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+

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.

Highway 1: An Appreciation

A love for small-scale character-drive auterist masterpieces was not born in me at NYU film school. That happened much earlier, thanks to my late father, who introduced me to Raging Bull at age ten (whoa) and later, Clint Eastwood's directorial debut, Play Misty For Me.

Amazingly enough, American independent film wasn't born in a convenience store in New Jersey, or even in Austin, TX. No, way back in 1971, Clint and co. scrapped together the financing for this 16mm production which made incredible use of location photography in Carmel-by-the-Sea, including passages of the famous Highway 1. Still worth a spot on your Netflix queue, Play Misty for Me is a suspenseful precursor to Fatal Attraction with Clint as a late-night DJ stalked by an obsessed fan.

Perseverance

I don’t like walking around with a chair on my head. If given the choice, I’d prefer not to crazily wave my arms around and make animal noises. If you ask me to do an interpretative dance about a flower rising from the ground, I might just stand there, staring at the floor, wishing I could disappear.

So then what was I doing in an acting class? I’d always considered myself a “serious” writer and filmmaker, someone who could weave words or bits of film together into a seamless whole, so imagine how naked I felt when I had to leave those props behind in a special acting class for film students at NYU called “the Actor’s Craft”? I know I was completely out of my element with the improv games and the yodeling contests until the teacher asked us each to bring in a story. We were to perform a monologue about our “defining moment.” This, I could handle. I was a serious writer, after all.

I thought about one particular moment when I was ten years old, and I really wanted to play basketball. I thought about what I found when I showed up at the first day of practice at the City Civic Center Youth league: seven boys and the coach staring back at me as I entered the gym. I barely knew the difference between a point guard and a forward, except that one of them was supposed to be in the front, and suddenly I found myself in a group of boys who seemed to have basketball hardwired to their brains. I wasn’t sure which was more intimidating, running with these guys during games, desperately trying to find a footing, or afterwards, when I would head off by myself to the decrepit and disused women’s locker room. I remembered leaving that silent and empty space, going home and begging my parents to let me quit. They reminded me that I was the one who signed up, and so I would have to follow through with my intentions and play out the entire season.

It was this last part that I focused on in my presentation to Actor’s Craft. I skimmed over the misery and told the class about how the experience had defined my sense of determination. Every good story needs a driving theme, and I was sure that mine had one, something important about perseverance in the face of a challenge, stick-to-it-tiveness, never-give-up-and-you-can-achieve-anything-ness. Because if this story were a TV movie, could it end with anything other than this brash ten-year-old misfit sinking the game-winning three-pointer? Good stories demand creative license, drama, and by God, that was something I was prepared to deliver.

The teacher of Actor’s Craft didn’t ask for the TV movie version, though she did want us to use our defining moments for something that might demand a little creativity. She was going to assign each of us a partner, and we would meld our “defining moments” into something new and improvisatory. The details of the assignment grew hazy as I realized that I was to be paired up with my secret class crush: a brilliant flame-haired film student named Mike. I decided that I could learn to like this improv thing. The beauty of the actor’s craft was opening up to me, now that I could use it finesse a romantic subplot into the mix.

I went over to his dorm one night after class. I ignored the Grateful Dead he had playing in the background—I wasn’t going to let it spoil the mood as both of us circled in on each other’s “defining moments”. His was suitably grand and cinematic: he remembered watching the aurora borealis from the top of some mountain in Canada that he had hiked to with a Deadhead pal of his. Mike had been absent the day of my basketball monologue, so I told him the whole story.

I could see him thinking about it, as Jerry and the gang grooved on behind us. “I know it might be hard for you to relate to being the lone girl on all-boys basketball team. But really, it’s a story about . . .” I began. I could see that now was the time for self-revelation. And I decided to give him the real, unvarnished me, and not the TV movie version. “It’s a story about being . . . an outsider,” I finally said.

He thought about it, really tried to delve into his mental files of experience. For Mike was a “method” man; besides being a talented filmmaker, he had this acting thing down pat. He had no problem walking around with a chair on his head.

He scrunched up his face and frowned. “It’s just that—“ he began. “It’s just that I don’t think I’ve ever experienced that.”

I looked into his bright green eyes and they just didn’t seem as compelling. I was prepared to overlook the Grateful Dead thing, the tie-dyed shirts, the fact that he was just a touch, okay, maybe a lot shorter than me. But this? He had never felt like an outsider? My crush burned away like the cone of incense he had stationed on his tapestry-covered dresser. I could see now that we would never unite.

Still, our stories had to. “That’s okay,” I said. “Because, you know, it can be looked at in a different way, as a story about . . . perseverance.”

“Perseverance . . . okay,” he repeated. “So what about we’re both playing basketball, but we’re like really committed to the game, only the aurora borealis is up in the sky above us, while we’re playing . . .”

There’s always room for revision. An inept ten-year-old basketball player had gotten cut and so had my budding infatuation, but Mike still held out the promise of a happy ending. And as our newly minted universe lit up and took a life of its own, it was a small consolation but a real one: two happy hippies playing basketball with dogged determination while the Aurora Borealis glittered above them, the offspring of a union that was never meant to be.