I go to and fro, and occasionally suffer from bouts of self-consciousness re: robotic tronic. Abandonment, negligence, reckless emoting, I plead guilty on all counts. Going home over the weekend I had to face the reality of a runaway cat. My mom thinks Jaws may have been eaten by an owl. Nature is both bloody and cruel.

Ladies and gentlemen: my life's work, in the NY Times.
Look. So depressing.

"Buying Your Way Into Brown = Out, Unfamiliarity With Household Appliances = In"
Fuck.

Another Serendipitous Occasion

Last week on Friendster, out of simple nostalgia, I put Opus the penguin, Bill the cat and Steve Dallas, attorney at law in the "Who I want to meet" section. I never expected Berkeley Breathed to respond. I figured he was probably liberating chinchillas with PETA. But Opus has indeed returned. Not Bloom County, just Opus, but I can still cross my fingers. I think I read the books about 10 times. Eventually I moved on to young adult fiction (a genre elaborated strictly for the enjoyment of the last three girls in 8th grade to need a bra), but it still comes up in my head all the time. I actually just quoted it in an e-mail last night. Solon, the term "pinko punk" is not my own.

It's like when Richard Dreyfuss started carving Devil's Tower out of his mashed potatoes.

Dead squirrels and homicidal elephants have played prominent roles in some of my playwriting. At work today, one of the designers was shuffling through some photos of pieces by Maurizio Cattelan. I was floored.

Not Afraid of Love

Bidibidobidiboo (it is hard to tell in this image, but the squirrel has commited suicide)

Can't get a job?

Yes. That sucks. I can't either. But now, via Mike-D, we can see how the pros do it.

"Let me introduce myself... My full name is Svetlana A. Goncharova, of course, it sounds rather pompous for a girl of my age, so my friends call me Sveta. I was born on the 22-nd of February, 1980 in Kiev, Ukraine..."

Let Sveta teach you. Let Sveta teach us all.

I love when my friends are famous

Elana once told me she was going to create an 'independent media empire'. Now her article is mentioned on gawker.com, part of what the NY Times recently termed a 'web media empire.' Read Elana's article on cool people here where subjects such as intergenerational mingling and inspirational crayon centers are tackled with glee. Elana's empire vs. Nick Denton's is like Hannibal vs. Scipio. Place your bets. And Elana, if I really did fuck Anna Wintour, would it still be ironic if I wore the t-shirt?

I know I talk about Nathalie all the time, but now I have been legitimized by The Washington Post's Jennifer Howard. I'm not sure when Nathalie got the name Chica, I think it might be a misinterpretation of Chicha but The Washington Post! That means if Katherine Graham weren't dead she might read Nathalie's blog!!

"What, you've never heard of Chica, Terry and Choire? Let me introduce you, in order, to the up-and-coming blogger behind Cup of Chicha (www.nchicha.com/cupofchicha/); Wall Street Journal drama critic Terry Teachout, who moonlights as a blogger with his site About Last Night (www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/); and ur-New York media blog Gawker.com and its editor, Choire Sicha, who maintains his own blog at www.choiresicha.com. I only know this because I've been reading these sites long enough to get a feel for the usual suspects. Otherwise I'd have no clue either. And I'm not sure why I should want to."

Because Ms. Howard, they are clever and funny, rather than an annoying player hater like yourself. Read more here.

Humbled, Dismayed

"Nicky Hilton Defends Sister Paris In Haiku

by Nicky Hilton

Um Like Whatever,
People are just like haters-
Totally jealous."

From D-Nasty's blog, whose writing is the best thing that's happened this November. Can anyone tell me this person's real name? Obviously not Moses Herzog. Read everything, but especially read "Eros and Thanatos in L'affair Hilton," by Bergmann Endresson, "Noted Film Critic, Swede." I sort of felt like quitting this game after I read it. Or at least obliterating all first-person references.

Agora meu nome e Ze Pequeno, porra!*

I met this Brazilian photographer who goes by the singular name of Cale at a party a couple of weeks ago. I finally got around to looking at his web site, and his photos of Cidade de Deus (as well as his portraits of soap opera stars) are well done. He also has a little summary of MV Bill's spat with the directors of City of God, one that Katia Lund said was more motivated by Bill being a little cranky that he wasn't cast in the role of Ze Pequeno. It really doesn't matter though because it seems like his publicity brought attention to the real issue at hand, which is that even though the film was so successful worldwide Cidade de Deus is still lacking the infrastructure (plumbing, electricity, clean water) that even a favela like Rocinha has more of. Not to mention that a part of the development was built on a swamp and the foundation is slowly sinking. And that's not even bringing the Comando Vermelho into the picture.
To read more and look at photos of Mel Lisboa go here. There's a nice photo of Bill (who still has my copy of Ready To Die) with Fernanda Abreu who unfortunately isn't wearing the outfit of buckles she had on at her concert.

*I don't know how to type accent marks on Blogger. Apologies to proofreaders.

I've sunk too deeply into the velvet furniture.

I've read The Onion compilation and almost every magazine at the post-production facility. I'm a quarter of the way into David Hockney's "The Way I See It" and I can't concentrate anymore. There are pool and fooseball tables, but no-one to play with. There is a strange robotic coffee machine that's a sleek variation on the old hot chocolate vending machines from the days when I went to ice skating competitions. But even the novelty of pressing a button and witnessing computerized coffee can't last forever.

The world of advertising post-production is one of office waterfalls and overflowing bowls of candy. The i-mac I am using rests on a desk of warm red wood. My chair seems to be made out of a bewildering arrangement of rattan, leather and bamboo. There are q-tips, contact solution and hair spray in the bathroom, along with the any brand of tampon you might possibly wish for. Menus are suddenly placed in front of me with the prices erased, as eager assistants hover around to take my order on notepads. The notes are then handed off to other assistants, whose designated task is to call restaurants. Last night I was suddenly confronted with a large platter of sashimi and quality Dutch beer, bathed in the blue light of monitors. I was handed chopsticks and a fine linen napkin. "Eat," someone whispered soothingly from the sponge-painted walls. The computer that we did the color correct on was like the motherboard of the starship enterprise. Only New York magazine's article on gay couples with children has given me hope, followed by an emotional plummet as I read an article on The Strokes in Rolling Stone. I am considering defecating on the plush oriental rugs, just to assure myself that I am still human. The small statue of a cow resting next to me, its paint strategically weathered and cracked, silently mouths the word "No."

On Martin Amis and Yellow Dog...

"This is millennialism in high ironical style, something that the grave Amis of Einstein’s Monsters might have hated—and it seems to me a symptom of the gated imperialism of the British literary world. The white guys are for high irony—haughty, diagnostic, dismissive, politically indifferent—while the heartfelt stuff is presumed the province of immigrants and minorities. Thus, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth is hailed as an emotive epic of immigration and assimilation, despite the stylistic, schematic and substantive debt it owes Amis. Meanwhile, D.B.C. Pierre’s Booker Prize-winning Vernon God Little receives praise not for being the violent, ballsy scream of a book it is, but instead as insightful, heady satire, which it isn’t.

Amis once said that his Britain was living through something of an anti-climax: that Britons had their revolution and then they got on with it. Amis, however, has stuck with his eschatology. He is a millennialist who knows the world is ending in the way that only the once-ascoted, rather princely son of a booze-swilling cynic can know the world is ending (that is, with a snarky laugh). With Yellow Dog, his style—gluttonous, didactic—is going out like imperialism. He’s not done, just repeating himself, and rather indecently."

My friend Dave was fated to share two out of three names with David Foster Wallace and two out of two names with baseball player/autobiographer David Wells. He has three names, one hyphen. I leave the rest to your own ingenuity.

Dave made it his task in recent months to read the complete works of Martin Amis. For those of us who have been simultaneously awed and disaffected by Amis, Dave has now compiled a public analysis of this very personal undertaking via the popular medium of a College Hill Independent book review.

For further exposure to excellent descriptives like "once-ascoted" go here.

This is the birthday song; it is not very long.

I've been so shitty on the upkeep around here. I had to work long hours last week and this weekend on a commercial, casting child actors and discussing logistics with pot-bellied pig trainers who fax me pictures of small piglets wearing dresses, lifting one leg in the air or carrying batons in their mouths. ("She's even been on Letterman!") Both the child actors and the piggies elicit a similar response of adoration/guilt for exploiting the helpless. Parents of child actors and piggie trainers are suspiciously similar in behavior. Nellie and Hammy (those are the pigs) will get stubborn if they work more than eight hours. I'm worried most of the children at the audition were actually fat-cheeked robots like Haley Joel Osmond in A.I. which I'm starting to think was really a much better movie than I originally thought, given its value as an expose into the murky underworld of child actor robotics. Probably spelled wrong. Harry Joel Oswald? I get confused with Haley Mills and the Osmonds and Lee Harvey Oswald. I prefer not to discuss it. It's a wicked world.

Also it seems like everybody's birthdays are all at once. So: Martin, Elana and Louis: I got good and drunky at your parties with their cupcakes and sleeping pills and high-heel hazardous balconies. I weep profusely with love for you all. Ted and Nathalie: I'd like to teach the world to sing with you. Rebecca: We're not having a "quiet dinner with close friends."

��The final stand-off in Matrix #3 was suspiciously similar to Ursula the Sea Witch's last writhing confrontation with the Little Mermaid. I think I draw a great deal of my creative inspiration from that film (as was pointed out to me upon the completion of my senior writing thingy-do at Brown.) Why shouldn't the Wachowski brothers? You don't think "Part of That World" didn't influence the sentiment of longing felt by many in Zion?

We're hysterical, Freud says bring on the vibrators

I'm going to complain now, at great length (sorry) and supported through ample quotation, about an annoying tendency in this week's New Yorker.

It first manifests itself in an article by Virginia Heffernan about Tina Fey. The first woman to hold the position of head writer at Saturday night live is first profiled as a critical loner, her humor originating from the observatory powers of the outsider:

"Her [Fey's] sense of humor, however, didn’t make her cool. Instead, she was a straight-A student who packed her schedule with extracurricular activities, including the newspaper and choir. She has a soft but precise singing voice."

And here:
"“She’s pretty monastic at times,” Amy Poehler told me. “She’s not the first girl to belly-flop into the pool at the pool party. She watches everybody else’s flops and then writes a play about it.”"

Then we see Fey as a ball-busting hardliner, as in this quote:
"Nearly all Fey’s colleagues mentioned her ability to be mean and disarming at the same time. I heard her humor variously described as “hard-edged,” “vicious,” and “cruel.”"

And then (oh thank god we thought she was a cold-hearted bitch) we have this:
"While I was sitting with Fey one afternoon in a café on Broadway, she admitted that she chronically prepares for the worst, in part by keeping zingers close at hand. But it’s excessive, she realized: “No one’s really coming at you.” She had been reflecting on current events, and I expected to hear her customary tartness, but her voice faltered, and tears slipped down her cheeks..."

Later on in the same issue, in the story on the Wall Street Journal by Ken Auletta, we are presented with a similar female-in-position-of-power with Karen Elliot House, publisher of the WSJ.

Once again we have someone who was an outsider:
“I was fortunate—though I didn’t think so at the time—to have a father who taught us to go alone because he wouldn’t let us ‘go along.’”

And then, wow surprise, she's tough cookie also, as shown here:
"“She organized her territory and her personnel and got things done, in my mind more effectively and more forcefully than her predecessors,” Phillips said, adding that, under House, the Journal in Asia and Europe became profitable. At the same time, he acknowledged that she could be “brusque”..."

Or here:
"“People tend to describe me as ‘tough,’” House told me. “I don’t think I’m tough. I think I’m demanding.”"

But oh wait, no... is she crying?:
"Then there was the moment when Karen Elliott House cried. At dinner, House spoke, as she had at Boston University, about the importance of independence, of reporters avoiding the press pack. Then she talked about her pride in the newspaper, and her voice broke and tears filled her eyes. “We all looked at her and were befuddled, and silently pleaded, ‘Don’t cry, girl!’” one female editor recalled. Others remembered that she had cried during the newsroom announcement last spring that the Journal had won a Pulitzer. It’s a meaningless tic, Paul Steiger insists. “It’s like she scratched her ear,” he says. “She doesn’t lose focus.” (House cried on nine occasions during our two interviews. Once, she was describing Steiger, and when I asked why she was crying she struggled to regain her composure and said, “Partly it’s because Steiger is a nice guy.” Then she choked up again.)"

As someone who tends to shed tears in times of stress, this makes me a little annoyed, just because both articles follow the exact same narrative trajectory with regard to the female in question: Outsider, Intimidator, and then, as demonstrated by weeping, Human. The crying becomes both Fey's and House's redeeming quality. Now we've all seen someone like Bill Clinton get weepy on us, but for him everybody chuckles, "Oh Bill, he's such a ham." With Fey and House, the mention of their crying forms a turning point in the whole article, ("And then there was the moment when Karen Elliot House cried"). Heffernan and Auletta don't downplay the womens' myriad accomplishments or their intelligence, but in both of these there is an underlying insinuation of I-told-you-so that's rather maddening, like the goal of the article, twice in one issue, was to find some point of weakness and feast vampirically upon it. As if, in finding evidence of a breaking point, the authors reassure us that everything is in order after all. No need to worry.