Category: blog

Jukebox

I can only hear Noir in my head, but they are very loud there. The way I work — my way into story and character — is through mirror neurons, and so my people live large within me. To me they are utterly real.

But, sadly, not real in the “let me play you this really cool song by Noir” way: so the best I can offer is a selection of what goes through their ears when they plug into other people’s music. Think of it as a random sampler of the iPods of Noir (ouch, that sounds like something from a bad fantasy novel, but never mind).

This is a longer playlist, eight songs — two each from Duncan, Johnny, Angel and Con. You do not need to have read their story to appreciate (or not) their taste in music: but perhaps if you have enjoyed traveling with them, you’ll find some fun here.

To use the E-Phonic MP3 Player you will need Adobe Flash Player 9 or better and a Javascript enabled browser.

Duncan’s always a little dramatic: from him, you get Gotye and Nine Inch Nails, and he’s planning to send an audience right over the edge with them any day now — there won’t be a dry eye or a dry seat in the house. Johnny is the rock poet and the Holy shit, look what you can do with music guy: he likes Bowie and would walk through fire for Patti Smith. Angel is… well, he’s Angel: he’d always rather have more, and he thinks resistance is silly, hence his fondness for Cafe Tacuba and “Super Freak.” And Con loves “Bad Medicine” (although for a while he was sorry because the song made a lot of trouble for everyone), and since he saw U2 and Green Day play the Super Bowl he has dreamed, dreamed of Noir having that moment someday. Because they would kill.

Enjoy.

Parkour women

I think parkour is amazing — beautiful and exciting, combining talent, skill, elegance and pragmatism (a blend I’ve always found compelling). So fabulous to see the human body in use, in motion, in flight.

Most people I’ve seen doing parkour are traceurs — men. Mais aujourd’hui, je vous présente les traceuses. Parkour women.

Actually, first, parkour girls, in a program in Westminster (UK) teaching them to throw their bodies through space. Here’s where parkour can start for girls…
 


 

And here’s where it can go.
 


 

Gives me chills. My entire girlhood, my entire life, might have been so different in so many ways if I’d had any of this when I needed self-confidence, when I needed to be living in and learning my body rather than being so wary of it. Oh, the possibilities.

I want to see us big

Well, the whole big world has a lot of little girls in it, too. And not all of them are princesses — and the ones who are princesses have plenty of movies to watch.
 
And even many of them who do aspire to be princesses are mixing their princess tendencies with all manner of other delicious things. Their tiaras fall off when they skin their knees running at top speed; they get fingerpaint on their pink dresses; they chip their front teeth chasing each other in plastic high-heeled shoes.
 
— Linda Holmes, from her open letter to Pixar

What she said. Go read Linda Holmes’ entire “Dear Pixar” letter on the NPR website. Then come on back and let’s chat.

I’ve talked before about how much I want to write great roles for women, especially those of us who never see stories on screen in which people like us — over 40, not runway models or heiresses or sad lonely spinsters waiting for the right man, but simply smart, competent, interesting women — are the heroes. And in those stories, we won’t be heroes because we are tigress-mommies or loyal resolute spouses who suddenly kick ass to save our families. We’ll be heroes because we are human beings in a situation where heroism is required, and so we step up.

Why is that seemingly so hard for so many writers, producers, directors, and studio executives to imagine? Especially when we have a few shining examples of how much it rocks when a movie gets it right: Ripley in Alien, Sarah Connor in Terminator, Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis in Thelma and Louise, Geena Davis in The Long Kiss Goodnight (okay, she was a tigress-mommy too, but first she was an assassin, so she was by god no cliche).

And a hero is not only someone with killer biceps who leaves no bad guy standing. The hero is the person at the center of the story who must overcome challenges, face their deepest fears, lose their most precious things or people or dreams, strive and fail and still keep on going. Is it really true, as so many industry insiders seem to think, that men can only identify with those experiences if another man is having them? I am inside the hero all the time regardless of whether I’m watching Tom Cruise or Sarah Michelle Gellar. Does having a Y chromosome really restrict that kind of identification?

I don’t believe that. I think if a woman on screen is a compelling, non-cliched human being having big experiences, struggling with big feelings, making big choices, then any of us can identify with her.

This is a big screen issue for me. Television is a veritable paradise of Strong Women Characters in comparison to films. Buffy, Faith, Anya, Willow, Tara, Xena, Gabrielle, Callisto, Zoe, River, Kaylee, Sookie, Tara Thornton, Tara Gregson, Debra Morgan, the list goes on. All different, all with strengths and flaws and their own particular voice, and their own fabulous stories — complex and deeply human and universal.

So why can’t we do it big?

Well, let’s just imagine that we can. What would you like to see women characters doing on the big screen? I’d love to hear your wish list!

Resting

Here’s another in the series of excerpts from With Malice Toward Some:

Oct 7th
The days melt away like cough drops on the tongue. I brush my hair and take a long walk and type out Henry’s notes and stand for a while in the garden composing my face to look like a Landed Gent, and ping! the day is gone. The Devonshire countryside grows upon me like an obsession; I sometimes suspect that somebody has given me a philtre. Living in England, provincial England, must be like being married to a stupid but exquisitely beautiful wife. Whenever you have definitely made up your mind to send her to a home for morons, she turns her heart-stopping profile and you are unstrung and victimized again. The garden still spurts roses and snapdragons and Michaelmas daisies, which I cut and arrange at great length in bowls and vases. This pursuit I estimate to be about the sheerest waste of time I have ever indulged in. The flowers wilt and only have to be done all over again. Henry, being a native New Yorker, looks pained if his attention is called to flowers. And the flowers in the garden are virtually forcing the house right off the property as it is, without my introducing them into the drawing room to bore from within. But it is principally because it is so fruitless that I like to do it. It makes every day feel like Saturday afternoon.
 
— from With Malice Toward Some by Margaret Halsey

I’m thinking a lot about the difference between relaxation and rest. I’m a champion relaxer: I know how to kick back, share a bottle of wine and talk for hours; spend an hour on the deck with a book; fall so deep into a movie that I forget where I am; sit on a park bench and stare at Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains beyond while crows and seagulls spiral up and down from the beach. I know how to enjoy these moments.

But I don’t know how to rest. I spend my life doing: it’s my response to responsibility (whoa! just made the linguistic connection…), to stress, to challenge, to learning. To life, really. I’m good at doing; but it turns out I have very little skill at stopping. I relax, but in a little back corner of my mind I am already figuring out the next process, making the next mental list, preparing to do the next thing.

I’m lucky; the busy-ness of my life is not the treadmill variety. I like my life; but it is full, and I have a lot to do, and somewhere along the line I learned that my culture won’t give me a lot of slack for “wasting” time. For just spending a hundred Saturday-afternoon-days in a row arranging flowers or sitting under an umbrella on the beach at Musha Cay — those cuffy thing moments that I find I am yearning for more and more these days. I want to do fruitless things just because they are lovely to do. I want the beautiful surroundings just because they are beautiful, and then I want to simply sit and be in them with no responsibility to anyone, not even myself. I want to unhook from all of that results-oriented list-bound doing.

I’m good at being. But always I am being in motion. Now a part of me just wants to be still.

Shindiggin’

We had a lovely gathering of neighbors yesterday — about 40 people met, grilled, drank, ate, and talked in the commons at the end of our driveway. The weather was beautiful, the beer stayed cold, and as far as I know the potato salad didn’t send anyone to the emergency room. It turns out the folk here are relaxed, charming and have incredibly-well-behaved-but-non-robotic kids (I know, it sounds more like Lake Wobegon all the time).

My neighbor Vicki and I have been talking about doing this for so long that it seems strange to have actually done it. A couple weeks ago, we made a flyer and spent a Saturday afternoon walking around the neighborhood knocking on doors, introducing ourselves, and explaining about the barbeque and our desire to connect people in the ‘hood as much as possible. When people weren’t home, we left flyers, and I know there was at least one household that didn’t open the door because they thought we were selling magazine subscriptions or something (yep, Mr. Neighbor Dude, I did see you peering through your fence at us. You missed a good party and if there’s an apocalypse you won’t know everyone’s name…).

The knocking-on-doors thing is actually hard for me: I can be quite shy in situations where I am having to justify my presence/explain myself/”sell” in some way, and although I have good strategies for overcoming that shyness, they take a lot of energy. So how nice to have so many people respond by turning up with their kids and their salads and desserts, and — especially — prepared to have a nice time and meet some new people.

It’s funny how easy it is to remain disconnected even in such a place as this, where people are aware of one another and have good intentions. Connection is a process, and I hope yesterday was a good step in expanding it. We collected contact information, and now we’ll spend some time figuring out how to use it in a way that builds neighborhood bonds without turning into some kind of social club or low-value time suck that makes people disengage again. It’s an interesting thing to think about. But worth doing: apart from anything else, if there ever is an apocalypse, we will need each other. What heartens me above all else is that it seems I’m not the only one here who knows that.

Preppin’

I am not really here (grin). I am madly preparing for our Neighborhood Shindig — making potato salad, moving out tables and chairs and galvanized tubs for ice (are we a party-ready household, or what?), and wondering how it’s all going to turn out. I will report back tomorrow.

Coming soon: women in films, keyword searches, jukebox (so many ideas… Duncan Black’s iPod, songs about love, identity songs, dancing music), and more!

Enjoy your Saturday.

21

Nicola and I met 21 years ago today: and life changed utterly between one breath and the next. Everything I have done since then, and all I have become, is in some way connected to that meeting.

I just can’t imagine who I am in the alternate universes in which we never met. I hope those Kelleys are happy and full of joy. They can send me postcards: I’ll be here, having a beer on a Friday afternoon with my sweetie, celebrating the years.

Kick the twilight out of him!

From video remix artist and media activist Jonathan McIntosh comes this fantastic video that puts clips of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (okay, Freudian moment, I just typed Vampire Spayer…) together with footage from the movie Twilight, in which vampire Edward Cullen falls hard for a human girl but won’t, you know, bite her or anything, because that would be too much like teenagers having sex, and we know that never happens.

In this remixed narrative Edward Cullen from the Twilight Series meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’™s an example of transformative storytelling serving as a visual critique of Edward’™s character and generally creepy behavior. Seen through Buffy’™s eyes some of the more patriarchal gender roles and sexist Hollywood tropes embedded in the Twilight saga are exposed in hilarious ways.
 
— Jonathan McIntosh, from his commentary on Buffy vs Edward

McIntosh’s remix is beautifully edited, funny in places, genuinely creepy, and pretty searing in its commentary on what many fiction writers and screenwriters (and directors and producers and readers, not to mention scadillions of teenage girls and boys out there) think constitutes “romantic” behavior between people. If you know a teenager, or a so-called grownup who acts like one, park them in front of this video and tell them the only part of this dynamic that is remotely okay are all the parts where Buffy takes care of herself. And then beat them on the head until they understand that she shouldn’t have to.

You don’t need to be a Buffy fan or know the Twilight story to follow along…

Enjoy.

 

Get your apt on

I don’t know the original source of this: someone gave it to me about 30 years ago. Because I know all my readers are good-looking, adventurous, talented, charming and of course incredibly smart — the aptest of the apt — I expect you’ll all get perfect scores!

You may use the comment space for your answers.

Make me proud.

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APTITUDE TEST

Instructions
Read each question carefully. Answer all questions. Time limit: 4 hours. Begin immediately.

History
Describe the history of the papacy from its origin to the present day, concentrating especially but not exclusively on its social, political, economic, religious and philosophical impact on Europe, Asia, America and Africa. Be brief, concise and specific.

Medicine
You have been provided with a razor blade, a piece of gauze, and a bottle of scotch. Remove your appendix. Do not suture until your work has been inspected. You have fifteen minutes.

Public Speaking
2,500 riot-crazed people with swords are storming the classroom. Calm them. You may use any ancient language except Latin or Greek.

Biology
Create life. Estimate the differences in subsequent human culture if this form of life had developed 500 million years earlier, with special attention to the probable effect on the English Parliamentary system. Prove your thesis.

Music
Write a piano concerto. Orchestrate and perform it with flute and drum. You will find a piano under your seat.

Psychology
Based on your knowledge of their works, evaluate the emotional stability, degree of adjustment, and repressed frustrations of each of the following: Alexander of Aphrodisias, Ramses II, Gregory of Nicia, and Hammurabi. Support your evaluation with quotations from each man’s work.

Sociology
Estimate the sociological problems which might accompany the end of the world. Construct an experiment to test your theory.

Engineering
The disassembled parts of a high-powered rifle have been placed beside your desk. You will also find an instruction manual, printed in Swahili. In ten minutes a hungry Bengal tiger will be admitted into the room. Take whatever action you feel appropriate. Be prepared to justify your decision.

Economics
Develop a realistic plan for refinancing the national debt. Trace the possible effects of your plan in the following areas: Cubism, the Donatist controversy, the wave theory of light. Outline a method for preventing these effects. Criticize this method from all possible points of view. Point out the deficiencies in your point of view, as demonstrated in your answer to the last question.

Political Science
There is a red telephone on the desk beside you. Start World War III. Report at length on its socio-political effects, if any.

Epistemology
Take a position for or against truth. Prove the validity of your position.

Physics
Explain the nature of matter. Include in your answer an evaluation of the impact of the development of mathematics on science.

Philosophy
Sketch the development of human thought. Estimate its significance. Compare with the development of any other kind of thought.

General knowledge
Describe in detail. Be objective and specific.