Danger Den

Once I read this book. 

Then I read this book:

Except it had this cover, which seems designed to aid you in associating it with a Murakami novel. 

Not that “Atmospheric Disturbances” is “Murakami-esque.” But there is something wonderfully complimentary about these two novels. It was sort of like if I had watched an episode of “90210” with only Brenda, and she seemed oddly incomplete, but then I watched one with Brenda and her twin brother Brandon, and I realized that, while they were almost humorously NOT alike, by gosh were they ever twins, borne of the same womb, who, in the parallel universe where they were both actors, were indeed banging one another.

It is possible that I could make similar metaphors.

My first instinct would be a food metaphor. Like, “Wind-Up Bird Chronicles is like a hot dog, and Atmospheric Disturbances is like diced jalapeños and ketchup” or “WUBC is like sushi and AD is like ginger and wasabi.” But that would be incorrect. Because one is not the substance and the other the tasty, tasty condiment. It is more that they are echoes of the same thing, but going off in opposite directions.

Let’s say Murakami and Galchen were both given the task of buying Barack Obama an iPad. Murakami would have gone to the mall, stopped to buy some noodles, met a girl with an interesting ear and talked to her about records. Then he would have gone to the bathroom and watched a father speak firmly to his son. This would concern him and he would follow them into a toy shop, where he would swear he saw the father hit the son and then the son walk right through a wall. Disturbed, he would become dissociated from his body temporarily and start thinking about war. Then he would have gone to the Apple store and found they were out of iPads and then gone home. Galchen would go to Borders and buy seven cookies and an orange juice, and would eat the cookies too fast, not realizing that she was getting crumbs all over herself. She would read Consumer Reports and wonder if maybe, maybe she shouldn’t get a Nook, or a Kindle instead. While this is clearly a bad decision, she would provide intensely compelling reasoning that would make you doubt everything you know. Then she would call her penny-pinching uncle, who is crazy but she trusts because he looks like her father. He would further convince her to buy Not an iPad. Nonetheless, she would stumble into the Apple store, her feet autonomous, and Google her uncle and find out something so shocking that she got too distracted to buy the iPad.

Basically, they are both novels about men in search of the wife who has left them. They make you question reality and the idea that two people can ever really know each other. 

Wind-Up Bird Chronicles is disjointed, left untied in a way that makes it sit with you forever. It doesn’t insist on logic, but instead distracts you by creating a totally convincing reality that you feel like you’re hanging out in but is cracking from the outside. Atmospheric Disturbances is the opposite. Reality and the stability of the narrator are questioned from the start, but it insists on logic. It takes the same problem and theme and rigorously examines it. 

Anyway, these are two of the best books I’ve read in my life. Maybe I just like books about men who’s wives left them, because they always end up realizing that they didn’t really know the person at all. these books deal with that idea in a way that is sad but also sort of romantic. Maybe I can only buy into a “love story” when it starts from ground zero.

In pop culture dystopian novels about the future, like “Feed” and anything by George Saunders, people have a curious habit of ending declarative statements with question marks.

Example:

We broke up. But it wasn’t my fault? I was just kind of busy working on myself? Like going to the gym and Breeze Tan? So I didn’t have time to notice that he was on too many antidepressants - like maybe 3 different ones? 

These writers seem to think that our generation has a habit of not being able to commit to our statements. There seem to be other indications of this:

-Constant softening of descriptions with “sort of” and “kinda”

-Over-use of “just” to add a diminutive quality to a statement. 

I just kinda need some time alone to write in my Moleskine.

-Acknowledgement that things “seem” a certain way, rather than “are”

-Acknowledgement of relativity  ”I think” “I feel”

I just feel that this ugly christmas sweater party seems kind of played-out

-Use of quotation marks to denote that you are skeptical about your own use of a term, or about the term being an agreed-on term at all

Ugh, this “organic diet” is really making me broke

So, why is it that we seem so insecure about what we are saying? 

I took a class about semiotics once and it was really boring. I spent most of the time making up codes in my notebook, with which I took notes that I could not decipher come study time. But I remember learning that there is something called a “super-signifier,” a sign (or word) that orders other signs. Now, I might be using the term wrong, but like I said, the class was boring, I’m done with college and if you’re nerdy enough to correct me, you should probably quit college already.

ANYWAY

I was watching movie previews the other day when I went to see “True Grit,” and in one, the bro-y voice-over guy kept saying things were “Awesome!” and it occurred to me that I had been understanding that word wrong all along.

Now, I have railed against the word “awesome” for awhile now. I hate vague, meaningless positive words like “great, solid, stunning” and “awesome” seemed like the most vapid of them all. But despite my hatorade, I could not stop saying it.

It wasn’t until watching that preview that it occurred to me that “awesome” is not like the rest of the cotton candy happy words out there. Instead, it has become a symbol of pride, a revolution against crabby language criticizers like me. Now, when you say “awesome,” you are saying, “Hey college grads who took a class in semiotics and were once newspaper entertainment editors who wouldn’t let people call a movie ‘heartbreaking’ - you can fuck off! I’m going to talk how I want!” 

It’s a symbol against linguistic prescriptiveness, in favor of speech as unbridled speech, and that’s kind of cool. So now I’m going to say “awesome” whenever I want.

5. Toy Story 3

There were probably better movies this year than “Toy Story 3,” but I haven’t seen them. “Blue Valentine,” “The Kids are All Right” - a quick perusal of Important People’s Best Of lists showed that I haven’t seen 90% of the films that dominated this year. Nonetheless, “Toy Story 3” was less-than-objectionable, even good. I avoided seeing this for a long time, thinking, “I don’t know if I saw ‘Toy Story 2,’ so I probably won’t understand this one.” Turns out the narrative arc between the three “Toy Story” movies is not nuanced enough to require having the foggiest memory of the other two. The plot was whole in itself, full of creepy evil toys and dark adult references. I still hate the cowgirl voiced by Joan Cusak, but the cool authoritarian, spazzoid monkey made up for it.

4. Inception

 I wrote a “talking points” review of this movie and it was probably the most popular thing I’ve blogged this year. Here’s an excerpt:

-I think that Christopher Nolan came up with the idea for “Inception” when he was watching “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and that beach house fell down at the end. He was probably like, “Whoa shit! Why can’t this movie be nothing but houses falling down in your mind? Now THAT would be a movie! Now if only someone could mix it with the sweet-ass, slow-mo, anti-gravity bending in ‘The Matrix,’ that would be $$$$$$.”

-While I liked the suspense, part of me kept wondering what “Inception” would have been like if it were more about character-development and emotion. Like if the idea they were planting was less important (a new flavor of Vitamin Water?) and we really zeroed in on Cobb and his wife and the hot business guy and his dad. I would have liked to see that go really Freudian. Less bombs please, we’re talking about the time he walked in on his parents having sex here. 

3. 127 Hours

I was not excited to see this movie. I actually brought a mini wine in order to calm my nerves because I was so sure that I was going to have a nervous breakdown or vomit. For some reason I was sure that this was going to be an arthouse movie about making the audience slowly suffer so that they could brag that they liked it to all their friends and sound avant-garde and smart. But instead of a film where characters tie their shoes for 35 minutes, it would be a guy slowly cutting off his arm and passing out for 2 hours. Turns out I was completely wrong. (It was directed by Danny Boyle after all, not Sam Beckett or anything.) To my surprise, the movie was well-paced and surprisingly funny. They even got rid of Joan of Arcadia right in the beginning. Also, the scene where Rolston craves a soda and pictures humanity’s collective associations with Coca-Cola was downright genius.

And yeah, maybe James Franco is the next Johnny Depp, except he seems to be miscast less often than Johnny Depp. Whenever Johnny Depp is in a role, I’m like “oh, they wanted to make money. It could have been someone more like the character* and not Johnny Depp,” but in all James Franco’s roles he seems like an obvious choice.

*Except for “Edward Scissorhands” and “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape” and maybe some other ones I’m forgetting about. But “Blow,” “Alice in Wonderland,” “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and probably that movie he’s in with Angelina Jolie, he seems miscast. 

2. Black Swan

I saw a preview for this movie right after I had painted a picture of Mary-Kate eating Ashley, and I thought, “This is the movie equivalent of that image.” It takes little girls’ fantasy at 5-years-old - being a famous ballerina - and portrays it eating itself from the inside out in a terrifying, violent, but still beautiful manner. I was sure that this would be The Best Movie of the Year and maybe even my Favorite Movie, a film I’ve not yet discovered although it could be “Clockwork Orange” or “Synecdoche New York.” And yes, the movie was artful, cringeworthy in a good way and kind of darkly sexy, but it wasn’t quite as good as I expected it to be. There was something thin and campy about her transformation, and I found myself wondering if my future children would watch this movie and think it was funny. It seems like the drama might not age in as dignified of a way as it should, mostly due to reliance on illusions and dream sequences and the sad fact that Natalie Portman’s character is, at the last minute, turned into more of a parable than a person. But nonetheless, it was unlike any other movie, super sensational and full of Natalie Portman being both Very, Very Pretty and a Good Actress.

1. The Social Network

The most interesting people in the world are no longer actors. We can now be obsessed with entrepreneurs, coders, scientists and writers. We don’t need films to know who to care about, in part because of sites like Facebook, which provide an avenue other than the silver screen and vapid gossip magazines for people across a widespread geography to have a shared culture. But when there is a movie about someone who created a culture that removed movies from the center of mass media, the universe burps a little, and it’s powerful. It’s like reality magnified by not-reality to prove how interesting reality can be. Promise I’m not stoned.

Here’s my review if you want a better analysis.

The shittiest year in music in some time produced a few decent albums. Here were my top ten:

10. Toro y Moi “Causers of This”

The closest I got to liking chillwave. This album is pretty good booty music.

Best track: “Blessa” 

9. Das Racist “Shut Up, Dude” 

Things shorty says you look like [abridged]: 

 Devendra Banhart

That dude from Japan’s art, you know that dude who did the Kanye album cover?

Egyptian lover

Chubby Jake Gyllenhaal

Osama plus Obama minus the drama

The dude from “The Passion of the Christ”

Bob Weiss

Swiss D’s minus the ice

A gay David Banner on acid

Turtle from “Entourage”

Richard Greco 

Art deco

The gecko from Geico commercials

Dude who cuts her roses 

Cartoon of a dude throwing a harpoon at a whale ‘n shit

Best track: “Shorty Said”

8. Titus Andronicus “The Monitor”

Best Abe Lincoln guest appearance on an album since the future when they go back to the past and make Abe Lincoln and Lil Wayne team up.

 Best track: “ … And Ever”

7. Wavves “King of the Beach”

Nathan Williams fails to totally blow.

6. The Vaselines “Sex with an X”

 Don’t be fooled by the shitty cover design/photography.

Best track: “The Devil’s Inside Me”

5. Best Coast “Crazy for You”

Finally, a pop album about weed and TV and liking your cat. By a girl.

Best track: “When I’m With You”

4. Ariel Pink “Before Today”

I feel like this is Ariel Pink’s “Merriweather Post Pavilion.” Anyone who wasn’t into their lo-fi, take-out pop before can probably find something tuneful to like.

3. Sleigh Bells “Treats”

This album made me invent the term “murdercore.”

2. Das Racist “Sit Down, Man”

When I listen to Das Racist, I feel like the whole world is trapped in a pop culture-y snow globe right in front of me. It’s all there, from “Extreme Home Makeover” (Google the devil but I feel lucky/ Extreme Home Makeover Couldn’t Touch Me) to the Bible (Are you able to give of the flesh like Abel do/ Not able? Cain’ll do). They make society-encompassing connections constantly, like when they lead from a reference to “For Whom the Bell Tolls” into a whole litter of “Saved by the Bell” jokes. Not only that, but they remix beats, nab singers like that chick from Chairlift and redeem them from the crappy iPod commercials that we hated them for. All while making fun of the fashion world and picking on the government for making EBT cards too picky.

 1. Kanye West “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” 

 When the “Runaway” video came out, I watched it and then watched it again, thinking, “Could I write a blog about watching ‘Runaway’ every day?” (Answer: No, but points for inspiring the question.) Not only was the video interesting, it was also excellent marketing. What better to get people excited about your new album with than a cool, sexy, artsy, restrained video that they will immediately associate with all your songs? And the songs turned out to be pretty damn solid. Don’t really feel like reviewing that album though, so I’m gonna go eat a cookie because I have a lot of them.

If you are not in the mood to read much, skip the background and go right to the list.

Awhile ago I bought and read Tao Lin’s novel “Richard Yates” because the characters were named Dakota Fanning/Haley Joel Osment, the cover had a vagina-like seashell in front of a guys’ face and the back of the book looked like a cubic egg. I thought, “This looks marketed at me.” Ryan said something like, “My friend Al hates Tao Lin. He thinks he is shallow, gimmicky hipster scum.” I ignored that, because I tend to like things that people write off as “too hipster,” like Das Racist and my boyfriend (haha), and I ended up giving it something like a 6.5/10. Good writing, stubbornly absent plot development. 

Then I found Tao Lin’s hipster version of McSweeney’s, MuuMuu house, and I realized that Tao Lin is not the first Gmail*-obsessed, vegan shoplifter writer, but one in a constellation of many, all of whom are either copying him or copying one another. This made Tao Lin seem More Important, as if he were, as I suspected, our generation’s Bret Easton Ellis. I had found his Jay McInerneys. 

So I read some of their stuff, a lot of which were lists of Twitter statuses handpicked by fellow depressed, Odwalla-sipping admirers, and his other novel, “Shoplifting from American Apparel.” Again I had the same complaint: stubbornly lazy plot, good writing. But this one I give a 7, because it has stuff about jail, which is an interesting tool for contrast against the bored writery people landscape. 

Anyway, here are the new writing habits of the Tao Lin hipster writing movement:

1. Putting lots of random things in quotes. Quotes make the ‘noun’ you are talking about seem fake, like a ‘product’ of ‘marketing culture’ that you are laughing at. I wont’ get into the ‘psychology’ of ‘hipster irony’ because you could just go read ‘Adbusters,’ a ‘magazine’ that totally ‘sucks.’*

2. Middle fingers to lit teachers

Teachers tell you not to use adverbs because they are weak or something. “You could use a powerful, rock-hard verb,” they say. “Never say, ‘She was happy.’ Say, ‘She guffawed.’ Let the reader figure it out.” But the Tao Linions like to ignore that with their Ultimate Deferred Description of Emotion.

It goes like this:

Becky was at the zoo. She was eating cotton candy and watching a monkey with a bored look on her face.

“Peter,” Becky said without looking at him, “Why did you drink all my Sailor Jerry’s last night?”

“Because Megan was passed out and we had just gotten in a fight about whether or not the phrase ‘coon’s age’ was racist,” he replied with a concerned look on his face.

This construction mocks the “rule” that you have to use fancy verbs to get across how someone is feeling by inferring their emotions in the most straightforward way possible. I don’t mind this because it seems closer to how people actually think. How often do you think to yourself, “Whoa! Is he ever gesticulating!?”

This approach is somewhat passive, admittedly less-than-omniscient. You might say it also accomplishes this:

3. Emotionally impaired, mildly autistic voice

The MuuMuu house writers add a lot of padding to all accounts of observation and consciousness. They are always at arms’ length, even when recounting their own thoughts. 

When I was brushing my teeth, I thought about Koala Yummies and Jesse Ventura, although I don’t know why.

Lin will often write that his character “thinks that they aren’t thinking about anything, really.”

Oftentimes this confused distance and caution in interpreting emotion comes off as mildly autistic, which is coupled by the characters’ frequent chats where they don’t know what to do with themselves or other people, concluding frequently that they are depressed, or as they put it, “fucked.”

Not that I think they are autistic. They’re using that stance as a comment, almost to parody an overly emotional culture. Ok, I’ll give it its own bullet point…

4. Ambivalence about emotions in general

This is definitely the generation that was raised to regard “opening up” as a breakthrough fit for a reward. Between spending their childhoods playing Hungry Hungry Hippos in therapy and watching people get called heroes for losing 100 lbs. and crying on TV, we have realized that revealing our “sincere emotions” gets attention. But that culture has magnified to the point where it’s surrounded by boring, weirdo phonies, and I think we have developed some ambivalence about what, to us, seems like cheap bait for response and sympathy. 

That’s why the hipster lit movement rejects sincere emotions and climactic breakthroughs. Instead, hints of these things bubble out sporadically, clumsily and are glazed over with irony and passivity. When I say the plots are “stubbornly lazy,” I don’t mean that they weren’t stubbornly lazy on purpose. It does achieve something, that being a refusal to use emotions as bait and/or presume that your story merits a breakthrough at all. Do real breakthroughs even exist? How postmodern. Nonetheless, I still don’t think they’ve found something interesting to replace that process with, although I do enjoy the gimmicks, as long as only one person does each one and they don’t all copy one another.

Can’t wait till Lin hits his “Lunar Park” phase and writes something really good.

* This movement promotes a consistently incorrect capitalization of Gmail. As someone who works in marketing (with Google!) and has been a fact-checking editor, this bothers me. Also, society should learn that all Apple products are capitalized like this: iPhone.

* I really do hate Adbusters

Jas: “all you talk about is food and cats.” Jordan: “food and dick and cats.”

“I want that young spring feeling.” -Jordan, talking about how he’d prefer to eat a young person, if eating a human.

“let’s get away from this and go to nature. Do you like nature? Like trees and grass and fish?” -Jordan

 “I kinda have this fantasy if being a biker chick. Maybe in another life.” - Jordan

Jordan, asking about a Hindu temple: “do you guys sell nick-nacks?!”

Jordan, to Andy: is your aunt a down-ass bitch? Or a five-star bitch?

Jordan: Jason let’s get a dog. Then well be real dads.

Jordan, serving shooters on a star of David tray: let’s all get cheesecurd fight drunk!

Jordan: i love the vibe. It’s like drag queen afterlife. [about the kitty cat klub.]

Jordan: “I want Caesar salad … and dogs!”

Site

i really want this

this is an embroidery

yellow isolation tape

I wrote this for the Zeus Jones blog

I recently wrote a post about how to make your writing not about nothing. But now that I have read the leak of Groupon’s secret copywriting guide, I feel like I might have wasted my breath. I’ve mentioned that Groupon emobodies the best practices in copywriting, and now we have their secret Judo patterns of success! But you don’t have to read the actual thing yourself. I’ve gleaned the top lessons just for you. Note: Not safe for work if you have the type of boss that will put coal in your Christmas pie if they catch you laughing excessively. Another note: The following text written in italics is straight from their words.

1. Linguistic devices to use:

Mixed Metaphors - If your eyes are the windows to your soul, your hair is the tunnel to your mind.

Fake History - When strongmen of the past wanted to show their superhuman brawn, they coddled kettlebells or other, potentially stronger strongmen.

Absurd images

Hypothetical worlds

Fake Prophets

Negative Comparisons - Today’s Groupon is for people who love a good massage but hate how, unlike pie, they can’t take any of it home with them.

Sci-fi references

Illogical comparisons – Detoxification is more than drinking herbs, wearing cucumbers and painting Russian nesting dolls.

2. To avoid

-Speaking in the second person. After you startle awake with  your face encrusted to a bowl of vegan cookie dough, you usually take your sleep-eating guilt for a late night lap around the Wal-Mart.

- The imperative. “Eat! Drink! Try our vaccuums.”

-References to hipsters or the ’80s

-Jokes about ligers. Not funny any more.

-Exclamation points

-Superlatives

-Abstractly positive words (i.e. optimize)

-Corporate speak

3. Cleverly substitute names for body parts. Here are a few of my favorite suggestions.

Hands: Michigan silhouettes (use only in Midwest), turkey tracers

Teeth: Mouth bones

Tanning: 3rd-place Olympic Finished Skin, Casper’s wish (Casperation)

Spray Tan: Melanin Marinade

Body: Spine Vase, Brain Marionette, Life-Size Action Figure, Jim Torso & The Four Limbs, Skeleton Space Suit

4. Avoid racism. Duh. Also, avoid offending religious people. Turns out they got in trouble for a whitening joke to the tune of “whiten by an average of eight shades, equivalent to being punched by God twice.”

OK WRITERS, TAKE THESE TIPS AND CHERISH THEM.

Also, is “leaking” the new trend for 2011?