Stereotypes about Los Angeles I have absorbed from the pop culture

On the eve of a transcontinental jaunt, these notes to self:
The streets are empty and filled with whimsy. Paul Thomas Anderson made me think this, Punch Drunk Love. I remember thinking, this is the way Southern California feels: flimsy, spacious, bruisey pastels. A little like a forgotten backlot.
They have a vastly superior food scene. Many things have cause me to think this. Going for Okonomiyaki (savory Japanese pancakes) with a friend and her father when I was a child. My sister's hole in the wall vegetarian Indian place in a strip mall near her house. Reading Chowhound posts about Taco Trucks. Jonathan Gold's expeditions. Diddy Reese.

If accepting J.C. as my personal savior would bring an In 'n' Out to NYC, sign me up. People, come on. If you'd tried it, you'd know.
Despite NY's superior literary heritage, Angelenos have Miranda July. How does she do what she does without being totally annoying? I don't know. Why can't I be more like her? The jury's still out.
The music scene rules. Again, this started in childhood, Sean and I driving to the Roxy in his Ford Escort, going to see Lush or the Pixies at the Hollywood Palladium. Now I listen to Morning Becomes Eclectic every chance I get. In New York, seeing a show invariably a hassle; in L.A., enchanting singer-songwriters grow on palm trees. They work at Book Soup.

These ideas I have are crazy. I am a native Southern Californian, and I should know better.

Still...I want my trip to be weird, illuminating, delicious. Look for me at sporting a copy of No One Belongs Here More Than You at Father's Office.

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

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

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Review Thursday: It pains me to say it, but...

It's unfortunate when you are the second book to write about layoffs and office life in the first-person plural. Man, would that suck, but such is the zeitgeist. I'm trying to write about fictionalized office life, so I'm interested in books that do it well. Because working is boring, writing about work is boring. When a writer captures the mundane and stifling in a fresh, even inspiring way, it's a truly remarkable accomplishment. When books about work take off, I think it's through capturing some kind of idiosyncratic singularity (like Ferris's book or the underrated Big If by Marc Costello) or the workplaces is a kind of accessory to the an overall commentary they are making to American culture (Palladio).

Another book I'm looking forward to reading is Among Other Things I've Taken Up Smoking, if for no other reason as it has an amazing title. Also, More Than It Hurts You, by a former teacher, Darin Strauss. It's gotten great notices, and I like the is-it-or-isn't-it premise about Munhausen by Proxy, and the attendant satirical tone.

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.

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.

To do list

• Arrive at Penn Station.
• Call Sally Hayes
• Grab a taxi.
• Ask cabbie about the Central Park ducks.
• Check in at the Edmont Hotel.
• Set up appointment with Faith Cavendish
• Go to the Lavendar Room to meet Marty, Laverne, and Bernice Kregs.
• Ernie's in Greenwich Village.
• Walk two miles back to the Edmont hotel.
• Talk to Allie.
• Pretend bullets in gut.
• Go to sleep.

Review Thursday: Into the Wild, book and film

You're either the type of person who comes alive in the presence of others, or else you need to get away from people in order really feel yourself. I mention this because I think your identification with one role or the other will probably determine much of they way you feel about Into the Wild, either the Jon Krakauer book or the Sean Penn film.

Watching the DVD the other day reminded me how engrossing I found this story when I first read the book. The hero of the nonfiction story, Christopher McCandless, aka Alexander Supertramp, really calls into question the prevailing attitude that solitude inevitably means loneliness. Conjuring an archetype honed by everyone from Henry David Thoreau to cranky naturalist and Desert Solitaire author Edward Abbey, the Krakauer book grapples deeply with a forbidding yet fascinating topic: being alone.

What would it feel like to just check out of society? Burn all your money? Spend day upon day by yourself, out in the wild? I don’t know many people who could embrace such deep solitude, so, by virtue of that accomplishment alone, I’m fascinated by McCandless.

At the same time, I know that the book and movie are both guilty of romanticizing this character. They want him to be one-of-a-kind, when certainly there are things about McCandless that are of a kind: there’s something about the guy that suggests the sort of self-righteous, fanatical hippie that probably everyone knew in college (exhibit A: when he gives himself the dopey moniker Alexander Supertramp). The hubris of a young twentysomething man--also, of a kind. The Penn film, particularly, lets McCandless of the hook for not having developed the skills to survive in the Alaskan wilderness.

Still, I was surprised how much the film was able to evoke fundamentally internal states. In both the book and the film, there is something really haunting about McCandless’s demise, when it’s certain that McCandless wasn’t feeling the life-affirming joy of self-reliance, but instead desolation…and loneliness.

How easy it is to slip between solitude and loneliness is certainly a worthy subject, and one that the book is able to cover much better than the film. But both portray a fascinating story that I think is worthy of consideration.

"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.