Labor

There's this long protracted scene in the book I'm reading, Meyer by Stephen Dixon, where the protagonist lists the circumstances, in block paragraphs, of all the calls he's gotten in his seventy-some years alerting him to the deaths of loved ones. Heath Ledger died two days ago. Back two weekends, I saw a couple making sex across the street, then the woman's silhouette walking into the bathroom while the dude cleaned off his penis with his hand, sitting on the bed. That's kind of just what it's been like lately.

Grooming

Like most women of my generation, I've seen all 19 episodes of My So-Called Life. I went through an intense fascination with it when I was a senior in high school. Re-reading an old Open Diary (ha) entry the other day, I was struck by the propensity of my high-school self for sincere self-reflection, how free of irony (almost alarmingly so) my dialogue with myself was. It's not surprising, then, that I saw MSCL as revelatory during this period, in the way that I simultaneously loved Joni Mitchell and watched the hours-long Woodstock documentary and "The Last Waltz" with nothing short of open-mouthed LOVE. I'd love to think that these loves had to do with more than just feeding myself morsels of trite girl-wisdom, but who knows. At least I never had to deal with boy-things, then. I barely paid attention when boys talked about anything other than, well, me.

My So-Called Life is out-dated now--so much more than I expected it ever would be. What it observed about high school--normalcy!--has nothing to do with "My Super Sweet Sixteen" or "Gossip Girls" or "Rich Girls" or "Laguna Beach." Right? I mean, that's obvious, I guess, but who knew that '90s nostalgia could hit with such force in 2008, and that it would be so much about Innocence? At a concert last night, Nick said that he felt '90s nostalgia was really the "zeitgeist," which is such a hilariously ironic and accurate description of our generation's fixation on the various Cools of the past. Angela Chase, in 1993, represented the last authentic moment of the '90s, for teens. Her zeitgeist just eluded me and my peers, who were in elementary school when the show came out, and when Kurt Cobain killed himself. I mean, I don't even remember knowing who Kurt Cobain was. By the time I was in middle school, big pink seventies flowers and bell-bottoms were "back," and there was nothing creative in the translation of the sixties-and-seventies pop aesthetic to the late nineties--it was literal, and boring, and had little personality of its own. Rayanne Grath and Clarissa Darling, though? They had style--a kind of individual aesthetic that would never be celebrated on television, now.

Last year I saw "Bridge to Teribithia" in the theaters, that terrible film version of the great children's novel, that comes off as both timeless and authentically seventies on the page. I was so annoyed by the way the movie presented Leslie Burke as this Avril Lavigne-esque "alterna-girl," SO pretty and wearing fingerless striped gloves! Leslie is supposed to be independent-minded, exempt from the real world, and Weird. And a Tomboy. When was the last time you saw a female character on television showing anything close to personal style? I miss Blossom, even though I'm too young to miss her. I'm too young to miss a lot of things, and I think that's what we--Generation Whatever--feel so strongly. Nostalgia for something we never inhabited! How depressing! Yup.

Labor

So I've been re-reading Slouching Toward Bethlehem, and it's funny, because the way she figures herself in her writing is the way I've actually always wanted my life to look. There is a section of her L.A. essay that has her going to the grocery store with her baby daughter, in a bikini on a hot day, and an older woman says "What a thing to wear to Ralph's." I can only imagine that her brain, like mine, works constantly to romanticize the everyday self. Why else the anecdote about the bikini? In the essay it's meant, I think, to convey the weirdness of L.A.'s interpersonal climate, but what she really wants you to see is HER, in the bikini, with the grocery cart. And I sympathize with this so so much.

I think it must have to do with how ambivalent I feel about my actual, physical self. When Lauren and I go to yoga and the teacher says that we are "alienated from our bodies" as New Yorkers in winter, I have to admit that this is how I feel all the time. There are girls, personified for me by those eighties-movie adolescent tomboys with shorts and baseball caps, who do without all the self-presentation. And it's hilarious to me that what I've actually achieved, at twenty-three, is something similar to the thing I've romanticized for quite possibly ever. Not that I feel solid to myself--to feel that way I think I will have to start playing volleyball or something.

Grooming

Last night I watched New York's Eyewitness news at five, and I like never watch the television news (except for the Jim Lehrer news hour, to please my high school history teacher). And it was crazy! For those of you who have read Francesca Lia Block (omg), it gave new meaning to the whole trope of Witch Baby pasting horrible pictures from the newspaper to her bedroom walls. The newscasters didn't seem fazed at all, although they made the appropriate tragic murmur sounds. A family was burned in a fire, mother huddled over kids. Some girls were forced to get into a minivan by some guys, and were raped. Best of all, a New Jersey lab technician violated a 93-year-old woman's corpse--they left that story to the end, but hinted at it before every commercial break.

This isn't supposed to be an indictment of like, sensationalistic television news media whatever, I just legitimately forgot that the whole "violent contemporary world" thing wasn't just a part of the nineties, and my childhood. I've talked about this with people before--that intensified period of parental worry about abduction and sexual abuse in the early-mid nineties. On the news last night they also had a story about an upstate New York town instating a 7:30pm curfew for trick-or-treaters. I keep thinking about Francesca Lia Block, and how a lot of her books must have been responding to how totally scary L.A. is. That's what Joan Didion is famous for talking about, too. I mean, I know we're all supposed to be scared all the time and everything's horrible, blah blah, but it seems like kind of a passe topic at this point. I think the newscasters are parodying it a little bit, even. Well.

Grooming

Mercy and the Butterfly visit London, get bowlcuts, meet fashion photographers:



Picture from Facehunter.blogspot.com

Vanity

There's this thing called The Cleanse or something, which my co-worker is currently pursuing, where you eat only lemon, maple syrup and cayenne pepper (mixed together) for ten days straight. My sister used to talk about detox and shit like that when she was younger. Weird! I can't even imagine. Thoughts, homeopaths?

Grooming

Today on the subway I started reading Crime and Punishment. My mother bought me the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction for my birthday (only because I asked for it), and I haven't read a lot of the stories, especially stuff like "The Lottery," by Shirley Jackson, and "Heart of Darkness." According to Owen, I haven't read the classics. Over the summer I worked for an English professor, and I realized that I'm very good at faking my way through conversations about music and literature. I'd never thought I was faking it, before.

Over the weekend I saw The Darjeeling Limited, which like all Wes Anderson movies produces this weird, only momentarily satisfying sense of fullness. The way he has people handle objects in his movies is the kind of cinematic trick that totally does it for me every time. It's like, Natalie Portman brushes her teeth! And it looks great. And obviously this must be the universally appealing thing about his movies, and why white people of a certain leaning like them so much. I also think this is something about Cigarettes and Movies, and really I'm just talking about smoking in movies and how much I am persuaded by it. I'm so impressionable.