?!

Shane Oman from Mean Girls is now Mike on Homeland.

What!?!

I love it when bit players get to show their stuff years later. Also, I hope Mike and Jessica make it work. Brody is the worst.

Melissa's Wedding

My friend Melissa got married back in August, in beauteous Estes Park, Colorado. I forgot to take pictures but recently went through her photographer's slideshow. I think anyone looking at it would have the same thought stream: "Lovely photo... lovely photo... lovely photo... Melissa's friends from the home... lovely photo... fin."

It was really fun.

Grudging Props to Netflix

Their self-contained marketing campaign for Arrested Development is pretty clever.

The End of Courtship or Whatever

According to this this lightly reported Times piece, romance is dead and we should all go home. I don't know, though:

After an evening when [Lindsay, a 25-year-old online marketing manager] exchanged flirtatious glances with a bouncer at a Williamsburg nightclub, the bouncer invited her and her friends back to his apartment for whiskey and boxed macaroni and cheese. When she agreed, he gamely hoisted her over his shoulders, and, she recalled, “carried me home, my girlfriends and his bros in tow, where we danced around a tiny apartment to some MGMT and Ratatat remixes.”

Am I supposed to bemoan something here? That sounds FUN.

One Man's Trash...

How did she even get in there?

This is why I hate throwing out boxes.

PSA

Cashmere sweater dress from J. Crew, currently $99.99 (in red) plus 30% off at jcrew.com.

You can buy a cashmere dress for seventy dollars, is what I'm saying. SEVENTY DOLLARS. I already have one, and can vouch for its cashmere dress-ness. Buy two.

Some Books I Read In 2012, part two

Where'd You Go, Bernadette
by Maria Semple

This book is deceptive. It's easy to read and has a cartoon on the cover, so you might think it's a beach book for the lit-unsavvy, but my heavens, that is not the case. Maria Semple is a former television writer - think Arrested Development - who turned to novels a few years ago, and wrote this one as a gentle satire of her adopted city, Seattle.

It's so much more than satire, though. The titular Bernadette has withdrawn into her falling-apart home, and eventually disappears. The book is a series of primary documents assembled by her brilliant teenage daughter, Bee, in an attempt to figure out how and why she left. There are e-mails between Bernadette and her virtual assistant in India, emergency room bills for her neighbor, FBI files, academic articles, and TED-talk related blog posts, all punctuated by Bee's clarifying and very funny commentary. The story unfolds slowly but surely, just enough at a time. I really had no idea where the F Bernadette had gone by the end, and I really, really wanted to find out. I've been thinking about the novel a lot.

The American Girl doll above is dressed up as Bernadette. Dark glasses, chic scarf, fishing vest.

You should go read it.

Girls

A few months back, I was feeling restless and asked my friend CK to give me writing assignments. That practice led me to writing for Character Grades, which has been great fun - it's nice to have a deadline, and even though it's a small site, way more people are going to read my thoughts on Lord Grantham there than here.

I figured I'd repost one of my CK writing assignments here, though, in honor of Girls's premiere on Sunday. It was challenging, because with so, so much written about Girls in its first season, I wasn't sure there was anything left to say.

Also, an aside: Allison Williams (Marnie on the show) is the sister of one of my brother's college friends. When Matt graduated and was looking for work in the city, ideally in tv, the brother suggested he reach out to her. This was at a time when basically every contact he tried brushed him off, but Allison responded immediately, invited him to lunch, introduced him to her boyfriend (who founded CollegeHumor) and set him up with friends who needed help shooting a music video. There was nothing in it for her, but she was incredibly nice to him at at time when he really needed it, so I don't care if she's eventually photographed in a fur-lined Nazi costume: I am a fan for life.
_______________________________

For or against: Lena Dunham's Girls (things to think about, the dialogue it creates with your own experiences in new York as a young 20 something, it’s critical success, the various backlashes, are you inspired to create or intimidated to go out of the city, etc etc)

_______________________________

I am for Girls, the HBO show from writer/director/actress Lena Dunham. I appreciate it. On some level, I’m grateful for it. I think that Lena Dunham is talented, her point of view is weirder than it seems, and she’s apt at expressing it. And frankly, I think it’s pretty cool that she incited so much discourse at the age of 25.

But let’s discuss that weirder-than-it-seems POV. The first promo campaign for Girls had a great tagline, “Living the dream. One mistake at a time,” and a breezy, indie-dance music trailer full of pith and hapless cuteness. Lena looks up at her guy under horribly drawn-on eyebrows! Allison Williams pushes her way through a stylish, crowded party! Jemima Kirke oozes charisma, and Zosia Mamet is thrown back on a bed: Girls looked like a bit of a romp. So when the show, which is actually quite specific and strange, premiered, there was surprise. This New York that Hannah and her friends inhabit didn’t look familiar to me. The behavior didn’t look familiar, either. “Who eats a cupcake in the shower?” my mother asked. “Is that a thing?” While I’m a little older than the girls of Girls, I could tell her with absolute confidence, “no.”

But here’s the thing: maybe Lena Dunham knows people who eat shower cupcakes. Maybe she does it herself. Or maybe she just thought it was an interesting detail about her character, Hannah Horvath, that communicates her inability to enjoy things in a socially normal way, or to express the dichotomy of both eating a cupcake in a secret place (food shame), in front of her roommate and best friend (badge of weirdness: look at my food shame!). These details are fun to unpack – they show us how a woman weaned on Sex and the City might take a New York-ism so co-opted as the cupcake and incorporate it into her sad little life. Hannah, I feel, doesn’t think she deserves to eat cupcakes out in the open. Not until she has a column in the New York Star.

Then there are Hannah’s aspirations. As Girls begins, Hannah has been living off her parents for two years while tinkering at a book of personal essays. At no point do we see Hannah actually working on this book, or doing anything that might provide the book with subject matter (although Midnight Snack is a great title). While Girls gives us no real sense of Hannah’s talent at writing, it does show us, clearly, that she has no idea what a working writer does. She doesn’t pitch editors, cold call, network, pound out listicles for AOL, or sit in quiet places with her laptop, writing. When her college nemesis publishes a memoir, she doesn’t make like a normal person and kiss that frenemy’s ass to get an in with her agent. Hannah has no hustle. This is understandable at the start of the series - her parents have been enabling her, and it’s high-horsey to get mad at her for accepting their cash - but is maddening at the season’s end. Hannah doesn’t know that she has no material, and no one, in even the gentlest way, is suggesting that this project is a disaster.

Then there’s the sex: a less fun detail to unpack. Hannah has lots of stilted, experimental, unloving sex with her kind-of boyfriend Adam, and I share her gynecologist’s concern at the relationship. He is an asshole, and, in the words of Tess Lynch, looks like he’s wearing a muscle sweatshirt made of his own skin. Adam gets some layers as the show goes on, but after five episodes of pure dickery, an AA membership and footie pajamas do not a charmer make. Hannah’s refusal to move in with Adam in the season finale might be her sole bit of growth over the season. As she wishy-washily explains that she found another roommate, I saw her listen to her gut – knowing that deep down, moving in would be a bad idea – for the first time in months. While Adam flipped out and she ended up getting robbed on the train, I still hope it felt good the next day.

Sexually, the other girls have similarly unenviable experiences: Jessa bangs her ex out of paranoia that he might be moving on, Marnie dumps her boyfriend midcoitus, Jessa and Marnie narrowly run out on a threesome with Williamsburg’s biggest douchebag, and it takes Shoshanna a full ten episodes to find a guy who’ll fuck a virgin. There’s exactly one sex scene in that displays mutual affection and genuine heat, and it’s between Hannah’s parents. Sidebar: Becky Ann Baker, thank you for showing us your middle-aged tits. They are fantastic. I am no longer afraid of age.

Finally, friendship, Girls’s forte. Hannah and Marnie’s fight in episode nine is the most realistic female fight I’ve seen in media. Allison Williams’s Marnie manages to start things by declining to bash Hannah’s memoir-publishing nemesis and throwing away old clothes - in other words, by doing not much. It’s passive aggressive to the tilt, and neither character is wrong, but things quickly escalate to the point of Marnie moving out, and it takes seven agonizing minutes. I haven’t had a fight like this in a while, but I have had it, and the scene made me profoundly uncomfortable. This wasn’t like the scenes with Hannah and Adam, which made me pray that I never have a daughter, or the scenes with Hannah and her parents, which made me wonder why anyone has children. This was the scene where I saw myself, and it wasn’t pretty. It was the moment I decided to be in the pro-Girls camp. Sure, it was funny when Hannah confronted her now-gay ex-boyfriend and his new “fruity little voice,” but lots of things make me laugh. The Fight was a scene I hoped no one else was watching.

Tiny Furniture, Lena Dunham’s first movie that made Girls possible, tells an even smaller and more specific story. The sex is just as bad; the ennui just as lethargic; the kids even more dependent on a family they’d prefer to leave behind. I appreciated Tiny Furniture more than I enjoyed it – my thoughts drifted towards Facebook as I watched, but I still liked thinking and talking about the film the next day.  I admired Dunham’s honesty and unsparing portrayal of someone like her, ensconced in privilege and wrapped up in her own talent. I see why Judd Apatow decided, twenty minutes into watching the DVD, that he had to meet this girl and work with her. Mostly, I look forward to Girls, season two. People can grow up a lot between the ages of 25 and 26, and I hope that Hannah is one of them.

In any case, I have to like Lena Dunham. Nora Ephron loved her, and Nora knows everything.

And It Begins

I almost titled this post "Baby Time" and then realized that sounded like a pregnancy announcement. It is not. But, a bunch of my friends are having kids. Facebook has turned into a parade of "BABY DRALLMEYEROWITZ is HERE!!!!!!!" and "two months and counting!!!!" status updates, punctuated by soft-focus ultrasounds.

My friend Erinn is due any day now. Here we are at her baby shower a few months ago:

Can you tell which one is six months pregnant? Did it at least take you a minute? (She's in the polka dots; the one who looks ever so slightly bloated). Sweet jebus. Life is not fair.

Haha

"Its top ticket price of $100 is a new Broadway high."

- choice quote from The Big Book of Broadway Musicals Dan got me for Christmas.

Someone knows what I like.

Sushi of Gari

Every so often, Dan and I like to treat ourselves to omakase at Sushi of Gari. Say every eighteen months or so (er... it's expensive). If you've never experienced omakase, save your pennies and do it. You receive sushi from the chef piece by piece, and if they're doing it right, you go through the entire meal with a body buzz.

Sashimi (including my favorites, sea urchin and sweet shrimp):

Something delicious:

Some delicious clam thing:

Red tuna with tofu sauce (incredible):

Salmon with blistered tomato - strange, but it works:

A jewel box of tartare:

Yet another piece that made us swoon (mackerel? I forget. It's shiso and sea urchin on top):

Yeah. Gari knows what he's doing.

Downton Returns

When Mary got engaged, it was the crux of the Christmas special and two nations fell to the floor with joy. Edith getting engaged didn’t even make it into my recap.

I've been writing about tv shows at a website called Character Grades, so if you'd like to read some picture-laden, very wordy, character-by-character breakdowns of Boardwalk Empire, American Horror Story, or Downton Abbey, check it out. This week's Downton premiere was recapped in Katie's kitchen in New Orleans. I went down for her baby shower. MORE TO COME.

Advice to Youth

I wrote this post last May and forgot to post it. Maybe a college student graduating mid-year would find it useful? I don't know.
____________________________

Dan graduated from business school yesterday.

If you're thinking of attending grad school, b-school is The Way To Go.  For two years you go to parties, assiduously develop contacts with people from Europe, South America, and Asia, drink a lot, go out for fancy dinners, travel the world over long winter, spring, and summer breaks, attend classes for which you only nominally receive grades, and finance it all by taking on crazy loans.  In between all this you interview for sweet jobs.  I, personally, had one-on-one meetings with media titans (seriously: Jeff Zucker gave me advice on my resume), traveled with Dan's cluster to Colorado, Costa Rica, and South Africa, and joined Cluster F's post-grad book club, and I wasn't even enrolled.  It's way more fun than law school, and afterwards, you don't have to go through the disillusionment of working at a law firm.  Yay!

♫ Large head in a little haa-aaat. ♫

Around this year, every time, I think about the full-blown panic I felt at my own college graduation.  I loved my Gothic Wonderland campus. I understood it. If I wanted to mount a production of Christopher Durang's Beyond Therapy, or inform a couple of thousand of people of my opinions on the Iraq war, I found the appropriate avenue and did it. I did not understand the real world, but I did have the vague idea that adults Out There, who were not paid to care about me, would not find me as impressive or interesting as the adults In Here, and would not want to chat with me about twentieth century American drama, or be interested in reading my thoughts on Shakespeare after 1600. This was correct.

So here is my advice to aimless, overeducated, paralyzed youth. If you already have a great job lined up, just go and enjoy your summer.

• Make a list of your strengths and skills. Make it detailed. Go through that list and star all of the skills you enjoy using.
• Make a separate list of every career that uses those skills. Be thorough.
• Rank those careers.
• Congratulations! You now have a career path.

That sequence might sound silly, but it's what made me move to Los Angeles (skills I possessed and enjoyed using: writing and entertaining. Corresponding career: television writing). While I didn't end up in the career I originally pursued, it gave me a start.

Some less tangible advice:

• Let go of fear. It's useless.
• Make sure you have health insurance.
• Don't be shy about living on couches and asking for favors. If people offer help, accept it.
• Keep in touch with your old friends, but follow up on making new ones.
• Some people find their career at 22, but most people don't. It's okay to be in the majority.
• If all else fails, there's always the Peace Corps.

Christmas

Christmas 2012 was a raging success. It's probably all because of the ornament Mom won at her annual white elephant party:

Anyway, the weekend started with a family trip to the 24th annual production of A Christmas Carol at the Chatham Community Players (um, not to brag or anything, but I totally played Cratchit Child #3 in the 1995 production), followed by dinner. Then we came home and watched March of the Wooden Soldiers, which riveted everyone.

It was a BYO restaurant, ok? What else did you expect?

I amused myself by taking a million pictures of Marty. It might seem ridiculous to take so many photos of one cat, but when he poses like this, what else am I supposed to do?

I gave everyone t-shirts from our swag sale ($1 each!), which everyone looooooved.

Some Books I Read In 2012, part one

Death Comes to Pemberley
and, as a result,
Pride and Prejudice

Obviously, P&P was a reread. No one graduates from Kent Place School for Girls without a studying this book, possibly for an entire trimester (raises hand). For a time, any blue mood could be cured by revisiting Book 3, Chapter 1, when Lizzie first visits Pemberley.

Sidebar: in current times, could you write a female heroine who firmly rejects someone, reconsiders only after seeing his giant estate, admits to him that she only began to change her mind upon seeing his magnificent home's "delightful grounds," and have her remain likable? I posit no.

I purchased the BBC miniseries in college - a big deal in the early 2000s, when DVDs were pricey and illegal downloads limited to music - and would watch twenty minutes of it every day. "I just need a hit," I'd tell my roommate, as she glared at me for not inviting her to join in on Bingley, Darcy, Georgiana, and Elizabeth's awkward meeting at the Inn at Lambton.

So when fanfic sequel Death Comes to Pemberley, came out in late 2011 to decent reviews, I snapped it up for the perfect read to start 2012. It was okay. It includes a lot of summarizing of the original book, which, as you may have gathered, I found pointless, and paints the older Elizabeth Darcy as a bit of a bore (unforgivable). The real value is that it inspired me to reread Pride and Prejudice from start to finish, something I haven't done since tenth grade. I'm glad I did, because the novel is not how I remembered it. Not worse. Not better. I just look at things differently.

Mr. & Mrs. Bennet
Mrs. Bennet gets a rough go in P&P, ignored by her husband and mocked by her cleverer offspring, painted as a ridiculous, hysterical woman constantly shoving her daughters at the nearest available suitor and retiring to her bedchamber in a fit of nerves when they refuse. But why does Mr. Bennet get a pass? He has some top-flight quips, to be sure, but spends a lot of time either reading in his library or insulting his wife. Look how he treats his family's future! He tells Lizzie that by the time and Mrs. B realized that they wouldn't have any sons, "it seemed a bit late to start saving." Mr. B? Lydia is FIFTEEN YEARS OLD. Therefore, you have had a DECADE AND A HALF to have started saving up some cash so your family has a place to live after you die. He also lets dumb Lydia go off to Brighton, knowing full well what a terrible idea it is, so he can have some quiet around the house. I loved Mr. Bennet when I was fifteen. Now I think he's an asshole.

Lydia
Lydia is still a twit, to be sure. I'm guessing that in Edwardian times, when people routinely started families at eighteen, her immaturity would have been shocking to the reader, kind of like Selma Blair in Cruel Intentions. But now her poor judgment, indifference towards privacy, and inability to accept or acknowledge criticism just make her a Millenial. Come to 2013, Lydia! You'll fit right in.

Jane's Visit to Netherfield
Jane's visit to Netherfield reads as one thousand times more awkward to me now. Conversely, the Netherfield ball seems more tolerable. I'm not sure why.

Elizabeth and Darcy
Oh, Elizabeth and Darcy! Fear not: I love these crazy kids as much as ever, but I found that over time, I had been coming down harder and harder on Elizabeth for rejecting Darcy when he first proposes. Yeah he's reserved, but his fortune generates ~$600,000 a year and he's better than Mr. Collins. Then I reread the book, and was reminded of how Darcy describes her when they first meet:

She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me; and I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men.

Then he realizes she heard him, sees her go spin the tale to her friends, and feels like a moron. No wonder this book still resonates: doesn't this happen all the time on the Internet? All I'm saying is, I can see how it took Lizzie a while to forgive him. I also identify a bit more with Darcy, aside from the millions of dollars thing, because he's shy. Shyness and aloofness are indistinguishable to many, and it's easy to look like you don't give a shit about someone's life when really, you just think it would be rude to ask.

BBC, Keira Knightley movie, Lost in Austen (in a brilliant move, our modern-day heroine who's stuck in the story makes Darcy go swimming in a white shirt. I'd do the same)

What I realized more this time around is how quickly E & D grow to like each other, but stubbornly hold on to their initial, publicly expressed distaste. Also, how awkward is Darcy? At the end of the book, he's violently in love with this woman and just spent upwards of a hundred grand to save her family's reputation, yet this is the best he can do with the proposal:

You are too generous to trifle with me. If your feelings are still what they were last April, tell me so at once. My affections and wishes are unchanged, but one word from you will silence me on this subject forever. 

What?

In General

Pride and Prejudice assumes a certain level of knowledge; there's a reason we all had to read Letters to Alice in high school before even starting on the novel itself. I agreed to read some mannish book whose title I currently forget this year at Dan's request, under the condition that he read P&P, but I realized he'll need some schooling on what constituted a big deal to members of the Edwardian-era landed gentry if the whole "Lydia and Wickham Take Off For Gretna Green" plot is to make a lick of sense.

But despite requiring a familiarity with the term "entail," P&P is kind of a potboiler. There's so much PLOT. Shit is constantly happening at Longbourn and the surrounding environs. Red herring suitors are dropped in and then yanked out with a vaudeville cane, friends become foes, foes become friends, and marriage plots, however unfeminist, are literally a matter of life and death.

Remaining Questions

• How on earth did Elizabeth and Charlotte remain friends after the Mr. Collins thing? I get a distinct "frenemy" vibe from Charlotte once she moves to Rosings.
• If Darcy's first proposal had excluded all those dings against her family, I think Lizzie would have at least considered it.
• Are Jane and Bingley literally the biggest pussies to have ever been written? Seriously, in the first book Bingley gets talked out of proposing to Jane because she's too quiet. Give me a break. 
• Having met Elizabeth at Rosings and observing her headstrong nature firsthand, did Lady Catherine de Bourgh really think that showing up at Longbourn with a litany of insults was the way to talk Lizzie into rejecting a million-dollar marriage?
• I prefer the original title of the book, First Impressions, for expressing the theme. Pride and Prejudice sounds better, though. Point Austen.

Next: books I read for the first time in 2012, about which I will probably have way less to say.

And To Prove It...

I'm back, I'm back, I swear!

Work has been really slow for the past two weeks or so - things stall out around the holidays but don't shut down completely, so I've been coming in more or less in case there's an emergency. What this means is that I've spent a lot of time cleaning out my desk.

I've had this list up for a while and thought it amusing. They are real notes from an actual conference call.

Nevermind

I don't know what I was thinking, y'all. I really like Tumblr as a way to consume blogs (you follow certain blogs and the new posts all collect on a handy dashboard), but the platform was just not for me in terms of creating content.


So... MV:TB is back open for business. Hi! Wait, come back! I need you! A round-up of some books I read in 2012 TK!