Oh, the Apologies
June 22, 2011 1 Comment
Dear Millicent,
Maybe this is everywhere, but I just found it today over at Splitsider, and instead of even working out a comment, I’m gonna leave it right now at this: uhhhhhhhh….
Yours,
CF
Netflix Deathmatch 1: Interrupted Weddings
June 17, 2011 1 Comment
Dear Millicent,
You know how you sometimes absorb a novel or movie and let it become an unspoken part of your decision making process? Like, I have had a baggy red sweater for 12 years mostly because I thought a similar one looked so charming and relaxed on Juliette Lewis in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.
I’m pretty sure I spend most of my time trying to live in a novel or movie, and most probably, a novel or movie that my brain absorbed between the ages of 4 and 19. Maybe all generations experience this cultural nostalgia, where the timepieces that shaped y/our expectation of the future are so special because they are so specifically y/ours. People even 6 years ahead or behind you have an entire different set of references. There must be a very squishy age (9?) where we absorb all that magic, and the cultural timepieces lock in. My Tribes is another person’s Square Pegs is another person’s Degrassi High .
Obviously, we don’t live in movies, blahblahblah, but I do think something interesting happens when we get two conflicting cultural imprints. This would be the equivalent of absolutely wanting the Lewis red sweater, and then seeing something else that confirmed red sweaters were the stuff of bad, un-Depped, lives. But, on a much larger scale, of course. This whammy happens to me a lot. For example, tet’s take a favorite topic of mine, weddings!
This might be my all time favorite wedding scene ever:
Conclusion: it is good to follow your heart, and whatever you do (as pounds of movies have told us) is DO NOT MARRY THE SAFE GUY. Meg Ryan is also very good at proving this (Greg Kinnear, the safest man in cinema?). Also, the promise that TRUE LOVE OUTS, ALWAYS.
And then we have this famous doozie:
Both narratives are in agreement about one thing, ADULTS SUCK. And both make fun of the same system that, by getting married, the youth are signing up for in the first place. But we get that in The Graduate, the whole situation sucks some balls. Growing up sucks some balls. Plastics suck some balls. And, well, ending up with Benjamin as your Dwayne sucks some balls. He’s a stalker. He slept with your mom. Elaine…it’s not too late for you, but you should probably grow up to be a sexy single lady who owns a bookstore.
The conflict: Both are iconic, closely related scenes in my head, but one promises bliss and certainty, and the other promises that grand gestures can be as empty as what they hope to work against.
I also like to smack Howards End in the middle of this Netflix deathmatch, because well, it swings its weight both ways. Margaret marries the safe man, the rich Mr. Wilcox, and it’s terrible. But Helen follows her heart and fully abandons herself to passion, and it, too, is kind of terrible. And poor Leonard Bast. All he got was some sex and misery in his life.
So who wins–what will get to be the grand narrative that wins in my brain? Of course neither, because luckily I can handle conflicting narratives and their ambiguities, but what if they had to? What if we had to either join them all together in some mad life lesson, or at least make some peace with their differences?
Then I would say we snuggle up to EM Forster as much as possible, and let the other two float in the ether. Partnering for comfort or lust is probably a bad idea. I think Forster would approve of Elaine’s escape and Whitley’s change of heart. Interestingly, they all work on class lines too: if you’re a gal, DO NOT MARRY THE RICH GUY unless you really want to sleep with him and he likes your brain, and for guys, DO NOT MARRY THE POOR GIRL OR OLD LADY, you were probably just with her because you were horny. True love = breaking class expectations. If you’re a guy, SAVE YOURSELF FOR THE RICH GIRL. She’ll probably go ahead and break your heart anyway, but it will be morally correct. At least, it will this time in the annals of Carla Fran’s Culture Clash, or what I like to call The Media Closet of Our Lives.
Join us next time where we take on reproduction: Lost in Translation vs. Friday Night Lights!
Yours,
CF
PS. All movies agree, never marry a cop.
Smatterings
June 9, 2011 4 Comments
- The Catherine Ferguson Academy for Young Women in Detroit is being shut down. This is a tragedy. A big, sad, infuriating tragedy. The school is a wonder of education: a school for pregnant teens and young mothers that was also a working farm right smack in the middle of the city. It has a 97% attendance rate, and 90% graduation rate. I heard about the school on a Canadian news show about a year ago, and the students who were interviewed were so excited about their kids growing up eating the food that they had grown, and well, it all just seemed like one of those programs that was too good to be true. Pregnant women being respected! Young women full of self confidence! Organic agriculture in the middle of urban blight! It really seemed like a movie made to make indie leftie liberals faint in delight as they (we) ate kale salads and talked about John Stewart. The school is closing because of funding. Rachel Maddow has been covering the story, but very few others have. As of yesterday, even the local Detroit press had not picked it up. The school closes on June 17. Take a moment to sign this petition over at Change.org .
- Some famous Brits tweeted their homebirth on Monday. The best part of this story is that, as it was followed by thousands, and it was during morning rush hour, there were impromptu celebrations on the tube once the baby was finally born. I love the idea of a subway car of strangers hollering for the arrival of a new person. The tweets are short, and tell a pretty lovely story, complete with an eyemask that says “Fuck Off!”. Twitter, again, does something very interesting.
- More baby things, I just found the very interesting blog Public Health Doula, which has tons of good things. She recently posted this Ted Talk by a doula in Singapore that does a great job of explaining what a doula does. PHD also has a stellar post on what she wants her friends to know, which I would like to say ditto ditto ditto to.
- Did you know AJ Langer, she who was Rayanne from My So-Called Life, had a waterbirth? And, she’s full on Brit royalty these days.
- You should definitely look at these portraits of rich Russian kids. I have a bunch of old Life Magazines, and one from the 1950s has an entire spread on Russian children’s fur coats, followed by Barbra Streisand’s love letter to her panther fur jumpsuit. Children should not have multi-thousand dollar things, especially ones they will grow out of! Barbra gets a pass, but just this once.
- Seriously, go sign that Change.org petition.
New Crush: Karen Kilgariff
May 29, 2011 4 Comments
Oh, yeah. And she’s the older sister on The Book Group.
We’re Millionaires!
May 26, 2011 Leave a comment
Dear Millicent,
A quick thought for you. I just finished watching Micheal Winterbottom’s The Trip, another great showpiece of ego, struggle, modern idiocies and ancient foibles. It stars Steve Coogan as Steve Coogan, and is about an actor eating a set of dinners with another actor. The two men tour the north of England, eat fancy, sleep fancy, and expose about 10 profound levels of insecurity. Oh, actors. Oh, storytelling that is willing to just sit.
My question for you: is The Trip either a sequel to or retelling of Withnail and I? A love letter, perhaps? 2 actors, a vague notion of escape, good wine, and a desperate rivalry…is this Withnail and I 30 years later, no longer poor or young, but still unresolved? Still quoting poetry to the landscape?
Yours,
CF
The Leaking Conquest
May 14, 2011 12 Comments
Dear Millicent,
Hi! Welcome to this new day, one wherein Hollywood and comedians insist they always thought women were funny. A reviewer on my NPR station said, “I don’t understand what the big deal about Bridesmaids is. Apatow has always made women the smartest characters in his movies. This time, women are gross. So?” A writer acquaintance who once said “I just don’t write comedy for women,” said with great and serious gusto “Bridesmaids is important for comedy.”
The monsieur I went to see the movie with was wowed. “It’s so much more than a girl’s comedy,” he said, a huge compliment. And I hunched over. I thought of Lindy West. I squinted, trying to think if I would have said the same thing after The Hangover, commending it on being more than a boy’s comedy. You know the answer.
We are all excited about this movie. I was hoping for this great coming of women in comedy when I saw the trailer, and my fingers are still crossed for the continuation of whatever trend Apatow is building as he also produces Lena Dunham’s HBO show Girls. I will admit, I got cautious when I saw all the emails and tweets about it being a social responsibility to see this movie. I worried it was a great viral PR scheme…that Apatow had approached women’s comedy as an act of ego, to play all us feminists and prove us wrong about our criticisms of him. I like the happy idea that he had a great veil-lifting, and realized the flatness of his female characters, and instantly went out to correct the imbalance that he was part of, and a bit of a mascot for. But I doubt that. It’s too perfect. Instead, it seems like another time to type out the cliche’ that I use in almost every post about Hollywood: how nice it must be to have cake and eat it too. It just seems weird that it is a social responsibility to pay money to prove that a female audience exists (already known). Or to show that women would like more from their onscreen representations (already known). It wasn’t women’s social responsibility to carry this movie, it was dudes’. Hollywood needs proof that men will show up for a movie where a woman shits her wedding dress.
Interestingly, the previews at my theater before the show did not promise a continuation of this trend. Instead, there was an all guy remake of 9 to 5, and a male Freaky Friday about marriage and bachelorhood.
But I sound sour, and Bridesmaids did not leave me sour. It left me….relevant. I felt seen. I felt existed. Doesn’t that sound crazy? That one dumb movie could do that? But, watching Wiig work through jealousy and general life-shittiness was wonderful. The way she talked to herself in her car, the way she had a private world (the cupcake!), the fact that a woman was called an “asshole” and it fit, were all minor revelations of what real people do, including that half of the population, us. We had a movie soaking in the truth that women are as fucked up as men! Life According to Jim for everyone!
Speaking of that diarrhea scene, I immediately thought of Subashini‘s fantastic take on Awkward Women, which aligns with the pre-Bridesmaids rules for Apatow’s women:
Awkwardness indicates a lack of ordering and policing, but for a woman to relax and slip up means bleeding all over the place, even after the invention of the tampon. To relax and slip up can also mean an unwanted penis inside you, or perhaps a wanted penis, but then again, with undesirable consequences if one is not careful. There is that pesky thing that women have: The Womb. Sex, even when it’s fun, can quickly become unfun with the weight of pregnancy. The potential for a girl or a woman to become a mother is always there, underlying even meaningless sexual intercourse. And mothers are always policing social norms, are they not? The father lays down the rule, but the mother implements the rules. Women just can’t laugh or be awkward. They stand rigid and unbending and unsmiling, like an army of governesses from hell.
Here we have several leaking, unpregnant, unadorable, unrigid, challenges. As Subashini goes onto to say, the awkward woman is usually insane, a chaotic threat to world order (hello Nighty Night!). So, the fact that our women in Bridesmaids shit and puke over every surface they can find in the interestingly pure and patriarchal setting of a bridal shop, is divine. I said in a recent post that when we see a woman running in a wedding dress, it’s exciting because we see a woman fighting the system. Here, it changes. When we see a woman shitting in the street in a wedding dress, my fingers are crossed we see a woman shitting on said system.
I will still argue that Bridesmaids is weak sauce compared to the likes of Pulling and all the other amazing three-dimensional representations of women that have been in no way celebrated the way this Hollywood approved version of things has been. Nevertheless, Bridesmaids does stand as a great case for more. The angle of the jokes whispered how much comedy has been lost by not including women’s real perspectives. Examples:
- The joke of Helen’s full out gown at the engagement party. I have never seen a visual gown joke in a dude-normative comedy. It did so much work so fast, and was visually compelling, as well as instantly funny.
- A mother of 3 boys says “everything is covered in semen. Once, I cracked a blanket in half.” See, it still the same stuff we’re always laughing about, semen, but this time, it’s about the lady’s encounter with it. It’s a joke that’s hilarious to everybody, and an observation that has been missing because mom’s never get to talk, usually. How have we not heard that before? It’s a grand, filthy all-inclusive joke. And, it catches men in the self consciousness of their bodily humors in a rare way (I think of it as the male equivalent to the period blood stain in Superbad).
- Moms! Wiig’s mother is not a cartoon, but she is unhelpful and wacky like parents are. I still think the best mother I’ve ever seen is Louie CK’s mom on Louie, but this mom was another beacon of the fact that I was welcome here. I recognized that woman. Same with Maya Rudolph’s dad. It’s always a sign of life when even the minor characters has full plates of dimension, even if it is short work.
Other commendations:
- Melissa McCarthy stole the show for me. And while the audience actually squealed “Ewww” when she showed her leg to her love interest, her character was a direct challenge to that “Eww.” Yes, they have her run first into the restaurant, and she has the hassle of other cheap jokes, but her character is an amazing foil to Wiig’s. She is successful, and with an unabashed sexual appetite, and an unabashed sense of self. When she says “I know you couldn’t guess now, but it was hard for me in high school,” she means it. She in no way considers herself a victim or another person’s joke. She is winning. She is a model of self-love, and the appropriate agent to point out Wiig’s sadsackery. And kudos to the costumers for giving her that pearl necklace (and dear lord, why does that feel filthy to type? It really was made of pearls, and a necklace!). Initially, I thought the necklace was off-base, suggesting a properness that didn’t fit, but as her character gets established, it tidily proves that her success has been there all along.
- Irish guy from the IT Crowd. Nicely done.
- Thank you JESUS for a cast of women with bodies.
- Jealousy, class, money, and the tensions of friendship! Such rich stuff! So immediately connective!
- That the ultimate “perfect wedding” is still super tacky (lasers! waterfalls! Tim Heidecker!), because weddings are unavoidably so, in one way or another.
My last notes are about nostalgia, which might be our current trend in comedy, and one that I fall for every time. You bring on Wilson Phillips, and you got me. And, while I charge Your Highness et al with a great romance for scripts of masculinity from the past, I charge Bridesmaids with enjoying the same, but ladystyle. Because, when you get right down to it, Bridesmaids is 16 Candles, down to the pink bridesmaids dress, and the love interest (JAKE!), leaning on the car outside of the church. And, there’s cake.
What did you think, dearest? Is this a moment? A start? An echo that has the power to make a boom?
Yours,
CF
The Best Time I Didn’t Deliver A Baby
May 11, 2011 2 Comments
Dear Millicent,
I now know what kind of person I am in an emergency. Yesterday morning, I went to meet a couple who I would be doulaing for, ready with my bag of tricks. I had my lavender oil, my breath mints, my mantras and my own sense of calm. When I got to the door, the baby was crowning, and would be born two minutes later on the bathroom floor.
This happens, and homebirth is not by definition an emergency. Planned homebirth is awesome. Doulas are trained for what to do in an emergency delivery, but it is the kind of training that my brain did not hold tightly. I absorbed it like learning how to punch a window out if your car falls off a bridge and is submerged into water: it is big time useful, but also something that only happens in movies. Except that it all actually happens sometimes.
This was an emergency in the sense that there was no control. Whatever this would be, it would be, and it was happening RIGHT NOW. The dad asked me if I knew what to do. I said what my gut said. “No.”
And then I got thwarted by the fact I don’t know how to use an I-phone. Me and 911 kept saying “hello” to each other. I was waiting for all those important instructions to pour out–look for this, look for that. But I couldn’t get the damn speaker phone off, and asking for directions about a phone is stupid compared to the fact that a baby is coming out, right now. And it did. The baby came out. And started crying. It all worked the way it’s supposed to work, and firemen came, and everything got taken care of.
The Iphone never made sense.
For the entire 2 minutes, I had no idea how to help. I felt like the clumsiest person in the world. It was all very slow, and very fast. It was all high panic, and incredibly calm. A part of me surrendered, knowing that I had no idea what to do. And a part of me insisted that there were practical things to do. Look for towels! Pay attention. Watch. Look around for clues. Look for bad things.
But there were no bad things. We weren’t called on for that kind of adrenaline. It worked. It was a household event. Not a crisis. The firemen seemed happy to have such an easy emergency to attend. All was well. Babies are born every day.
I can’t believe that is how I spent my morning.
When I got home and looked up emergency home birth on the internet, all of the instruction guides (which I imagine freaked out people reading with the laptop set up next to the birthing woman, pissed that the screensaver came on because now they will have to click, then wash their hands again, and that baby is coming!), were amazingly soothing. They promised that this was rare, and that it usually happened with very healthy moms and babies. That birth, often enough to hope for the best, took care of itself. “When in doubt,” one content farm version of instructions said, “do nothing.”*
In the best of emergency circumstances, delivering a baby means lightly holding the head, making sure no cord is around the throat, and catching it. Then, putting newborn on mama’s chest. There are other facts. Babies are blue when they’re born. If the baby isn’t crying, to press its nostrils downwards. To keep the umbilical cord attached. There is a lot of information, but the basic instructions for a routine birth are simple enough to fit into a small bullet list. The internet could get you through it.
For myself, I’m not sure in that moment I would have remembered how the internet worked. But, I now have even more trust in what the body can do. This was the first non-hospital birth I have been at. It wasn’t an ideal birth. It was scary, and fast, and the amount of adrenaline drenching the house was insane. I don’t know if the mama is going to remember it as traumatic or wild. The experience brought home how birth is really about the woman and her body, and that the hospital is an accessory, a location. A minor distinction, one that I had not realized before this, emphasizing how disempowering many hospital spaces are for laboring women. Also, the immense blessing of people who actually know how to deliver babies, be they nurses, firemen (firepeople?), midwives, or OBs.
So, lessons learned:
- Time gets slow in crisis, but crisis keeps moving.
- Figure out how an I-phone works.
- Trust women.
- Babies don’t give a shit about your plans.
- Sometimes, things work out seriously fine.
Yours,
CF
**As for the “do nothing” style, there is a whole kind of planned solo birth where the mother attends herself. Often, a midwife will be present as backup for complications or support, but the birthing mother will actually deliver her own kiddo.
The Answerers
May 6, 2011 Leave a comment
Dear Millicent,
To be added to the list of fascinating things: response songs. These are songs written as an answer to a previous song, often making a song fight, or, at least, a melodic last word. It makes sense that musicians sing back to other songs before them, and it’s especially lovely when they point out the sticky bits in the previous song, correcting and challenging.
Here are two super famous response songs from the fifties:
The Original:
Hank Thompson’s “Wild Side of Life”
The Throwdown: “I might have known you’d never make a wife.” Also, you’re a slut, and you won’t talk to to me anymore.
The Response:
Kitty Wells’ “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels”
The Big Suck It: You were married the whole time, you bastard. [Also, note that Wells is performing in front of 10 men, there is only one other woman on stage].
The Original:
Hank Ballard and the Midnighters’ “Work With Me Annie”
The Throwdown: Annie, we have to sex. Like, right now.
The Response:
Etta James (ETTA JAMES!), in her first single “Roll With Me Henry” which was too dirty sounding, so it got renamed, “The Wall Flower” and “Dance With Me Henry.”
Here is another great version by the Platters, wherein there is slapping and dancing.
The Big Suck It: I’m game, but you’re doing it wrong. “You’re not moving me.”
“Work With Me Annie” had a bunch of response songs. The Midnighter’s did their own called “Annie Had a Baby,” all about how Annie can’t work anymore, because she had a baby. The song was banned from the radio. She must have gotten pregnant while dancing.
Yours,
CF
Art and Conversation
May 5, 2011 1 Comment
Dear Millicent,
Have been thinking of high art and low art, and the in betweens. You and I come from the academic tradition, and this tradition celebrates the makers of fine things. Thus, the MFA. Thus, John Cage and Gaddis and many people that we actually know, and who we also like to drink with and smile at. I have always stopped short at the creation and criticism of the heavy/complex: of the things that are so whacked out that, while they might be breaking boundaries, they are also the sole voice into the void which they create and map by sonar alone. And, with blogging and my own approach to fiction, I am starting to realize what this distinction is. Why I don’t value the avante as much as others, and why they might look at what I do with a pat “cuteness” as if I am scrapbooking while they are sculpting raw emotion. (Oh shit, scrapbookers, I think what you do is mighty. Forgive the example!).
They don’t care if the cake is edible. I want delicious cake that I can eat forever. I love talking about things besides cake with people who make good cake. Like, come to my house because the cake is so good (I lured you there! ha ha! cakebait!), but then, tell me about the Vatican astronomers, or about how tourism is an ethical quagmire. I think art/cake’s most powerful moment is exchange, cuz that makes, get ready–I’m about to drop a huge broad word that is so sappy it will make your teeth hurt more than icing–compassion. And you get more exchange if you make more. Thus, internetting is wonderful. I am done with writers thinking that blogging is small potatoes to noveling or poetic experiments. I get more conversation and readers and actual ideas by doing more, and by being less concerned about the deep sweat of it all. In a sense, fuck publishing. There’s no money in it, and if you aren’t going for money, then you might as well go for making by making and making. And if anybody is going to be snide about what kind of making anybody is doing, then I want a carpet, the loudest most calling up on carpet ever.
Let’s be wickedly proud of what we write and where we write it. Let’s blame them (those who suggest we are quaint hobbyists) for not getting it. We have readers who read us because they are interested in our ideas! We read other people because they are eloquent and smart and writing about things that make us angry or take our breath away! The exchange is times a thousand. Google Reader does more for me than AWP ever did, and is diverse and lovely and not sweaty. Let’s write novels and blogs and essays and lists that have glimmery lives in links or word documents. There are lots of way to make new maps.
That is winning the workshop.
And now, please, run around your living room with your hands in the air, pumping them up and down to the chant “we win! we win!”
And now back to regular programming.
Yours,
CF
Carla Fran
millicent
Millicent and Carla Fran