The Kinks, "Mindless Child of Motherhood"
Happy Mother's Day, mothers!
I'm personally conflicted about Mother's Day in my own household, because I typically play Good Cop vis-a-vis Exene, even though I think, stacking her up to all the moms that I know, she's not in the Hall of Fame by any means. I console myself by noting that, if not for her, I'd not have my wonderful boys, that she's 50% of their genetic makeup. By my standards, that's a pretty harshly pragmatic assessment, but it's what gets me through this day.
I'm always better about Mother's Day than she has ever been about Father's Day, but that's how our dynamic has always been -- I'm the one who pays attention to making folks feel appreciated (which is probably a stereotypically motherly duty, isn't it? Hah.) Even when we are (fucking FINALLY -- damn you Great Recession!!!) separated, I'll still want the boys to honor their mom on Mother's Day, because it's the right thing to do.
So, anyway, to the moms out there who actually rise to the manifold challenges of motherhood, I hope today's good to you, and people are nice and appreciative of you and the hard work that goes into it. Because I know how hard it is, how hard you work (and believe me, I actually DO know how hard you work -- of any dads out there, I most definitely do know), and how often it's taken for granted, so I hope your loved ones cut you a break today!
Enjoy today, whatever comes your way.
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Saturday, May 8, 2010
Dunster
The crazy who obsesses over Kirsten Dunst struck again. He (I assume it's a "he") papers a huge swath of the city with her pictures. Oh, and the Dunster (what I'll call this entity) seems to hate her, because a few times they'll write screeds like "Whore! Bitch! Jezebel!" on the pictures. This one above is a new addition, as usually it's just Dunst.
Stormy
Wow, it was very windy last night (up to 35-mph gusts), and cold. A storm blew in this morning. May in Chicago, always cool and stormy.
Today (weather permitting) I'm taking B1 to his soccer match, and will work on the screenplay revision.
I stubbed the fuck out of my right toes this morning -- I accidentally punted one of B2's large toy garbage trucks. He loves garbage trucks -- LOVES them. Cracks me up, how much he loves them. He's some amusing combo of actor and soccer hooligan, that one is.
B1 is sweet and sensitive and thoughtful -- he said the other day "I'm like Superman; [B2] is more like Lobo." For anybody who knows who Lobo is, you'll know that B1 perfectly characterized B2!
I was shredding old checks this morning (the fun never stops!) and the boys were LOVING that. B2 looked at the strips of shredded check I'd put in a bag and took a handful, said "This is awesome." Loved that. B2 does have the Instinct for Awesome -- that innate sense of things. Love that. He gets that from his daddy!
Exene was under the delusion that she'd always paid the bills in the past -- she blithely said that when were having one of our contentions, and I said "No, you didn't -- most of the time, I paid the bills." and she said "No, you didn't. I always did it." And wouldn't budge. Going through the checks, I held them up, said to her "Wow, look at these bills I paid, year after year after year. And to think you said I never paid the bills." She just glowered at me with her "It Doesn't Matter" Look(tm). A tiny victory, but it was nice for a sliver of reality to intrude a bit, there. Can't wait to not have to debate reality anymore.
Anyway, shredding the fuck out of the past. I was amused -- found two checks -- one she wrote on 9/10/01 for a crib; and one I wrote on 9/12/01 for a septic tank service company -- that nicely bookended our moving into the Black House in '01, in our fateful homeowning days... 9/10: crib; 9/11: terrorist attacks; 9/12; septic tank cleaning. I kept those two checks, just for the heck of it.
Caught a glimpse of a rainbow this morning. I tried to photograph it, but the light went and I'm not sure if I got it. I'll check.
Today (weather permitting) I'm taking B1 to his soccer match, and will work on the screenplay revision.
I stubbed the fuck out of my right toes this morning -- I accidentally punted one of B2's large toy garbage trucks. He loves garbage trucks -- LOVES them. Cracks me up, how much he loves them. He's some amusing combo of actor and soccer hooligan, that one is.
B1 is sweet and sensitive and thoughtful -- he said the other day "I'm like Superman; [B2] is more like Lobo." For anybody who knows who Lobo is, you'll know that B1 perfectly characterized B2!
I was shredding old checks this morning (the fun never stops!) and the boys were LOVING that. B2 looked at the strips of shredded check I'd put in a bag and took a handful, said "This is awesome." Loved that. B2 does have the Instinct for Awesome -- that innate sense of things. Love that. He gets that from his daddy!
Exene was under the delusion that she'd always paid the bills in the past -- she blithely said that when were having one of our contentions, and I said "No, you didn't -- most of the time, I paid the bills." and she said "No, you didn't. I always did it." And wouldn't budge. Going through the checks, I held them up, said to her "Wow, look at these bills I paid, year after year after year. And to think you said I never paid the bills." She just glowered at me with her "It Doesn't Matter" Look(tm). A tiny victory, but it was nice for a sliver of reality to intrude a bit, there. Can't wait to not have to debate reality anymore.
Anyway, shredding the fuck out of the past. I was amused -- found two checks -- one she wrote on 9/10/01 for a crib; and one I wrote on 9/12/01 for a septic tank service company -- that nicely bookended our moving into the Black House in '01, in our fateful homeowning days... 9/10: crib; 9/11: terrorist attacks; 9/12; septic tank cleaning. I kept those two checks, just for the heck of it.
Caught a glimpse of a rainbow this morning. I tried to photograph it, but the light went and I'm not sure if I got it. I'll check.
Friday, May 7, 2010
Unbalanced
You know, Vivien Leigh (although a Scorpio, herself), managed a picture-perfect portrayal of a Libra in her characterization of Blanche DuBois. Blanche is the archetypal Libran. You think in that clip that the music's just part of the soundtrack, but astute observers of the Libran in action know that the music's actually just playing in their heads -- like when they get that far-off look in their eyes, they've gone off to their Happy Place, their castle in the sky, where candy-apple mares eat rainbows and cotton candy, and their Shining Knight will rescue them, sooner or later. Far, far away....Oh, and I laugh -- Brando was an Aries, and the look on his face above (and Blanche's) aptly conveys the respective mental states of these polar opposites, when confronting one another (the above shot looks like Stanley's about to say "Earth to Blanche! HELLOOO in there?" and Blanche is busy being delusional about her gentleman callers and the kindness of strangers.)
Climb Every Mountain?
Ex and I got into it the other day (well, not true -- rather, I voice an opinion and she got pissed off and rather strident in her tone). It was one of those subtext-laden kind of things, where you're talking about something but I guess the behind-the-scenes stuff bubbles up.
I'd mentioned how amused I was that Gawker blogger and NYT darling Emily Gould's memoir had been received rather half-heartedly (typically saying that she wrote a memoir without having much to say). I've found Gould to be annoying as hell -- seriously narcissistic, and not nearly the writer we're supposed to believe she is (and she was given a very gushy treatment by the NYT a few years ago that set my teeth on edge).
Anyway, Exene was also not happy about that, which led to a discussion about memoirs in general, and we both agreed that only doing something noteworthy should be memoir-worthy. Simple enough, obvious point, right? I remember being on the commuter train in Indiana, and Hoosiers asking me "What're you writing? Your memoirs?" and I said "Memoirs? I haven't DONE anything, yet."
Then Exene made the mistake of referencing scaling Mount Everest as something memoir-worthy. She was under the (mistaken) impression that only 300 people have done it. I said "More like 2,000." And off we flew -- she got pissy about it, vehemently saying that a memoir about scaling Everest was a much worthier topic than a memoir by some narcissistic New York brat.
And I said "Well, they're BOTH lame, in my view." And I pointed out that maybe the first ten people to climb Everest might have something worth sharing, or perhaps a scaling that was in some way unique (up there, uniquely bad is likelier to be the outcome), and that, in my view, scaling Everest was as narcissistic as being a blogger in New York, only that in doing so, a person was spending far more money and actually risking people's lives for their vainglorious effort to summit Everest -- something nearly 2000 people have already done before you, and over 100 people have died attempting to do.
That really set her off, and she said how it was still more significant than the writings of a whiny, slutty New York chick. And I said "What's going to be said in an Everest memoir? It was cold. It was hard to breathe. It was dangerous. It was deadly. It was high up." I said maybe if a climber was abducted by aliens or saw a dragon, it might be interesting, but, by and large, it was the same story -- see mountain, climb mountain.
She went on a diatribe about the personal discovery a person scaling Everest might feel, contrasted with the navel-gazing of a former blogger-turned-writer (she didn't put it that way, but that was the key point), and I stuck to my contention that both efforts were lame, both were reflective of a deep narcissism -- whether "I live in New York." or "I scaled Mount Everest." -- both were lame, in my view. I said "Let me see the memoir of the first person to land on Mars -- that's something nobody's done before. But when you're the 2001st person to summit Everest? Yawn."
Now, either she's got it in her head to scale Everest, or she's perhaps conflating her marathon-running hobby as somehow deeply significant in the same vein that scaling Everest would be. That's the only reason I can figure on why she might get so up in arms about that. I mean, she was pissed! Like angrier than I've seen her in, well, the past two years (seriously, even angrier than when I told her I wanted to divorce her -- heh, if anybody should be writing a memoir, it should be ME -- "My Life with Maleficent"). I think maybe she thought my pointing out the ersatz and hubristic (and pointless) accomplishment of scaling Everest was, perhaps, a dig at her marathonning (which it wasn't, to be honest -- I wasn't even thinking of that at the time -- because it's not even in the same ballpark -- coming in 20,000th in a 40,000-runner marathon isn't even in same neighborhood as scaling Everest -- and only the delusionally hubristic would even think it is, which might be begging the question, yes?).
I don't know. I always look at those "extreme sport" things with a gimlet eye. The first, second, and third person who does something like that, sure, they're trailblazers. But after 2000 times? C'mon. Mountainous masturbation! Barring something extraordinary happening, it's not extraordinary -- personally meaningful, sure, but really, what moral lesson are you going to bring down from Mount Everest that already hasn't been learned? What, that it's HARD? That it's dangerous? That life is GOOD? That death is BAD? And sure, in a world of 5 billion people, you're one of the 0.00000004% to have scaled Everest, but I still think "Whoopity doo, goody for you. You're willing to risk those poor sherpa's lives, willing to pay out the nose for your little micro-sliver of personal accomplishment? What does that say about you?"
I remember reading that real climbers kind of look at Everest with a jaundiced view -- that the true lovers of climbing think it's kind of a circle jerk -- it's the mountains the "tourists" always want to climb. I didn't bring that up in my discussion with Exene, but I did think that.
Climb Every Mountain (had to be done). You know, at some point, I'm going to write a story exploring that impulse -- something darkly comic, to be sure.
I'd mentioned how amused I was that Gawker blogger and NYT darling Emily Gould's memoir had been received rather half-heartedly (typically saying that she wrote a memoir without having much to say). I've found Gould to be annoying as hell -- seriously narcissistic, and not nearly the writer we're supposed to believe she is (and she was given a very gushy treatment by the NYT a few years ago that set my teeth on edge).
Anyway, Exene was also not happy about that, which led to a discussion about memoirs in general, and we both agreed that only doing something noteworthy should be memoir-worthy. Simple enough, obvious point, right? I remember being on the commuter train in Indiana, and Hoosiers asking me "What're you writing? Your memoirs?" and I said "Memoirs? I haven't DONE anything, yet."
Then Exene made the mistake of referencing scaling Mount Everest as something memoir-worthy. She was under the (mistaken) impression that only 300 people have done it. I said "More like 2,000." And off we flew -- she got pissy about it, vehemently saying that a memoir about scaling Everest was a much worthier topic than a memoir by some narcissistic New York brat.
And I said "Well, they're BOTH lame, in my view." And I pointed out that maybe the first ten people to climb Everest might have something worth sharing, or perhaps a scaling that was in some way unique (up there, uniquely bad is likelier to be the outcome), and that, in my view, scaling Everest was as narcissistic as being a blogger in New York, only that in doing so, a person was spending far more money and actually risking people's lives for their vainglorious effort to summit Everest -- something nearly 2000 people have already done before you, and over 100 people have died attempting to do.
That really set her off, and she said how it was still more significant than the writings of a whiny, slutty New York chick. And I said "What's going to be said in an Everest memoir? It was cold. It was hard to breathe. It was dangerous. It was deadly. It was high up." I said maybe if a climber was abducted by aliens or saw a dragon, it might be interesting, but, by and large, it was the same story -- see mountain, climb mountain.
She went on a diatribe about the personal discovery a person scaling Everest might feel, contrasted with the navel-gazing of a former blogger-turned-writer (she didn't put it that way, but that was the key point), and I stuck to my contention that both efforts were lame, both were reflective of a deep narcissism -- whether "I live in New York." or "I scaled Mount Everest." -- both were lame, in my view. I said "Let me see the memoir of the first person to land on Mars -- that's something nobody's done before. But when you're the 2001st person to summit Everest? Yawn."
Now, either she's got it in her head to scale Everest, or she's perhaps conflating her marathon-running hobby as somehow deeply significant in the same vein that scaling Everest would be. That's the only reason I can figure on why she might get so up in arms about that. I mean, she was pissed! Like angrier than I've seen her in, well, the past two years (seriously, even angrier than when I told her I wanted to divorce her -- heh, if anybody should be writing a memoir, it should be ME -- "My Life with Maleficent"). I think maybe she thought my pointing out the ersatz and hubristic (and pointless) accomplishment of scaling Everest was, perhaps, a dig at her marathonning (which it wasn't, to be honest -- I wasn't even thinking of that at the time -- because it's not even in the same ballpark -- coming in 20,000th in a 40,000-runner marathon isn't even in same neighborhood as scaling Everest -- and only the delusionally hubristic would even think it is, which might be begging the question, yes?).
I don't know. I always look at those "extreme sport" things with a gimlet eye. The first, second, and third person who does something like that, sure, they're trailblazers. But after 2000 times? C'mon. Mountainous masturbation! Barring something extraordinary happening, it's not extraordinary -- personally meaningful, sure, but really, what moral lesson are you going to bring down from Mount Everest that already hasn't been learned? What, that it's HARD? That it's dangerous? That life is GOOD? That death is BAD? And sure, in a world of 5 billion people, you're one of the 0.00000004% to have scaled Everest, but I still think "Whoopity doo, goody for you. You're willing to risk those poor sherpa's lives, willing to pay out the nose for your little micro-sliver of personal accomplishment? What does that say about you?"
I remember reading that real climbers kind of look at Everest with a jaundiced view -- that the true lovers of climbing think it's kind of a circle jerk -- it's the mountains the "tourists" always want to climb. I didn't bring that up in my discussion with Exene, but I did think that.
Climb Every Mountain (had to be done). You know, at some point, I'm going to write a story exploring that impulse -- something darkly comic, to be sure.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Music
I love The Nerves. This was one of their best.
This song by The Zippers, "You're So Strange" (1977) is very good, too.
This song by The Zippers, "You're So Strange" (1977) is very good, too.
The Cell
This is a pretty funny sequence. I am amused, because I've run into that a number of times when working on horror stories -- only I never do pat "no signal" kind of stuff, but come up with other ways that a person can't call their way out of a jam. But it is amusing, because it really does come up as an issue in the era of cell phones everywhere! A related issue is the increased presence of surveillance cameras, at least in urban areas (although not exclusively there, anymore).
Ow.
I think I might've gotten a stress fracture on the outside edge of my left foot. I nailed it the other day, and it hurts like hell when there's any pressure on it. Nothing to be done for it, if it is a stress fracture, since they just have to mend. Just hope there's not a zombie apocalypse over the next few weeks, because I won't be able to run very far. I haven't had one of those since college (stress fracture, not zombie apocalypse), during Tae Kwon Do.
ANTM Roundup: Jessica
So, doe-eyed, babyfaced Jessica finally went down in flames on ANTM. I'm not surprised, really -- she was really pretty, but didn't seem fully able to bring it in the fashion photography. Of course, Tyra et al. can game the results by picking the shittiest pictures for a given model and then critiquing it, which I'm sure they do (since we don't get to see the prospective pictures, we only get to see what they claim was "their best shot.")
Angelea, this season's villainess, coasted through to the final four (as I knew she would), although surely she should've been on the bottom, if they were actually judging on the photographs. Giant-eyebrowed Raina (kind of like Denise Richards on 'roids and prone to saying the annoying "Oh, my lanta!" Which seems like a Diablo Cody witticism, there) was also on the chopping block, but made it through. Krista, the black, man-faced (even by fashion model standards) anorexic, once again sailed through the competition, which seems to have gone right to her head. The other one, Theresa (? I can't remember her name), the so-called "plus-sized" model (what is she, a size 6?) is the other strong contender for the win -- she and Krista appeared to be Heathering the other contestants a bit.
The stand-out moment in last night's episode had Jessica making tacos (?) by, uh, placing the taco shells atop a toaster -- not sure what she had in mind with that. The taco shells promptly caught fire, and she was at a near-total loss of how to tend to it, eventually half-assedly tossed a wet rag on the flaming tacos. After this, I'm thinking of using "tacos on a toaster" in the same way that people used "snakes on a plane" the other year. Just feels right.
The other contestants gave Jessica grief for that, saying "You're a mom, right? Don't you cook?" and she admitted the her husband did most of the cooking. One of the others asked her "Wait, you're a stay-at-home mom who doesn't cook? What DO you do?" I had flashbacks!
There was a photo shoot at the still-there set of Hobbiton, in New Zealand, which I guess they kept hobbitified in the wake of Lord of the Rings. Weirdly, Angelea was like "All the other girls know what this is, am I like the only person in the world who doesn't?" And I'm thinking "Uh, yeah?"
Anyway, next week is the two-hour finale already, so that's that. My dose of trash television!
Lost In Translation
Okay, I tuned out LOST somewhere in the second season, but this list on SLATE amused me. I still maintain that LOST is the biggest flim-flam perpetuated by television writers and producers on an audience in television history. I thought that when I tuned out, and I think it all the more so these days. Maybe they'll brilliantly pull a rabbit out of their hats, but at this point, they'll need to have a big pile of rabbits to do the trick, is my guess. I imagine them pacing around and brainstorming gimmickry to get them out of the the jams they wrote themselves into.
Also, I'm worried about IRON MAN 2 -- so much cross-marketing has been going on with it, so many ads. I see ads for Audi, for Dr. Pepper, for fast food, ads on bus kiosks, ads on the sides of buses. My rule of thumb is usually when so much attention is paid to marketing, it usually means Hollywood's got a clunker on their hands, and they're busy trying to generate a pre-premiere buzz through mass-marketing. The original IRON MAN was an unexpected hit, and didn't have nearly the marketing, of course. That they're doing so much with this one, I dunno. And having Scarlett Johansson in it seems like a risky move. I've always considered her fairly leaden in any role she plays, and having her as the Black Widow seems like a miscasting to me. Maybe it'll be alright, but I am skeptical. We'll see after opening weekend, whether the turnout nosedives, as it usually does if it's based purely on marketing.
Also, I'm worried about IRON MAN 2 -- so much cross-marketing has been going on with it, so many ads. I see ads for Audi, for Dr. Pepper, for fast food, ads on bus kiosks, ads on the sides of buses. My rule of thumb is usually when so much attention is paid to marketing, it usually means Hollywood's got a clunker on their hands, and they're busy trying to generate a pre-premiere buzz through mass-marketing. The original IRON MAN was an unexpected hit, and didn't have nearly the marketing, of course. That they're doing so much with this one, I dunno. And having Scarlett Johansson in it seems like a risky move. I've always considered her fairly leaden in any role she plays, and having her as the Black Widow seems like a miscasting to me. Maybe it'll be alright, but I am skeptical. We'll see after opening weekend, whether the turnout nosedives, as it usually does if it's based purely on marketing.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Huh.
I saw a coworker crouching in their workstation today. Literally crouching, chair pushed aside. First was a kind of Prince Valiant pose, like a classic lunge position. The other was a crouch.
Chase Seen
Saw an odd thing the other day, while waiting curbside for my bus home: I saw a car chase! There were two vehicles: one was a convertible red BMW driven by two middle-aged men, and their pursuer was in a white Mini Cooper Turbo.
They caught my eye when I saw them sloppy-driving down 60th Street, weaving and zig-zagging. Then the BMW took a hard left (all skidding tires and what-not) and waited at the stop sign, with the Cooper hot on their tail.
The BMW guys were fairly serious in demeanor, weren't laughing it up or anything -- one of them looked like he was huffing and puffing, like he was scared. Not sure WHAT the deal was.
When the traffic let them, the BMW took off, with the Cooper right on them, honking and racing after them. I lost sight of them as they shot off toward Lake Shore Drive. No idea what it was all about.
This older woman was waiting there with me at the stop, and she said "Huh. I thought Mini Cooper drivers were supposed to be all mellow and stuff." and I said "I don't know; I think maybe they're secretly cauldrons of rage or something."
No idea what the heck was going on, but I wish I'd had a camcorder handy to record the weirdness, the stop-go car chase.
They caught my eye when I saw them sloppy-driving down 60th Street, weaving and zig-zagging. Then the BMW took a hard left (all skidding tires and what-not) and waited at the stop sign, with the Cooper hot on their tail.
The BMW guys were fairly serious in demeanor, weren't laughing it up or anything -- one of them looked like he was huffing and puffing, like he was scared. Not sure WHAT the deal was.
When the traffic let them, the BMW took off, with the Cooper right on them, honking and racing after them. I lost sight of them as they shot off toward Lake Shore Drive. No idea what it was all about.
This older woman was waiting there with me at the stop, and she said "Huh. I thought Mini Cooper drivers were supposed to be all mellow and stuff." and I said "I don't know; I think maybe they're secretly cauldrons of rage or something."
No idea what the heck was going on, but I wish I'd had a camcorder handy to record the weirdness, the stop-go car chase.
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