No cliches were harmed in the making of this video

Let's not lie...air travel is the place where it's totally cool to watch eight hours of Kathy Griffin. On my first Virgin American flight, I got drunk on chardonnay and played video DJ and watched the following. Not having had MTV for quite a while, I was unsure about what the kids were into these days. Herewith, a sampling of my amateur observations.



Lupe Fiasco "Superstar"--In spite of myself I love this song, right down to the "Chris Martin called, he wants his act back" stylings of whoever it is does the chorus. Matthew Santos? Yeah, time for a new shtick, your whispery falsetto warbling isn't fooling anyone.

When I heard this song, judging from the verse where Lupe raps:

"So just take me home where the mood is mellow
And the roses are grown
M&M's are yellow
And the light bulbs around my mirror don't flicker
Everybody gets a nice autograph picture
One for you and one for your sister
Who had to work tonight but is an avid listener
Every song's a favorite song
And mics don't feed back
All the reviewers say you need to go and see that."

I pictured him as a chilled out, self-deprecating dude. And when you've written a song about wish fulfillment, you've got to cut against expectations. You have to, right?

I can't imagine was fool they hired to conceptualize this video. It bummed me out because I bet there was a million cool ways to do it. It could have been the hip-hop Hard Day's Night. You could have cast it with playacting kids like Bugsy Malone.

Instead, you get a dry ice filled cheesefest. Pyrotechnics spark out from his fingertips. Hoochie mamas coming out of the limos. Flashbulbs pop along the red carpet. What cliches did they not employ in the making of this video?

My grade: F



Yael Naim, "New Soul"--Okay, so Apple made you famous with your cute little ditty. To start, this video seems promising, with Yael moving into an apartment, no lip synching. But then she puts up some woodsy wallpaper, and then Yael is tickling the ivories, she's singing now, and the video inexplicably cuts to some dude in a field with a horn. She puts up pictures of all of her bandmates and then does crude drawings over all of them. Suddenly, there's a porthole in her apartment, she knocks down the walls and she's on some kind of hippie barge. The bandmates, on handpainted inner tube, will be right there. She dumps the goldfish in the river. Hey, that goldfish will never survive...but it doesn't matter, the hippies are dancing. You don't have to pay rent when you live on a barge. Score!

My grade: C-, sorry, cutie.

Fiest, "I Feel It All" (Embedding is disabled, but you can see it here.)

Fiest, I love Fiest. Sure, she's a chart-topping pop chanteuse, but she's not exactly a young thang, she's striking without being perfect looking (she wears a pair of jeans and an old striped sweater in the video). She has Peaches and Canadian music scene bona fides. She makes great videos that don't seem to have been dreamed up in an ad agency.

All the creative choices are kind of weird and non-commercial. I mean, are those red isotoner gloves meant to pick up the lipstick red of the oil drums? It may have been the Chardonnay talking, but I was just sitting back and thinking, this is the first time I've really felt something while working my way the queue.

I've got to hand it to Fiest. You get the sense that despite how annoyingly catchy her songs are, there's still something original about her, that she's really doing something that she cares about and that comes out in everything she does.

Love the crazy exuberant dancing, the sheer romanticism. I'll be the one to break my heart, indeed.

Grade: A+

OMG! Crack for wordsmiths: Wordle

Dudes, check it out...cut and paste chunks of your blog, you novel, your screenplay into Wordle.net, and check it out, you get a very artistic tag cloud. Wowowowowow. Genius.

This one is apparently from a german edition of that Ben Kunkel book:

...words, originally uploaded by Sebastian.r.

Try it now at www.wordle.net!

Review Thursday: Dissolute Cities

“Nothing in this book can be considered reliable or accurate,” reads the jackassy disclaimer of James Frey’s third foray into fiction, Bright Shiny Morning. I haven’t read the book, so I can’t comment on whether or not the writer who’s making self-aggrandizement cool again has mastered a sense of originality, I only remember being in the minority of people who thought A Million Little Pieces was corny and overblown. At the time I received of the phony memoir, I was reviewing books for the Quality Paperback Book Club, and I couldn’t fathom all buzz the book was getting. It’s main claim to fame seemed to be using Capitalization and punctuation incorrectly to Make. A. Point. Man. Also the bloody, no painkillers airplane scene. That was Intense. But it never seemed particularly Real. So Oprah revealed him as a Big Fake. Big Whoop.

This time around, people seem to be responding to Frey’s portrait of LA, or at least Janet Maslin is, pulling a Michiko Kakutani and writing the review of his book in his style. I just want to know why are people so impressed with writing like this, when there are so many similar, better books? It’s the same thing I thought when I picked up Charles Bock’s Beautiful Children. I had read it talked up in Elle (don’t mock me, they actually devote an admirable amount of ink to books), and so reserved a copy at the library. From all the advance notice, the book promised to be a riveting portrait of sketchy types in Las Vegas—you know, criminals! Broken dreams! Strippers! The porn industry! I like my salacious literary reads as much as the next girl, and I was all primed for a seedy vision of Las Vegas to wash over me.

Man, was I let down by this book. It felt as though the writer tried really hard but a book that should have been populated by the richness of intersecting lives had tumbleweeds rolling through it.

More than that, both books seem a pale shadow of an overlooked favorite of mine, a novel that takes a panoramic view of Los Angeles and delivers something funny, powerful, emotional, authentic and edgy. Not just James Frey posturing “edgy,” either. Really edgy. That book is I’m Losing You by Bruce Wagner.
In an overflowing plot too complex to explain, Wagner gets up close to the lives of everyone from a heartbroken studio exec to a crazy masseuse who believe she can steal people’s energy. What continually impresses me about his writing is how well he modulates tone—one minute biting and satiric, the next, emotional and lyrical. I’ve always thought that his deserving novels are not given the praise and attention they deserve because they are about Hollywood, and regular people, for some reason, don’t read Hollywood novels. But in I’m Losing You and the later Still Holding (and you have to get past the groaning phone lingo inspired titles) he draws a bead on the human experience in extremity and comes up with something as invigorating as it is wrenchingly emotional. Wagner’s books always make me want to write, and for a populated panorama of a dissolute city, these more recent contenders just can’t hold a candle.

The revolution will not have a Facebook page

It’s like it’s 1997 again, said one of the industry vets I was having lunch with at the IAB Social Media and User Generated Content Conference on Monday. If that’s the case, I want to know, where’s my ping-pong table? Why can’t I have a margarita machine in my office? Where is the launch party and, more importantly, my stock options?

Let’s face it, this is 2008. I’m not a millionaire on paper or anywhere else except the land called make-believe. Friendster, once the boon of noncommittal urban hipsters is now relegated to popularity only among Pilipino teenagers, and your grandmother has a Facebook page. Is social media the next big thing? In case you do not have the time or the cash to attend such an event, here is a summary of the day’s events:

Keynote: Seth Goldstein of Social Media

He talked about the social media challenge, how volume is up and effectiveness is down, but what struck me the most was how he mentioned his wife had come up with the term “social media” a couple years ago and they registered the URL. Which just goes to show you that when picking a mate, whimsical brilliance can go just as far as sheer dollars and cents in terms of net worth. Try to shack up with someone who thinks of good ideas and registers those domains, as your beloved may be in possession of the next google.com type idea!

It's All About Performance.... Isn't It?, with a bunch of people from DoubleClick BuzzLogic and AvenueA Razorfish

I love it when marketers talk about harnessing the power of the social media frontier. They are herding cats, as it were. That’s not the right expression exactly. What’s the term for taking a giant grass-roots movement and when your brand happens to come up, acting like you’ve influenced it? David-and-Goliathism? When David is the marketers and Goliath is the user base? There’s an anarchic side of me that loves this—that if you were in a pessimistic mood, you could say that marketing is in everything, or if you’re a believer in the social media space, you could say that people are taking control of brands from marketers.


Consumer Panel with Ideas to Go

Couple of things that I noticed here: focus groups are always funny. This was a group of so-called “creative consumers” who are impaneled by a group called Ideas to Go. They are like these strange animals, these people who do not work in marketing. They are seventeen year olds worth being flown out to sit on a stage in front of two hundred puzzled marketers in suits. The company had them list “social medias” that they consume. The moderator seemed like a sort of actor who rolled big, jargony words around on his tongue.

Facebook workshop

Again, I sat there wondering—are these marketers really creating phenomena on social media sites, or at they witnessing phenomena and then claiming credit? There was a dude who markets Proctor and Gamble brands like Tide with public outreach efforts like one called “Loads of Hope.” You can buy a hipsterish ironic t-shirt with a retro Tide logo and all proceeds with go to New Orleans, where presumably laundry detergent money washes away all sorrows. I was thinking there’s so little brand differentiation among detergents—they are all bright boxes with splashy comic book-like lettering—that it seems a bit of a lost cause to try and stand out. Yeah, it may be cool to wear your retro Tide shirt, but does that really make anyone think about the brand? I wasn’t sold on it.

There are days I long to escape to a land with no marketing in it. What would such a world look like? Is it a magical place in Canada that you can only reach by dogsled? And can you give me some directions?

Review Thursday: On the ampersand

via Conor and David

In movie credits, the ampersand is a code. It means: John Doe & Jane Smith duked it out in a room over this script, one choking the other with second-hand smoke and the other spitting in the other's coffee. The dreaded "and" means different writers were employed at different times: John & Jane got sacked and Quentin Tarantino was called up for a punch up job. As a device to help me remember the difference, I think: tied together, the ampersand means the writers were tied together.

With it's curving sweep, the ampersand is a saucy shorthand for "and," which is why it surprises me that it's so common in the British writing I see at work.

Wikipedia notes the growing use of the ampersand due to text messaging.

And if you enjoy this seductive bit of punctuation as much as I do, you may want to check out the Ampersand blog, a treatise on all things, and only things, ampersand-related.

My week without the internet

I feel bad about depriving my loyal readership of six or seven people of their daily dose of news about Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, not to mention the macro photography of erotic scenes painted on grains of rice they have come to expect. I have my reasons for the silence however; inspired by a documentary I saw on the Amish, I decided to unplug for a whole week, and lucky for you, I kept a diary of the whole ordeal...

My week without the internet

Day 1:

9:22 AM: So I’ve finally decided to do it. No Internet for seven days. Figure I would be capable of so much if I didn’t spend so much time on Gawker and Celebritysighting.com.
Like a surgeon, I open up my laptop, lift out the beating heart its wireless connection, and hide it from myself.

12:01 PM: Sit outside and look at trees. Wonder what kind of tree that is in my backyard. Or why plants grow toward the sun. Or why the sun circles the earth. Or what ancient cultures thought the world was round. Or whether Earth, Wind, and Fire ever wrote a song about the sun, and whether I should write about it for when I can update my blog again. Redouble effort to read entirety of Proust. Wonder why they changed the name of Remembrance of Things Past. Wish I could still use Google. I’d only need it for 10 minutes. Know I must resist.

Day 2:

9AM: First day of work without Internet. Explain to boss I won’t be online. But you’re a web designer, he says. You don’t have to surf the web to be a great designer, I reply. But what about Outlook? I say to him that all of us sit in a big round open space. We can just shout back and forth.

Day 3:

Days at work seem long. Have much time to sit and think. Hours seem sharply delineated and endless. Pain in head getting worse.

Day 5:

10:50 PM: Take a copy of Cook’s Illustrated to a local watering hole, where I sit and nurse a Jack and Coke and pour over directions for a crown rack of lamb. Some dude comes up to me and asks if he can buy me a drink. I want to say, what is this, the ‘70’s? but he does seem cute and nice. Realize I have dated anyone I’ve met IRL, as it were, since 2004.

We end up talking about all sorts of things, the Great Wall of China and skateboarding. Why there’s no nutrition in celery. It’s the most stimulated I’ve been for, well, weeks. At the end of the conversation, he asks for my email. I tell him I’m not using the Internet for a month, and my various reasons for my decision, and maybe I went on too long, because this look came over his face and he said: If you don’t want to see me again, you don’t have to be sneaky about it. I said, wait, you can have my phone number. I’ll make you a rack of lamb! But by then he’s gone. Some people are just insecure.

Day 7:

Some things that people might not be aware of about old-timey hobbies: knitting takes a lot of patience. The costs of setting up a blacksmithing shop are prohibitive. And beekeeping? Let’s not talk about beekeeping.

Now, where did I put my wireless card?

Picture Monday: Top Secret Attack Band in Prospect Park

IMG_0185, originally uploaded by Brooklyn Bridge.

"Everyone is unusual in their own way": an interview with the creator of functionally ill

Laura-Marie Taylor has been a friend of mine since we met when we were teenaged aspiring writers at the California State Summer School for the Arts. Geography separated us then; she was from the Central Coast and I from SoCal, but we still managed to visit with each other from time to time throughout high school and college, and now that we are separated by 3000 miles, the internet has brought us together once again. It's online that I discovered Laura-Marie's blog, Dangerous Compassions, and also one of her zines, functionally ill: adventures with mental health, that offers a personal view of mental illness, its treatment, and implications in one person's daily life.

What struck me when I first started reading functionally ill was how much my ideas about mental illness were formed by books and movies that portray sufferers in dramatic extremes: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Girl Interrupted, Prozac Nation, etc. functionally ill really got me to thinking about the reality, that there are millions of people are living with mental illness, holding jobs, going to the grocery store, etc. We just don't get to see accounts of the day-to-day experience. I found functionally ill's treatment of the subject really fascinating, and I wanted to open up a conversation with its creator about what inspired her. So what follows is our interview, conducted over email last week.

AJM: Can you talk about whether you've thought at all about where your zine fits into the pantheon of mental illness literature? Maybe you could also talk a little about what inspired you to start the zine in the first place.

LMT: I don't consider functionally ill as having a place in the mental illness literature pantheon, but I do see it as having a place in the zine world. Years ago I read a zine by Megan Gendell called Clark 8 which is an account of a stay at the mental hospital: articulate, sharp, intimate. I will always be grateful to Megan for showing me what's possible in mental illness writing. There's a whole genre of mental illness zines, mostly about depression, anxiety, and self injury. I'm happy to find myself within this genre and believe I have something to give.

As for what inspired me to start the zine in the first place, I wrote issues one and two with an intense need to communicate my truth. Another reason was to shed light on a shady topic. Friends wanted to know what my voices say, for example, and I was happy to provide that information. I've been creating zines for a long time, and it's natural now. Also, I write functionally ill for my mom. She readseach issue multiple times. I feel safer knowing that other people understand my life. I'm expanding the community of people who care about me. And I've received the most moving feedback from other mentally ill people and their family members.

AJM: Another idea in your zine that really intrigues me is the idea of "identifying" as a mentally ill person in the way that someone might identify as gay. You write about how the ability to take up such a mantle is something of a relief, because it allows a person to stop having to pass for somebody else's idea of "normal," whatever that might mean. The other way of looking at such an identification is, of course, political. The Icarus Project, for instance, critiques the concept of mental illness as a dysfunction rather than a different way of being in the world. How do you feel about such constructs?

LMT: I struggle with these constructs. Ideally, everyone should be out about everything. So many people are suffering in closets of isolation. Telling the truth about our lives is a step toward authentic experience. Also, a good example helps other people feel okay about telling their truths. We discover that everyone is unusual in their own way, and life becomes more refreshing.

I remember after I wrote issue one of functionally ill and gave it to friends. A week later, my friend Paul said, "So, you're crazy."

I said, "Yeah."

"Me too," he said. "Everyone's crazy."

Later he and I had another conversation about it. I asked him, "Do you hear voices too?"

He said, "No. I wish I did. That would be cool."

In my life, it's mostly fine to hear voices: they're just chatty. They're not a big deal. But some days it's really a burden, the days the voices get screamy in particular. It's scary to have something going on in my head that's disturbing and I can't make it stop.

I told Paul that we all draw the line somewhere, and I would say someone's actually mentally ill when she's dangerous, to others or to herself.

"You don't seem dangerous to me," Paul said. And I don't seem dangerous to most people. Does everyone have a secret life? I've spent my whole life refining my wellness performance. Some days I do a better job than others.

I guess everyone has performances. But I never gave Paul issues two or three.

AJM: Many of the history's greatest artists and writers, like Van Gogh and Emily Dickinson, have been "diagnosed" as being mentally ill. What do you think about the role mental illness plays in artistic creation—a means of insight or a hindrance? And how do you think medication might interact with the thought and creativity required to create writing or art?

LMT: Sometimes I want to go off all my medications and be crazy because my best art has been created during extreme emotional states. Also, when I'm manic, I write with an incredible urgency. I feel compelled to stay up all night writing: issue two of functionally ill was written during a manic episode.

Mental illness is a hindrance to making art in that it causes artists to kill themselves. If I could get away with it, I would live without medication, but I don't want to die. When I made the decision to try mainstream methods, it was a last resort, and medication is part of that package.

As for what role mental illness plays in artistic creations, that's a fascinating question. I don't think it's a coincidence. It must have to do with extremes. My favorite bipolar hero is my favorite novelist Virginia Woolf. I actually don't know a lot about her life besides a few basic facts—a little about her relationship with her husband and her death. I want to be like her in all the good ways and not be like her in all the bad ways.

Check out past, current and future issues of functionally ill. For more information write to: robotmad at gmail dot com.