Classifying the unclassifiable.
The Back Story is now The Best Damn Thing, and it lives on Tumblr. Please update your bookmarks and blogrolls if you love me. It’s essentially the same thing, but with more Jersey Shore and Twilight references than before.
Thank you.
Love,
The management.
A large, yellow butterfly flew around my head and then landed on my arm. I carried it to 34th. People stared.
I was at work when it happened, and I oh shit-ed my way through the rest of the day just like everybody else. Anyway, I was trying all week to think of my big Michael Jackson memory, and I don’t really have one, unless you count the debut video of “We Are the World,” which I watched with my parents on a really old TV in our apartment in Queens. It wasn’t the best video ever. This is.
Notice how even his socks sparkle. Did your heart skip a beat at 3:44?
I also remember watching The Michael Jackson Story when it first aired, and being weirdly fascinated by how screwed up his relationship with his father seemed to be. I didn’t understand why he was pushed so much. It’s safe to say that’s the first time I really started thinking about fame and what it does to people.
I know plenty of Music Lovers who talk shit about Pop Music. And then turn around and call Michael the King of Pop like it’s No Big Thing. Maybe that label, to them, isn’t all that great, after all. But hooks like that are earned, not manufactured. He earned all of them. And even though his face was plastic, I adored his crazy jackets, I adored his voice, and I’m very sad he’s gone. He is the only artist whose words I actually believed when he would lean in, smile, and whisper into a microphone, with a child-like, high timbre, that he loved us all, his fans, so much.
Bye, M.J.
I absolutely adore the Observer. Peter Kaplan is so right: He told the Times’s David Carr that, unlike Gawker, the salmon-colored weekly doesn’t recycle or borrow the news–they create it! Their reporters are incredible and I aspire to their wit and skill and prowess and not that they’re going anywhere or anything, but I really do wish Kaplan wasn’t leaving. I agree with one of his former underlings, now at Vanity Fair: not having him at the top of a masthead is just WEIRD. I mean, this technically shouldn’t be as depressing as a magazine folding. He even has a new job, at Conde Nast Traveler! But then why do I feel so sad?
“I had a little newspaper in New York City! You can’t beat that. No matter who you are,” he mused. “That’s as good as it gets. It’s better to have a little newspaper in New York City than a big newspaper in New York City. Because then you only have to report and write for the people you care about. And nobody else.”
That’s why.
I’ve been working. A lot. And often I get in at midnight and read a lot of posts on web sites written by Married Mormons who are really cute and adorable and perfect for each other. Whoever has been fighting the good fight against glossy women’s magazines for making girls feel bad about themselves should probably turn their attention to these blogs, immediately. Self-Esteem 101, Chapter 2: The Love Addiction.
It’s sort of hilarious that the guys who have contacted me, lately, pretend to be curious about how I’ve been and then, ever so casually (they think!) mention some fantasmaglorious thing (they think!) they want to see featured in the pages of the publication that employs me.
New thing to worry about: Do you like me for me or my magazine? (Can easily be retooled to suit your own emotional insecurities, e.g. do you like me for me or my enormous rack; do you like me for me or my stable and ever-growing trust fund, etc.) I’m now someone in danger of being taken advantage of! Movin’ on up, inch by inch in the “creative underclass.” Note the scare quotes!
And yes, this is a dating blog now. Maybe.
I’m going AFK for an as-yet-to-be-determined length of time.
However, my inner fangirl shrieked for nearly fifteen minutes straight last week, when I got to interview Josh Schwartz, the lovely man behind Gossip Girl and The O.C. It’s up on the Village Voice.com.
See ya on the other side, I hope…
Catching up on stuff I’ve been writing…when I’m not griping about boys, that is:
I interviewed Jon Friedman, created of the Rejection Show and author of Rejected:Tales of the Failed, Dumped, and Canceled for Time Out New York, and got him to school me on how to make a comeback after getting snubbed, using some beautiful pop-culture losers as inspiration. I also put together a quiz and a comprehensive guide to Interweb memes for the same issue of Time Out. Take it and tell me how much you love my favorite viral phenomenon. You know which one it is!
I recapped Episode Eight, Episode Nine, and Episode 10, and Episode 11 of The Real World: Brooklyn for the Village Voice. I wasn’t able to finish out the season because, happily, Time Out owns me full-time, now, but I’ll still be watching–and loathing–Chetubular the Morminator. He’s forever, like diamonds. Except he’s made of hell-fire and torment and coke-bottle glasses fashioned in the Devil’s workshop. Also, he wears too much lilac.
I interviewed author, illustrator, Times art director, and the current holder of the New Yorker Whose Life I Wish I Had title, Leanne Shapton, for this week’s Phoenix. This woman is amazing, and Brad Pitt and Natalie Portman literally fought in a BIDDING WAR over the rights and the opportunity to star in the movie adaptation of her new book, Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry. It’s obvious why: the novel is thoughtful, sensitive, and one of my favorites of the year so far. Not surprisingly, it’s about relationships. And their death.
I guess this is sort of a dating blog after all. Effing deal with it. Back to work!
him: i really think the guy thing will be more than fine
you’re going to be plenty busy and you’re just going to meet someone
seeing a show
doing a review
whenever
and he’ll be like joss whedon
but better looking
and not suddenly over the hill
me: what else will he be like?
him: well…
he’ll be tall and skinny
and a former emo boy gone good
me: anything else?
him: his parents will be dead but he’ll have a cool brother in san francisco
me: why are his parents dead?
him: to make your life easier
and because my friend had her engagement abruptly end because his mother said something disparaging
me: that’s awful
him: it’s not great
me: i want to go spend vast amounts of money on clothes
him: me, too
me: sometimes a new shirt makes me feel happy for a week
him: i get that
me: i’d rather have a boyfriend than a new shirt, though
him: depends on the bf
and the shirt
me: if he’s as you described, i’d take the bf
his parents can be alive, so long as they’re nice
him: stop boyfriend dreaming and write!
me: that’s what jane austen would have told me to do
Adriane Quinlan’s Observer essay about spending one week without technology invented before the year of her birth, 1985, really makes me wish I could experience this, too:
I think of the famous E. B. White line, “No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.” And maybe this is what I’ve been experiencing all week—making a friend on the train, dragging an acquaintance out to get drunk in Astoria, where we become legitimate friends. But also, I am seeing people less. I am more neighborhood- and family-focused. I see less, more crisply.
I start a full-time gig at Time Out New York next week. There’s no way I can ever try this now. The web is my crack and my pleasure and my pain. So long, life!
The one time I half-attempted it, I couldn’t go longer than a day.
Some weeks pass where I feel pleasantly stretched to my hypertube limits, as if I’m full on a really delicious meal; I’m absorbing everything, all the nutritious vitamins and some guilty pleasures, too. I get the sense that I’m a functioning, necessary cog in something bigger. What I learn is incorporated into what I write, making my words a part of the cultural conversation, and it’s good and right and the sentences just trip off my fingers, the blank pages fill up, and I’m so excited to see what else is out there so I can say more and do more.
Other days I can’t remember what the Treasury secretary’s name is or why we’re all so angry at A.I.G., or even why anyone cares about Jennifer Aniston not being married yet. Deadlines loom, but there’s so much out there to look for, so many more people I could be talking to, before I feel prepared to distill it down to a story. And it makes me so frustrated, sometimes, just to look at home pages refresh themselves. Why won’t they just give me a break? When I read Gawker, now, I remember how witty and great it used to be, but that was back when it didn’t run all day and all night long, like a 24-hour Duane Reade. And when twelve posts a day were more than enough. Now you’re barely in the game if you blog eight. I try to say I’ll just stick to what I love, things like the Observer, my favorite street-style blogs, the New Yorker, the Times in full, that sort of thing. But I can’t.
There is a definite pressure to keep up with everything, and I’m both too proud and too afraid to count the number of magazines, newspapers, and blogs I read online every single day, every single week, without fail. I feel guilty, occasionally, when I skim a post, or go out for the night without having at least looked over each front-page Times story. I feel disappointed in myself when I realize I’m totally out of the loop about the new Heathers musical, or some such thing. But! I feel even guiltier when I stare at the list of books I want to read, and notice that I’m checking them off so much slower than I used to. (Just let me read this one article and then I’ll sit down with some tea and my book! Four hours later…)
The fact is, I feel like I’m not doing my job if I don’t know what’s happening, all the time. I have to schedule non-Internet time in just so I stay human and real and myself.
Lately I’ve been thinking seriously about switching to a cell that will give me Internet access, but now, I truly think that would be the end of me. If I can’t stay off the keyboard, my Zach Morris mobile telephone might just be my one haven. On the subway I can still read a book. While I’m waiting for someone to meet me, I can still people-watch. When I’m upset and wandering around the city, I’ll have far less of an inclination to check the Facebook status of some guy, because it would require going to the public library or the Apple store, or grabbing some friend’s iPhone and having to explain why. This way, I’ll have to wait until I get home and turn on my laptop to log on and stare and pine, then read a thousand other things before I retreat back to the same headspace I was in before. Or not. Because if I’m lucky — maybe even the same kind of New York lucky E.B. White was talking about — I will have forgotten about him by the time I sit down.
Colin Meloy, do you have to be such a drama-queen about EVERYTHING? Seventeen tracks of this:
The Hazards Of Love tells the tale of a woman named Margaret who is ravaged by a shape-shifting animal; her lover, William; a forest queen; and a cold-blooded, lascivious rake, who recounts with spine-tingling ease how he came “to be living so easy and free.”
Is it wrong that I hate it on principle? I’m listening to it right now, though, and it’s not bad. Not at all. IF you ignore lyrics like “I’ll lay you down on the clover bed/the stars a roof above our heads.” Eww. It’s like tales of hobbit fornication or something!
The NPR junkies will cream themselves.