Now Playing: Lily Allen--"Everything's Just Wonderful"
Something I struggle to avoid in writing the blog is a rote recitation of the various things I've done or experienced--shows, parties, movies, books, walking--without some sort of context. One of the most frequent accusations made against blogs is that they're nothing more than narcissistic navel-gazing, which I find a little churlish. Many are, but all too often the accusations are made by paid writers studying pop culture for various publications, which really amounts to navel-gazing writ large and therefore renders them hypocrites of the first water (and nervous nellies--remember how the internet was going to make books obsolete?). In their defense, I suspect it's really their justified fear of the notion that anyone can write interesting and quality stuff for anonymous consumption, whether the material consists of weighty thoughts on politics and philosophy or "what I ate for breakfast"--a "celebrated journalist" on the British Horror Films forum once tore into a several-page rant on the subject, essentially accusing bloggers of stealing the bread from his children's mouths. My own reaction, sadly, has been to internalize this attitude and minimize the purely personal details (which usually aren't that interesting anyway) and lean more towards the cultural and culinary criticism that I enjoy doing in the first place. It becomes a problem when my social life overheats to the degree that it has recently.
Simply put, I am... seeing somebody. I don't want to write too much about it because of the whole aforementioned "personal downplay" mode, but also, I think, in a weird way, because I want it to stay ours. Suffice it to say, she's terrific, and it's an unusually pleasant meeting of circumstances: I've known her slightly for some time but don't really know much about her, and vice versa. So we're somewhat familiar with each other but there's still a lot to learn, which I think will be very, very fun. It occurred over the course of a weekend involving both a pumpkin-carving party and a happily abortive attempt to see The Darjeeling Limited at the Michigan Theater (it was sold out). This wasn't entirely a bad thing, especially as I have issues with Wes Anderson. I enjoyed Bottle Rocket (1996) and loved Rushmore (1998; although in the latter's case, it was probably more the soundtrack than anything else), but found The Royal Tenenbaums (2002; she disagrees, but who the hell names their falcon Mordecai?) a militantly twee toothache. I didn't bother to see The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) and have heard a few negative rumblings over Darjeeling. Apparently Laura and Steve tried to get into the Q-n-A session with Anderson and that lovable scamp Jason Schwartzman at Borders a week ago, only to find themselves barred because they weren't "with the University" (for most cultural events in Ann Arbor, a vital requirement for "personhood"). Fortunately (for me, anyway, because it was hilarious), they got to watch the whole thing on a TV screen set up on the first floor. The same thing happened to me when Rackham Auditorium was too packed to hear Jeffrey Eugenides; Middlesex worshipper that I am, I found the concept a little too well-meaningly weird, and left. The intereview was, by all accounts, a cacophony of ass-kissing, with Schwartzman shamelessly mugging to the crowd at the end. The stench of phony Klostermanesque irony that ruined a perfectly good cultural moment in the late 90s hung over the whole idea of The Darjeeling Limited from the get-go, and I wasn't that sorry we couldn't get in. We all went to the Eight-Ball and had a better time than I thought we would, as I'd only gotten two hours of sleep from the night before.
Mean Girls (2004): As relatively independent as I like to think myself from the world of celebrity obsessions, I have only myself to blame for not seeing this enjoyable little flick before, and all down to fear of what Lindsay Lohan performance looked like in this day and age. The only other movie I'd really seen her in before was the lackluster remake (Lackluster? A remake? No!) several years before of The Parent Trap, and she wasn't that bad (the reason to see that one is that Natasha Richardson has never looked better). Besides, I love Tina Fey. 30 Rock could have been a stultifying landslide of smug in-jokes and tired hipster snark a la Wet Hot American Summer--excepting, of course, that canoe rescue scene and the great Paul Rudd--and it's instead one of the funniest comedies out there right now, and largely down to the quality and timing of the writing. Mean Girls doesn't quite rise to that level (although few things can) and gets a little preachy at the end, but it's a lot of fun and funny with it. Caddy (Lohan) and her parents return from the African bush to America, where Caddy has to maneuver the minefield of high school social life, especially the title characters (Rachel McAdams, Lacey Chabert, and Amanda Seyfried). While finding allies in an understanding teacher (Fey) and a nonconformist friend (Lizzy Caplan), Caddy finds herself seduced by the more privileged lifestyle and has to make some tough choices. That last bit is the original proposition, with Solzhenitsyn's quip about the line between good and evil made flesh in an American high school (pretentious but true). Though onetime Party of Five moppet Chabert's rather entertaining as the deceptively saccharine Gretchen, the lovely Caplan's the best reason to see the movie besides Fey's writing--she actually makes me wish I'd watched The Class while it was on.
Oh, this is pretty sweet, too.
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