recession class

So there was a great article in the Times this morning about Hollywood and the recession:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/movies/26scott.html?_r=1&hpw

Basic idea is that Hollywood has always defaulted to the upper-middle-class as its venue. Hollywood's "ordinary folk" are typically the relatively comfortable, happy-go-lucky suburban dream we all thought we were going to be. But lately it has gotten kind of sickeningly unrealistic. I went to see "How Do You Know," the new James L. Brooks comedy, with my dad last week. Funny as hell, and his characters are far from perfect. They're neurotically realistic. But their setting is not. Reese Witherspoon's character talks about "going to grad school" or "working a retail job to get by" after she loses her athletic career. In the meantime, she wears designer heels, lunches at exclusive hotspots, and spends her afternoons shopping at an organic foodmart. Um...no. Not unless the scriptwriter just forgot to mention that she recently inherited a large sum of money from a dead uncle.

The sickest I ever got was watching last year's "It's Complicated." Everyone in that movie was just dripping with honey. The college-aged daughter drives a Prius and looks like a J. Crew model. The divorcee who owns a bakery sits comfortably at the helm of a multi-million dollar ranch property. The twenty-something married couple has an apartment that looks like Pottery Barn vomited over everything. I could go on. Almost every romantic comedy I've seen in the past few years has made me jealously enraged at the crater growing between what we all actually are and what we still want to try and see ourselves as.

I see it all around me, this desperate holding-on to the middle-class standards that we set for ourselves. It's elaborate birthday parties for kids. It's five-dollar coffees at Starbucks. It's fancified strip-malls...which, incidentally, are now failing. I work just a few doors down from a Neiman. It's a ghost town these days.

We're in line for a HUGE readjustment. Sure, some people still have money. But you people get on my nerves because you turn into uptight mongers who vote conservative, expect tax cuts, and end up caring very little about those beneath you. Most of us are struggling to get by these days.

This Christmas, I polled co-workers on their holidays plans. Most of us there are in our twenties, still in school. The majority of us stayed in Austin this Christmas, holed-up with cheap wine and Netflix movies, because we couldn't afford to miss work. Where we're paid just a step-ladder above minimum wage. To serve middle-aged spenders expensive foodstuffs. The real middle class is aging. The generation behind them--us!--is serving them lattes. Some of us have more education than they ever got. Does this make sense? Hell no.

Call us recessionistas. Or just call us resourceful. But I say we deserve a lot of credit, this generation Time magazine has deemed "the millenials." We have been given very little. We live in a world that looks nothing like we were told it would after college. We have been disappointed, let down, beaten up by credit card companies and budget cuts and hiring freezes. But we still stay informed, and we still care. We'll pour your latte, but we want better for ourselves. We have no disposable income, but we still manage to look good. Give us time, and we'll figure it all out.

amen.

The Top 20 Songs of 2010

Music is one of my things. It helps to stabilize me. I search for great new songs like kids want ice cream. Paste Magazine, my culture bible, released their top 50 of the year. You can check it out here:

http://www.pastemagazine.com/blogs/lists/2010/12/the-50-best-songs-of-2010.html

I wasn't satisfied. I needed to make my own list (although a few match up). And typically I would annotate it. But one of my newest resolutions is to be more assertive in all things life. So I'll start with this list. Here they are, and there are no qualifications needed.

20. Vampire Weekend, "Taxi Cab"

19. Best Coast, "Goodbye"

18. Josh Ritter, "Change of Time"

17. Robyn, "Dancing on my Own"

16. The National, "Conversation 16"

15. Lady Gaga, "Alejandro"

14. Cee Lo Green, "No One's Gonna Love You" (cover of Band of Horses song)

13. Delta Spirit, "Salt in the Wound"

12. First Aid Kit, "I Met up with the King"

11. David Gray, "First Chance"

10. Vampire Weekend, "Horchata"

9. Mumford and Sons, "Little Lion Man"

8. Joanna Newsom, "Good Intentions Paving Company"

7. The Tallest Man on Earth, "Kids on the Run"

6. Pheonix, "1901"

5. Broken Bells, "The Mall and the Misery"

4. The Morning Benders, "Excuses"

3. Laura Marling, "Rambling Man"

2. Beck and Bat for Lashes, "Let's Get Lost"

1. Band of Horses, "Laredo"

winter in my mind

Texas weather might be more inconsistent than the Obama administration (oh snap! and I'm a liberal, keep in mind), but I've decided to construct the Christmas season from the ground-up this year. Tonight it's cold, and I write to you with a warm Chai latte to the right and a pile of notes to my left. Winter is all about writing meaningful words. It's all about stories. I hope to have some good ones to share soon. In the meantime, I've got the Frank Sinatra Holiday station rolling on Pandora, hot cocoa in the pantry, and some pie recipes to try. And that's just for the first week of December.

Happy month of merry, folks!

public history 101

I ran across this article from the New York Times this afternoon:

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/another-collapse-at-pompeii-renews-calls-for-better-care/?ref=arts

Another piece of ruins has collapsed in on itself at Pompeii. This follows the news about a month ago that the alleged "House of Gladiators" (where men were said to relax pre-battle) fell to dust just outside the amphitheater. How can a ruin collapse? Good question. Everything at Pompeii at least partially collapsed almost two thousand years ago when Mt. Vesuvius rained its fire down on her. The crux of the Times article is really just the spawning of a debate in public history--save the ruins (which means pumping money to fund special preservation strategies) or leave them be?

The topic struck close to home because I toured Pompeii this past May. I spent an afternoon there (not even long enough to see half of what's there, to note). I ambled along with my friend Catherine for hours, tracing and re-tracing the confusing passageways, wincing as the stones underfoot jabbed right up through my Keds. (Yes, I was wearing Keds...the cute kind.) Pompeii is a beautiful mess, let it be known. It's iconic at this point, plastered on the pages of history textbooks, the subject of many a coffee table book, pushed by travel agents the world over. And in many ways it lives up to expectations. It is a pile of ruins, jagged and haphazard because the volcanic ash selectively preserved its image. Recognizable artifacts--frescos, statuary, and the like--are scattered throughout and serve as shocking reminders that what Pompeii really can offer are haunting glimpses into the life of a community cut short. Vesuvius lurks around every vista there, and on our journey the clouds bundled around it threatened torrential rain.

At the entrance to Pompeii, right off the Trenitalia platform, you encounter public history at its absolute worst. Stall after stall of souvenirs, all of them cheaply made, where pompous men will haggle with you until you finally decide to just run away from them. The food is gross and expensive. People rush around you every which way, you must protect your pocketbook, and the air kind of smells, to be honest. But the beautiful thing is that once you buy your ticket, that's all behind you. I turned to Catherine when we entered and asked, "Is this right?" because the entrance pathway looked way too calm and indiscreet to be the gateway into one of the most wondrous sites of ancient history remaining in the modern world. There are no souvenir stalls in Pompeii. There is no food to be had, just water available from some of the original fountains. There are hardly any signs. Without the headset (which I never purchase, because why would I want someone else interpreting what I see for me?), it's a maze that you have to give yourself over to. At one point Catherine and I ended up on a hill above the ruins, felt lost, and considered climbing down into a roped-off part (maybe too fragile?) and sneaking back to where we could hear voices.

My point is that even though the weather and the process of aging are finally taking their tolls on what's left there, something's been done right. History is allowed to be history there, untainted by the bright colors and intrusive guidebook-mentality we encounter at just about any historical site these days. Even the Vatican has give in to some of that.

I don't have a solution for Pompeii. Does anyone really need to have one?

real quick-like

My family tries. We all do. There's just some kind of ornery glitch that makes holidays feel a little tense, a little awkward, like a cross between a Saturday Night Live skit and PBS News. Le sigh. Highlights this Thanksgiving weekend? Apparently my 14-year-old cousin came very close to bashing his head on a rock at Mt. Bonnell. One of my uncles commented that I look like Keith Richards early in the morning. Really? Let me go out on a limb and say that I have some ex-boyfriends who would joyfully disagree with that one. What else. We ate a lot of food. Eleanor charmed, then screamed, then charmed, then screamed some more. She has eight teeth now, she's walking. Pretty soon we'll be sending her off to Harvard I suppose ;)

In other more interesting news, I may be featured on Slate magazine in the next week or so. More to come when I know details. And it's not an article I wrote! It's an article that may indeed include some thoughts I contributed (and will, I think, be quoted on).

Ummmm...cheers!

currently

reading: Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Because I want to see what all the fuss is about. Because some epic twist of bookfate placed all three books in the series in my hands yesterday, for free. I'll take it. Because now I'll be able to see the Swedish film adaptations and the inevitable American film adaptations (my brother-in-law is convinced that Hollywood will tap tiny Ellen Page for the part of Lisbeth...I think he's probably right).

listening to: Pheonix (French band recently made pretty damn big through their inclusion in Wimbledon promos) Pandora station, featuring: Radiohead (re-discovering them is always moving, over and over), The Postal Service (who will remain forever underrated, even though they were around experimenting with electronica and melodramatic lyrics long before all these latest indie darlings), Mumford and Sons (current fave song = "Winter Winds"), etc., etc.

waiting for: the FedEx dude to knock, so I can get mah new phone. One of the fancy Droid-things. I hope I can figure out how to work it. Byebye, chipped, slobbered-on, cracked-up Blackberry.

drinking: coffee, of course.

dreaming of: a sunset in Roma, a finished dissertation, some people I love.

recommendations at random

Tonight ends a week that flew by in a mad rush of obligations. Good ones, mind you. On Monday I went with my dad for a fly-by-night roadtrip back to Shreveport. I spent that evening at my best friend's house, surrounded by her babies, red wine (for us, not the babies), and a warm blanket. By Tuesday night, I was back here at home in Austin dealing with a technological crisis--the loss of my trusty laptop. My dad bought her (I think she was a her) for me back in the Spring of 2008, and since then she's been my constant companion--through the coffee binges of comprehensive exams, the perils of research, more of hours of procrastination that I'd care to count, and, lately, the tedious task of dissertation writing. Thanks to the Geek Squad at Best Buy, my documents are safe. And thanks to an amazing friend, I'll be back up and running soon. Friday I bid a weekend farewell to my sister, who jumped up to DC for a getaway weekend with the husband. And, yep, that left me as sole caretaker for an 11-month-old. Single parents everywhere, I want to buy you cookies. And hire you nannies. The little munchkin is my world, she lights up every second, never fail, but 4:55am wakeup calls wreck havoc on someone not used to rising much before 8am...umm...really ever.

Spending time at the house with her was comforting, though. I bummed around in old pajamas and performed a story-hour for her. We ate banana cookies and clapped a lot. In the evening after she went to bed, I caught up on book and music recs. And now I share them with you.

Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty--This novel repeatedly shows up on "top books of the last decade" lists, so I found a copy for six bucks at Half-Price (shout out!) on Lamar and gave it a go. The plot descriptions don't let on, but it's a coming-out story at its core--a witty, and often erotic (which is why the BBC rushed to make it into a mini-series), tale of a gay man society-jumping in Thatcher's Britain. All 1980s and coke references, part satire of wealth and part art history tutorial, the book is ultimately a cautionary tale. Love lust, but don't let it overtake you. Love beautiful things, but don't let them drive you. Enjoy yourself, but take care of yourself too. The language is efficient, sophisticated, sometimes clipped. Couldn't put it down, read by the light of a dim lamp one night as not to wake others...that hasn't happened in a long time.

The Weepies, album Say I am You--I stayed away from them at first, because they seemed WAY too much the new darlings of the indie crowd. But, alas, the buzz is correct. Soft voices, straightforward lyrics, the whole album feels like a lazy Sunday morning with coffee and crossword puzzles with a jilted lover. Weird, huh? Not if you're me. "No amount of coffee, no amount of time, no amount of whiskey, no amount of wine...nothing else will do. I've gotta have you." How can you beat that?

First Aid Kit--Teenaged sisters-singers from Sweden. I can't even properly describe how ethereal their music is. Listen to "Ghost Town" and "I Met up with the King"--better yet, watch the videos on youtube.

More soon.

xo