which is all to say that I hope you check it out; go buy a copy at McNally Jackson or other fine booksellers that are stocking it. There are a lot of interesting stories in the compilation from many different perspectives including __ and __ and even __, which is a relief in these times of increasing compartmentalization of sexual identities and (as I see it) the de-gaying of so much mnstrm entertainment (see, e.g., the latest season of Mad Men?), which is a tribute to Meaghan and Melissa and of course the other writers. My only quibble (which I mention because this is a self-criticism) is that while reading, it seemed to me like every guy described in the book has a giant cock (I’m not referring to myself, btw, in case that wasn’t obvious), and as we all know, not every guy has a giant cock, or should be expected to. As Betty White (of the amazing folk-rock duo Elton and Betty White) once sang so perfectly, ‘The Little Dicks Fit Me Best.’ So yeah, check out C&C and then go get busy, as people have been doing since the dawn of time.

Too much important information here not to share this further.

marklisanti: The Power Rankings Posted late on Monday...

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 11:07:26 -0400

marklisanti:

The Power Rankings

Posted late on Monday night

New morning, reblog

To The Editor: Dear Sir(s), I do not know what is going on over at Lisanti Quarterly since its rumored purchase by N+1 Enterprises Inc., but it is apparent there is something broken in the machine that produces the Mad Men Power Rankings™. Peggy Olson at number three? Behind Roger Sterling? Let’s recap! Roger Sterling spent the episode sitting in his office, delivering what appears to be the world’s worst memoir to his disinterested secretary. His former lover, Joan, who ditched him, ditches him again for being boring and too drunk. He is basically described as useless by his coworkers. We finally learn about the lengths to which Roger went to not hire Don in the past. Compare to: Peggy Olson cries “Let’s get liberated,” rips off her clothes in a hotel room with a coworker, makes fun of a guy’s junk to his face and then makes fun of his dick size in the office in front of other people. Um. What gives, Lisanti Quarterly? Very Truly Yours etc., A Longtime Local Subscriber

I definitely advocate the purchase of Longshot magazine in part...

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 11:55:11 -0400

I definitely advocate the purchase of Longshot magazine in part because I wrote something really odd in it (which definitely at least looks like a better piece of writing than it is when it’s all gussied up with magazine sauce). Much better reasons to buy it include reading all sorts of writers you may not know!

REFRESH REFRESH REFRESH #4

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 10:21:08 -0400

leoncrawl:

LENA DUNHAM

CAROLINE BANKOFF

ABRAHAM RIESMAN

RICHARD LAWSON

AND… IN THEIR ONLY LIVE APPEARANCE EVER…

THE TWO WISEST, CRANKIEST GUYS ON TWITTER…

PETER STEVENSON AND JIM WINDOLF

Happy Ending, 9/17, 8pm

Genius.

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Sat, 28 Aug 2010 21:08:16 -0400

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Sat, 28 Aug 2010 08:59:19 -0400

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Fri, 27 Aug 2010 20:42:14 -0400

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"Edward Abbey said, in the introduction to his classic misanthropic hymn Desert Solitaire,..."

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 18:09:13 -0400

““Edward Abbey said, in the introduction to his classic misanthropic hymn Desert Solitaire, ‘This is not a travel guide but an elegy. You’re holding a tombstone in your hands. A bloody rock.’ A rock he suggests throwing at ‘something big and glassy: What do you have to lose?’ Abbey would have been amused, though not surprised, to know that today’s travelers seeking nature-oriented moments in the West are moving away from the typical and increasingly tainted wilderness experiences such as river rafting—viruses from sewage treatment plants along the Colorado have spoiled many a tourist’s holiday—toward remote natural ‘shows’ like the man-made lightning field in New Mexico. There’s a lot that’s big and glassy out there, all coming closer, and you have nothing to lose by objecting to it because the good stuff has pretty much disappeared. “”

- Joy Williams, July 2003.

"During our trek we often heard snatches of whistles blown our way by the sea breeze, and on the..."

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 15:56:02 -0400

“During our trek we often heard snatches of whistles blown our way by the sea breeze, and on the second day we stopped for lunch in a lush grassy pasture. During that break in our walk, we were treated to a lengthy whistled conversation which ebbed and flowed around us from all sides even though we never actually saw the whistlers themselves.”

- Jeff Brent on his first time hearing Silbo Gomero. (via paulbrady)

WHY YES THIS IS the most fascinating thing I’ve read.

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Tue, 24 Aug 2010 13:28:00 -0400

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Mon, 23 Aug 2010 19:08:13 -0400

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Sat, 21 Aug 2010 17:52:50 -0400

So because I couldn’t see the Todd Solondz movie or the Pat Tillman documentary (and because I...

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 10:05:19 -0400

So because I couldn’t see the Todd Solondz movie or the Pat Tillman documentary (and because I got, too late, a hot tip that The Switch (yes, the second genetic rape movie of the year (after Splice)) was weirdly and unexpectedly delightful, which, ?), I went at last to see Eat Pray Love.

(First can I note that the best thing in theaters right now is still…. the trailer for The Social Network? Man. Second best trailer ever?*)

Ryan Murphy’s first film, Running with Scissors was, more or less, a monster bomb? It didn’t even get released overseas, and pretty much no one saw it in America, and somehow I quite liked it despite some weird faults (also it had a terrible epilogue and was a little too “quirkily” shot), and even though I’m “against” the book. It was a great Alec Baldwin movie and it had a great Gabrielle Union part, which, Team Gabrielle Union.

And in Eat Pray Love I feel like the way Murphy shoots has really evolved and gotten sophisticated and is a lot strange and great. While the stuff in Rome is a little bit movie-Rome, the way Bali and New York and most of India is shot is unusual and fantastic-looking and not-cliched and the way he shoots actors is really odd and extended and leisurely. I like the way he makes men look a little ugly!

And I didn’t have those quibbles that other people seem to have had. There’s stuff they don’t bother to tell you, because why should they—the whole marriage isn’t sketched out, and you have to take her word on the divorce, largely, but also this might be a movie that makes a bit more sense to people who are older and have been divorced. Divorce can sneak up on you, I’ll tell ya.

(The thing that I don’t like about this whole EPL thing is the mind of the person who will come back and make a narrative out of it. (That person is surely a narcissist, and, to my mind, there’s probably not much “true” about the story.) I don’t trust memoirs much, and I don’t trust people’s accounts of themselves very often. So I have no problem looking at this movie as fiction, which it undoubtedly is, given the tale’s trip through more than one writer at this point, a game of telephone. When regarded as fiction, it makes absolute sense to me and it doesn’t trouble me in the slightest, not even politically, really. I mean guess what, here I am typing on my Tumblr while people are probably starving down the street.)

I also think that people rebel against spending a long time on a woman’s examining of herself (err, sorry, that sounds weird!). But I think that’s something new and honestly I think we’ve never really been exposed historically to the idea of a woman piloting a narrative that has to do with working out what she wants.

One thing I liked about EPL is that it contains an oppositely-expressed but shared viewpoint of And the Heart Says Whatever, which is a memoir that stubbornly sticks to the truth of “I don’t know why I wanted that.” (“Whatever.”) And there’s a tiny place where Eat Pray Love and and Emily’s book overlap, which occurs in far more hyper-dramatic form with Julia Robert (obviously), where she’s beating her chest and crying “I don’t know why I feel cold inside” basically, whereas in Emily’s book, this feeling of blockage and confusion about why one does or wants what one wants or what have you is matter-of-factly and appropriately brought out, shown and dispatched (and kept real). But I like that this experience is brought forward in both of these, because it’s an important moment in people’s lives! The feeling of I can’t connect, because (I project from my own experience here) the emotional broadband is all jammed up, like when you’re trying to read the Times online and you forgot you were illegally downloading a bunch of new albums.

Maybe there are a few things that help me enjoy this movie and see something valuable even (or at least “relatable”) in it. I’m not a person who feels a spiritual void, I did most of my angst and searching and finding pretty early on and I’m comfortable with whatever void remains.

And also I know both a lot of people who’ve gone overseas exploring (it’s cheap, by the way! I’ve said it before, but if I have to do unexpected unemployment all over again, I’ll take my tiny bit of savings and immediately flee the country for somewhere where the dollar goes a long way).

And I’ve known a lot of very wealthy people. (This is relevant, as the wealth of Liz Gilbert, to whatever degree she is “actually” wealthy, hangs over the film.) Some of them are narcissists or troubled or myopic (I have had millionaires complain to me about their money problems! While I was, you know, getting evicted! And then they’ve split the dinner bill with me!) but in the end I don’t think I really believe that rich people are any different than anyone else. They get faced with the emptiness of consumption and choice in a way that people can’t handle, and they fail to be good people often. What would you do if you didn’t have to work, or didn’t have to worry about money? Answering that question, or not even recognizing it is a question, goes really wrong for a lot of people, which is why we think the rich as a class are terrible. (Yes. They often act terribly). It’s not something people are equipped to do. (See also: lottery winners.) This is one of the reasons that I think capitalism as we know it doesn’t work; the human mind is often literally incapable of handling the hoarding of wealth, and it’s bad for everyone—particularly, you know, the people the wealth is hoarded from. Also people can shove their $60,000 fishtanks in their asses, seriously.

But that’s what I mean about the mental illness of money. If you have it, even a little bit of it, 999 times out of 1000 you absolutely will spend it wrong.

But in the end, I just don’t believe people are that different from each other.

People just aren’t that empathetic or thoughtful or intentional. After the movie (and at the end, of course I thought “Well I look forward to their three-month relationship and eventual breakup,” though that apparently did not happen in “real life,” wherever that is from here) we went for a burger and there were these terrible little people who were all in a tizzy because someone had touched this girl’s purse and then the girl had slapped the purse-toucher or something and they were all agitated and trying to decide if they were going to get into a rumble about it or walk away and “be cool” and go off to a bar. They were basically like animals, pacing in a cage. And these other young people were going to go out to a bar. “But you don’t want to sweat out your beer,” one girl said to another girl. And I was like, “God, these people are so much worse than Julia Roberts in that movie.”

Then when we got home, Party Monster was on TV (in which Chloe Sevigny looks radiant (and then distinctly not at all radiant)). What a great look at how people got famous (or micro-famous! Snarf!) before the Internet became an easier, lamer route. People don’t even have to put on crazy outfits any more.

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Fri, 20 Aug 2010 17:10:28 -0400

Thanks, Dave! JUST WHAT I NEEDED.

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 13:18:00 -0400

Thanks, Dave! JUST WHAT I NEEDED.

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Fri, 20 Aug 2010 11:17:55 -0400

I would say this is when the working stopped for the day.

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 14:17:56 -0400

I would say this is when the working stopped for the day.

"Only on the Basis of a Great Renunciation"

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 23:09:45 -0400

I just wanted to someplace to mention that I had all of the feelings today. Including the eight “advanced emotions.” (I think that includes “nervous hunger”?) Or did I? WikiAnswers says: “There are over 1000 feelings in the world everyone has atleast 25 feelings a day1.” Yahoo! Answers India says:

“Due to individual differnces,diffrnt peple feel diff. amount of certain emotions r diff. bt all r part of- happins sadns jealous infriority love hate etc„„„,”

And that is marked as a best answer, so.