Jump Around

It’s been a good reading week. I did enjoy the Shanna Swendson 'Kiss and Spell as much as I thought I would. I read Shanna’s blog, so I kind of knew that she was playing with the constructs of romantic comedy movies with this one, but I am a full on sucker for both rom-com tropes and having them turned on their heads. It’s hard to give much of a summary without getting into spoiler territory, so I’ll just give it a thumbs up. It’s a romance book with all that implies. Character development is limited to exposition in the spaces left between the action scenes, so we don’t learn a ton about the inner workings of any single character. You know, though, it doesn’t all have to be Proust. It’s fun and quick and surprised me a couple of times. It sounds like this will be the last in the series and I’ll miss Katie’s world.

I polished off Jim Gaffigan’s 'Dad is Fat in about 24 hours. It’s just Jim Gaffigan, talking about his 5 kids and how to raise them in a 2 bedroom apartment in New York.. It’s a quick read and funny, but it’s not the deepest book around. There are a number of jokes so corny they require rim shots, but he could read a take-out menu and I’d laugh. I heard his voice in my head while I read and that made it book much, much funnier than it deserved to be.

I moved from Gaffigan to Lauren Graham’s book, 'Someday, Someday, Maybe, but I’m not hearing her voice in my head. For some reason, I’m listening to 'Sutton Foster tell me about being a struggling actress in New York. I figured I knew Graham’s voice well enough to plug her right in after that many years of 'Gilmore Girls, but I guess I can only hold one fast-talking Amy Palladino lady in my head. I’m distracting myself with the inner narration, though, since Franny in Someday, Someday, Maybe is supposed to be in her early 20’s and I’m picturing a world-weary 40 year old telling the tale. Here’s the thing - Lauren Graham wrote a book, y’all. I don’t know why that stuns me, but I’m as proud of her as if I knew her. I might not even tell you guys if I don’t like it.

Cat’s in the Cradle

There’s a nice literary novel I’ve been waiting for and I got the call to pick it up at the library yesterday. But. They also had Ryan O’Neal’s autobiography in stock, too. I haven’t started reading the well-written and critically acclaimed book. Oh, please. Like you could have resisted Ryan & Farrah’s train wreck, either.

Rock Me Tonite (sic)

Did you know that Billy Squier blames the end of his career on our favorite drunkle (drunk-uncle) and So You Think You Can Dance-Dance-Dance choreographer Kenny Ortega? Squier was riding high, with three platinum albums, when Ortega directed his Rock Me Tonite video. It is, to be generous, a short film about a man in a pink tank top prancing around a bedroom set. Literal prancing. Billy Squier used to do this thing with his legs like he was goose-step dancing. Add in the satin sheets and smoke machine and it was pretty bad. I wouldn’t have thought it was bad enough to end his career – I mean, I’ve seen Prince’s “Bat Dance” video – but Squier is convinced that it destroyed him almost overnight.

I’m in the middle of two oral histories right now – I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution and R.E.M. : Talk About the Passion : An Oral History. I Want My MTV is HUGE, so I’m keeping it at home and reading it at night while I drag smaller books around with me. The MTV was one I was looking so forward to, and it’s good, but I find myself slowing down to hit the red lights and get a chance to read a page or two from the R.E.M. book. I’m not learning anything groundbreaking about the band, but it’s making me think a lot about what it feels like when your band becomes everybody’s band.

I’m old enough now that if I’ve heard of a band, there’s a certain level of popularity assumed, but it used to feel like a record was a present. There were the bands that were on the radio all the time and everyone owned them, but the bands you had to find on your own belonged to you and you didn’t really want them to get to stadium level popularity. I saw R.E.M. move from Bronco Bowl to stadiums, but I never saw them in a tiny club, so, while I had the early albums and loved them dearly, I wasn’t part of the first wave. I do remember the audience switch when “The One I Love” hit big and I do remember getting really frustrated at the sorority girls linking arms and singing lustily to “Eat for Two” by 10,000 Maniacs because they thought it was a love song. That still bugs me, actually, now that I think about it. Idiots.

I’m still reading both the books, but I’ll let you know if I get to anything earthshaking (And your feet are shaking ‘cause the earth is shaking). I’ll give them both a preliminary thumbs up for now.

Gimme Gimme

I never get to have a book stockpile. I read fast and I’m way too cheap to spend much on books that only take a day to read. I get a chunk of my books from the library, but they only belong to me for two weeks, so I read them as fast as possible. And the thing about library books is that for every ten books you check out, maybe one or two are books you really long to read. I’m glad to have quantity, but the new releases are few and far between. So, anyway, Amazon had a sale. Barnes & Noble had sales. I got gift cards. I haz stockpile.

It almost makes me giddy, to have two dozen unread books on the shelf (and the Kindle!). I don’t know what I did to please the Barnes & Noble gods, but they sent me coupons this year for 50% off one book (Yay, I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution), then 50% off any teen book (Will Grayson, Will Grayson), then 50% off unlimited teen books (these four, plus three more!).

It seems weird to pimp Amazon links for books that Barnes & Noble was kind enough to discount for me, but Amazon has an associates program that I’m part of. I get a few pennies for each link you guys hit through to Amazon, if you buy something. The best part is that what you buy doesn’t even have to be what I recommended for me to get credit, so I’d love it if you’d all go to Amazon through my site and let me keep the stockpile going. It makes me feel dirty rich!

This is just an aside, but you guys need to check this out – It’s called Old Love and it’s photos of famous people who used to date. I’m in deep love with it right now. There are couples I had completely forgotten about, striking a mortal blow to my reputation as pop culture maven, and some people who dated around a lot (Samantha Mathis, I’m looking at you, trampy.)

This Year’s Girl

I wish Mindy Kaling was my friend and we could talk on the phone all the time. Mindy is writer, director, and actor (Kelly Kapoor) on The Office and she’s written a terrific book, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns). It’s as funny and cute and likeable as Mindy seems to be, herself. It’s not pure fluff, there’s a deep seriousness that shows up whenever good comedians talk about the business of being funny, but it is light. I could quote from it all night, and probably will be chasing people down to “listen to this one thing” for a while, but this may have been my favorite -

Another old saying is that revenge is a dish best served cold. But it feels best served piping hot, straight out of the oven of outrage. My opinion? Take care of revenge right away. Push, shove, scratch that person while they’re still within arm’s reach. Don’t let them get away! Who knows when you’ll get this opportunity again?

Certain comics come up in Kaling’s stories, like Tina Fey, Kristen Wiig, and Amy Poehler. I like almost everything Tina Fey has done, (including not being totally ashamed that I saw Baby Mama in a theater), but I’ve never gotten any sense of how she is as a day-to-day real person, even after reading Bossypants. I have, for some reason, zero interest in Kristen Wiig. I don’t know why she doesn’t stick with me – I don’t dislike her work or anything. Something just occurred to me that is probably fightin’ words to Kristen Wiig. I think everything she can do, Christina Applegate can do better, so we don’t need her. She’s Christina Applegate light. But Amy Poehler. I don’t know if Kaling’s stories made me like Amy Poehler more than I already did, because she’s pretty high on my girl-crush list, but I would stand in line to read her autobiography. While you’re waiting for that book to come out, though, grab Is Everyone Hanging Out With Me? It’s a good read and, like Mindy says -

This book will take you two days to read. Did you even see the cover? It’s mostly pink. If you’re reading this book every night for months, something is not right.

Come As You Are

When I was in high school, a chunk of my friends were skater boys. In the mid- 1980’s, skater boys in our town were typically middle-class and generally pretty sunny in disposition and future. They were going to college and going to wind up lawyers and doctors just like their fathers. One of my friends, with red hair and the sweetest boy smile I had ever seen, went to Seattle and he died.

We’ve never quite known what happened to John. I’ve always had a hundred, thousand questions about his last two years, but there’s no one to ask. His family shut that door firmly, not even posting an obituary that any of us can find, so all that we have is speculation and rumors. I’ve always wanted to know if he was in college or working, was he a junkie? We’ve always heard that heroin was involved, but that can mean too many things to be any answer.

I’m reading Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge this week and I’m not sure why. I mean, I really will read an oral history on almost any topic, but grunge is not my music. Grunge really isn’t a music at all, just a label slapped on bands from a specific place and time. And, while I am from that time, I’m not from that place.
Seattle in the 1990’s is a dark, violent place. The musicians profiled in the book talk a lot of about how fun it was in the early days, in the 1980’s, but by the time the Screaming Trees, Alice in Chains, and Soundgarden are getting big, the scene doesn’t sound so fun anymore. (Guns ‘N’ Roses toured with Soundgarden and nicknamed them Frowngarden.) 

I guess when a handful of your friends get famous, it’s normal to think that it should be you getting the money and the record deals. And by the time Nirvana has come and gone, everyone is a cannibal. A surprising number of people in the book blame all the problems of Seattle on Courtney Love, which is kind of fascinating to read. It’s like she’s the Yoko Ono of an entire region, creating factions and isolations and death. She could have gone so many ways with her widowhood, becoming the beatific saint of musicians gone too soon, but I guess she really could only be what she is – too damaged and self-promoting and angry to do anything but lash out.

Oh, the deaths. The first few are shocking to Seattle musicians and they still remember that rawness these 20 years later. As the ‘90’s wear on, the scattered names of the dead become a roll call, with no surprise left. There are only a small handful of musicians profiled who didn’t die at some point. Apparently there are lots of ways to revive a dead man and the people in Seattle learned them all the hard way. They didn’t all come back to life, though, and I’m reading this account thinking that there must be dozens of dead audience members for every dead musician. There are people just like my friend in every concert photo. Kids who though moving to Seattle would fill some empty space in them and didn’t get to grow up. I guess that’s why I’m reading intensely - I’m looking for John on every page.

Pictures of You

Do you think when writers finish a book that they worry about what readers will take away from the stories? I read a few author blogs online and it seems likely that all they care about after finishing a book is not having to work on the book any more, but when a few months pass, the reviews on Amazon that say “You’re reading it all wrong!1!” may belong to the author. I’m always left pondering the weirdest stuff when I finish a biography – some throwaway line can keep me captivated for days. I’m probably supposed to be thinking about the author’s conversion from man into woman, and the political and social ramifications thereof, but days later I’m still pondering whether he/she is right about the difference in price between men and women’s haircuts mean that women are just suckers.

In Notes from the Underwire: Adventures from My Awkward and Lovely Life, former child star, Quinn Cummings (from Family and The Goodbye Girl) writes about her life after acting. As fine an actress as she was, I’m kind of glad she doesn’t do it anymore, because active actors don’t get to be as honest about the industry as Quinn is here and they don’t usually have the time to have a family life, much less examine it so closely. Quinn Cummings talks about her daughter a lot, which only makes sense in a book of essays about her life. She mentions at one point that, as they live in a very small house, they are hyper-aware of each other’s faults and tics. Her husband has a habit of singing one line of a song over and over, they all follow her into the bathroom, she has her own quirks. And then she gets to her daughter and say’s something like, “Alice has annoying habits, too, but since they mostly came from us, and are thusly our fault, we love them as much as we love her.” I’m totally paraphrasing, but that’s the gist. What an elegant way around the fact that her child is going to read this book one day and know that she was a normal kid with normal horrible crazy-making habits, and that she was loved both in spite of and because of them.

I read a LOT of mommy blogs, as one does when one is childless and not altogether sorry about that state. I don’t know what the bloggers think their intention is, but I am usually not left with the takeaway that having children is so delightful. Of course, it may be the mommybloggers that I choose to read, but it’s miles more fun to hear (from way afar) about the children that hit and bite and burn things. They rarely are able to create such a loving connection on the page and I’m always left thinking that this blogger’s child is an angel and that one is the devil on earth. Despite the constant mommyblogger refrain, simply putting words on paper (or screen) doesn’t make you a Real Writer, capable of depicting fully-rounded characters. Quinn Cummings is a Real Writer, and a really funny one, too.

This Woman's Work

There’s a new book out by Soleil Moon Frye called Happy Chaos: From Punky to Parenting and My Perfectly Imperfect Adventures in Between . I picked it up at the library and got about half-way through before it dawned on me that I was a childless woman reading a book of parenting advice from Punky Brewster. And not even deep parenting advice. It’s all, do what feels right and tomorrow’s another day. She does talk a little bit about the refrigerator episode of Punky, so that’s a point in her favor.

It’s a sweet little book, culled from her blog and filled in with anecdotes about her hippie childhood, but she must have been defiantly uncurious about childbirth before her first child. She mentions being shocked about several parts of childbirth & rearing that I would have thought were pretty common knowledge, like the fact that some women poop during delivery. I don’t know why her friends didn’t fill her in on that tidbit, because my friends have always listed it as one of the top talking points when discussing labor.

And I know I’m probably not going to ever have to make this call, but I’m not thinking that I want a football team worth of people in a delivery room with me. Soleil did, of course, including family and old friends and her birthing coaches Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher. Demi Moore apparently gives a great leg massage during labor. I’m thinking I’ll use Ricki Lake for my doula and Demi for my labor coach and George Clooney can be my focus object. And Soleil talked about music for the labor, how you would want tribal music for the hard labor and soft music for the resting times, but it seems like it would be hard to switch them on and off during contractions, so I think I’ll need Jane’s Addiction and James Taylor in the room with me playing live as the mood dictates. I’m sure the doctor can fit in there somewhere. My (hypothetical) husband can watch the game in the lobby – From that distance; I won’t be able to bite him (Hi, Gina. (((Waving)))).

Saturday Night's Alright (For Fighting)

Reading Rob Lowe’s book and the story about Tommy Boy made me pull out the oral history Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, as Told By Its Stars, Writers and Guests. I’ve had this book for years. I think I bought it for somebody’s birthday because I wanted to read it. They either didn’t want it as much as I did or I just took it back – I can’t remember and no takesy-backsy now, sucker. I love oral history and epistolary books written in letter or diary form more than any other styles. This book is huge and one of the reasons I sometimes long for a Kindle or Nook. I do have a Kindle on my phone, but the screen is so small that I’m going to have to get bifocals and reading glasses to add to my already giant glasses.

This book is fantastic, if only because the people interviewed are mostly comedians and not overly concerned with protecting feelings and goodwill. While I don’t want to date Chevy Chase (for so many reasons), I’m so glad that he’s willing to pummel and be pummeled in book form. In SNL history, there are a lot of people referred to as funny, a few lauded as genius, and then Chevy Chase. His fellow cast members really, really didn’t like him. The interviewers caught him at a perfect time, when he was enough older to recognize his part in the ill-will and still egotistical enough to think he was right. He and Bill Murray apparently got into some sort of fight that never quite tipped over into punches and the insult that everyone remembers best (decades after the fight) was Bill calling Chevy a “medium talent.” That kills me.

The early days and first few casts are explored in deep and loving detail, but as the years go by, the cast profiles get shorter and the interviews are mostly about Lorne Michaels. There’s a real sense of invention and experimentation in the early years, and that only makes sense, but as the show grinds on, it because a series of stories about how Lorne rescued whosie-whatsit from stand-up clubs and became their father-/god-figure. The best exceptions to this are the people who absolutely didn’t fit in at SNL, like Janeane Garolfalo and Norm MacDonald. They get to talk a long time about the faults of the show and network and that’s just good reading.

Oh, and did you know there were drugs at Saturday Night Live? Apparently they did some drugs there.

I can’t let any reference to Chevy Chase go by without reminding you guys to watch Community. It’s awesome good television. So is Parks & Recreation, and Amy Poehler is on that one. See, it all circles back to Saturday Night Live in the end. Maybe Lorne Michaels really is some sort of god? Oh, wait, Stuart Saves His Family. [Gilda Radner voice] Never mind. [/Gilda Radner]

Man in Motion

I just finished Rob Lowe’s autobiography. I have a deep love for autobiographies, anyway, with what people choose to include and leave out from their official life record. In the case of public figures, it’s most interesting because you already know so much about them. Rob Lowe, just for instance, chooses to barely touch upon his sex-tape scandal with two underage girls by explaining in one part of the book why he would have had no way of knowing they were underage and obliquely referring to the idea that he taped it simply because the technology was available, (I climb the mountain because it is there.) He didn’t have to say what he had done, catch us up on the back story, because we already know. In a weird way, the title Stories I Only Tell My Friends does refer to us in the public. We already know way more than the bare outlines of his stories, he’s just giving us the color detail.

Lowe’s stories are funny and quirky, and he seems to be a nice family guy. Now.  I was struck by his version of his relationship with Melissa Gilbert, who talked about their romance quite a bit in her autobiography. Lowe mentions that her mother thought he was after her for her fame and then sums up years of dating Gilbert as a hot-cold relationship when he’s talking about his affair with Natasha Kinski that blew the whole thing up. This man has slept with some women. He’s determined to make you see his sex life as a result of having trouble getting dates in high school, but he’s telling about girls who seduce him as a pre-teen, so it’s hard to be too caught up in his lonely pain.

Lowe tells a story about Chris Farley that breaks my heart a little. He and David Spade were at a steakhouse during the filming of Tommy Boy. He said Farley ordered two porterhouse steaks and put an entire pat of butter on each bite of both steaks. When one of them freaked out about the butter, Lowe said Farley giggled and said in his little kid voice, “It needs a hat.” That tiny portrait made me understand Chris Farley more than anything I’ve read. This man hated himself. I thought the drugs were the reason he was so messed up, but they were apparently just one more weapon he used in his battle against himself. I mean, there’s self-destruction and then there’s lighting dynamite and stuffing it down your pants.

 There’s some juicy stuff about The West Wing, for the Wing-nuts among us. Mostly contract and back-scene stories, but I’d love to get a great behind the scenes book about that series. They all thought they would last 8 episodes and then it became a juggernaut. What would that do to a cast of relative unknowns (except for Martin Sheen and Lowe) and their egos? Somebody without a stake needs to write that book for me, stat.

The other book I want to read is about Darryl Hannah. Lowe talks about the night he met her and she had on a fairy suit with wings (at 19) and didn’t sleep with him because she was saving herself for Jackson Browne, whom she hadn’t yet met. Some other biography, probably one of JFK, Jr., talks about her carrying around a teddy bear at a dinner party. In her twenties. I think she might be an interested subject or the whole book might be two lines. Darryl Hannah is beautiful and rich. And a whack-job.