The Awesome and Great Reading Show

The Awesome and Great Reading Show!

Hey everyone - I was away from the bert for a while due to technical difficulties but I'm back! And if I have any Austin readers who aren't facebook fans, please come to the show - this month we've got Tod Goldberg, Jill Alexander Essbaum, Amelia Gray and Kacy Crowley!

Writers write stories based on songs! Songwriters write songs based on stories!
It's backwards and bizarro awesome and great fun!

This May Be My Andy Rooney Moment

So picture me with white hair and a cranky look on my face while you read this:

What's the deal with Twitter? Or let me rephrase: Will someone please, for the love of god, explain to me what there is to like about this website, because I am truly, madly, deeply uninspired. Every day this is all I hear about, it's on the news, it's all over facebook, but try as I might, I don't get it. And I've been on there for months.

Granted, myspace and facebook each took me a while to warm to. But not this long.

I have experimented with following only close friends. I have experimented with following news organizations and celebrities. I, who am a known fan of exclamation points, find PTwitty's use exclamation points alarming. I, who has an unhealthy interest in celebrities, am unmoved by the opportunity to know Ashton Kutcher or Spencer Pratt's every thought.

What am I missing?

A lot of times I don't understand the shorthand. And correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like there's no rhyme or reason to the shorthand, like, everyone seems to have their own and you either get it or you don't. I have to say this too, and this may be just me, but it feels a wee bit like the cool kids party I'm not invited to. I'll give you that John Mayer has sort of a charming sense of humor, but what kind of relationship do we have where he gets to do all the talking? John Mayer and Demi Moore aren't going to answer my tweets. With all due respect, I can't even get Punky Brewster to answer my tweets, and she seems like a very sweet person.

If Lydia Davis and Deb Olin Unferth jump on board, maybe I'll be back. I think those gals make something out of that Twitter thing you kids are playing with these days. Meantime I'll grab my cane and stick with facebook until the next party comes along.

Naked City

Woke up at 3 am last night and came into the living room and found this program and had to stay up to watch the whole thing... I'm sure some of you have seen this or heard of it, but I had only the vaguest memory of hearing about it - anyway - by the look of it I figured it was very early 60s New York, black and white, and this episode featured Diahnn Carroll as a teacher for the blind or sight-impaired who takes a small group of her students on a city bus and then one of them runs off the bus, loses his glasses, and is lost in the city for the rest of the day. I didn't really know what to expect - it kind of looked like a cross between Dragnet and The Twilight Zone - but the location footage of NY was actually incredible; in this episode they went everywhere from the lower east side to Bethesda Fountain to the Brooklyn Bridge and into Brooklyn and gave you such a sharp sense of the landscape at that time. (Which was slightly before mine, I didn't arrive there until 67.) You could see Jewish delis, bakeries, bars, vegetable markets - and huge piles of rubble and dirt down along the east river - it's hard to think of any parcel of land in NY that's not built on at this point, but it reminded me so much of my childhood when things were a little rougher and darker than they are now. And to boot - this episode, anyway, was incredibly thoughtful - it wasn't so much a cop show as it was a really (really circa 1961) introspective drama - the teacher doubts her methods because she believes they can become independent until this kid gets lost - and then in the end he finds his way home because she had taught him he could. Another interesting detail that was only just dealt with under the surface was the issue of race - her boss is talking to her about it at one point and he's extremely empathetic but in so many words tells her that if this kid isn't found, she's going to be 'held more accountable' - and says something like 'you know what I mean?' Anyway, I can't be getting up at 4 am every night but I really want to see more of this show.

Plus Diahnn Carroll is wearing a really smart suit and looks totally fabulous through the whole ordeal. I tried to find a photo but no luck.

Shortest Conversation Ever In Which Both Parties Knew What the Other Was Talking About

Me: Yeah.
Ben: Yeah.

Alright, admittedly there was a slight bit of context. We were driving up Division Street past where Leo's Lunchroom used to be, and we'd driven past it about a week earlier, when I commented that I wondered if it was now part of Bob San.

Nevertheless, it made us laugh for about five minutes straight, and we decided to communicate like this from herein.

51 Birch Street

So, this mindblowing documentary is about a fifty-year marriage, and if you haven’t seen it, queue it up now, see it, and then come back and read this, cause I’m gonna spoil this too.



It’s a subject I have become really fascinated by ever since I got married – go figure – although you might think I’d have thought about it more deeply before, given that my folks were divorced, and I waited so long to get married. I mean, that wasn’t by accident. I knew I wanted to try to get it right if I was going to do it. But it wasn’t like I was mired in contemplation about my parents’ marriage, or either of their subsequent ones to any great extent. Probably just to the usual extent. Anyway. This guy starts out just by trying to document his parents and his family and then his mom dies, while he’s still making the film, and the father remarries very quickly (there should be an investigative documentary on this subject alone, I say) and slowly, more gets revealed about their history, and as he comes to think his father may have cheated with his new wife many years before, he discovers his mom’s extensive diaries, and it turns out she had been unfaithful, but that really, that was just one small thing, that she had profound feelings of unhappiness in her marriage, in her life, and all this stuff, and but, then in the end, it turns out that the father and his new wife are actually really in love, for the first time, and somehow all this ends up bringing the father and the son closer together, in letting all these secrets out.

For me, it just brings up, again, the central questions of – why do we do this marriage thing – when the odds are as low as they say they are – and how do we do this marriage thing, and what makes a marriage a good marriage or not a good marriage – are these questions all entirely individual? Or are there any universal truths? Are there cultural truths about it? You’d think I might write some fiction about this – and maybe I will – but I’m still figuring out what the questions are. Would love to hear what all y’all think about it, married, divorced, remarried, divorced parents, whatever. Maybe you can help me figure it out.

Bye, The Wire

Ben and I watched the last episode of The Wire last night. Oh, man. That was some good shit. Spoilers ahead, if you haven’t seen the whole series yet. Really amazing how they wove in all the storylines, and wrapped them up without it being all neat. And so perfect that in the end, they sort of show a sequence where it’s pretty clear that everything will more or less go on as always, in the form of different people and places maybe, but more or less the same. The whole last season, all I really wanted was that Bubbles would get clean, stay clean, and come up out of the basement, so needless to say I’m happy. And as much as I hoped Du’Quan would have a chance, I thought it was perfect that he sort of – took Bubbles place, if you will. I was totally bummed about Omar, and the worst part of that was that I actually saw that one episode out of order, before we’d started watching this season on DVD, at a friend’s house. I don’t know how any of you read this, but I actually thought the end for McNulty was kind of perfect, like, maybe if he weren’t a cop he and Beadie could have a chance. Anyway, goodbye, The Wire, it was great.

Omar.

Bubbles before.

Bubbles after.

More Awesomeness

So stoked that I figured out how to post this over here. This is my buddy Kacy Crowley (you need her record Cave) singing with the African Children's Choir the other night. We were there, and these kids were amazing, sparkling little lights. Try not to cry. I doubt it's possible.


Kacy with African Children's choir

November 4, 2008

I was not in Chicago for this, but Ben was in Grant Park that night, lucky! Anyway, you've seen a lot of the footage from the park that night, but he took this in the street, after everyone was leaving the park. Still cheering. Pretty rad. But actually, I'm still cheering now.

No Wonder Cardigans Are So Hard to Come By Lately

Okay, I am LOVING Mad Men for like sixteen different reasons, not the least of which is the wardrobe. Many of you know my obsession with vintage cardies, the truly special ones of which were increasingly hard to come by even before this show came on. I'll try not to cry too much, because the show is totally worth it. But if you see me repeating the same ones for a while, we can all blame Mad Men. Anyway, I have always loved the clothes of this era, although watching this show makes me really, really glad to be a woman in 2008 who can have the best of the clothes, without the foundation garments or the sexual harassment or the inequality.

NOTE: I have just finished watching Season One on DVD so if you lucky people have cable and you've seen Season Two, DO NOT TELL ME WHAT HAPPENS or I will come out in my nightie and shoot you with a BB gun.

Greatest. Thing. Ever.

The words I saw on my tv screen last night: President Elect Barack Obama.