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.

Secret Lovers

In case you missed it last time, I’m going to direct you once again to Old Love. I don’t have anything to do with it, which is a real shame. I follow it like it’s my night job, so it would be lovely if I got a kick-back. Did you know that Tori Spelling and Julian Lennon dated? That kills me. And this week there has been a mighty series of Rod Stewart/Britt Ekland shots where Rod is wearing an orange and grey tankini. He has a matching tank top and bikini bottom/speedo thing and there is nothing now that I don’t know about Rod Stewart’s anatomy. Oh, and on January 30th? There’s a shot of Diane Lane and Christopher Atkins and they both have the most odd, sweaty, painful looking camel-toes I have ever seen.

I have been doing more than staring at the crotches of celebrities this week, of course. (Don’t act so self-righteous. I know you just spent 10 minutes trying to figure out the deal with Christopher Atkins pants, too.) I might have maybe read a book or two. The only problem is that they weren’t very memorable. I usually read three or four books for every one I talk about here, but I’ve either hit a chunk of duds or I’m too busy to give them the thought and attention they so richly deserve. When something deserves the benefit of the doubt, it’s certainly more likely to be me than a lifeless lump of paper, so let’s just say that several authors wasted months of their lives and I am just fine. Let’s all just go back to looking at photos of Liza Minnelli & Mikhail Baryshnikov, shall we? We’ll try this book review thing again a little later in the week.

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.

Words Can’t Bring Me Down

I meant to write at least two posts every single week, but the holidays have knocked me back to one. I could blame it all on the work obligations (true) and social whirl (maybe a little less than advertised), but the real culprit is obvious. It’s stupid Words with Friends. I’m not an addict or anything. I don’t play in church or at the dinner table and that only has a medium amount to do with the fact that I can’t ever remember to turn off the popping bubble sound effects and my preacher and/or mother would take away my phone. I do have a lot of games going at once, though. I’m convinced that I’ll learn something new about people by playing them, so I mostly choose opponents I’d like to know better. So far, I’ve only learned who’ll apologize for playing ‘tooters’ and who’ll admit that they have no idea what a word means, but the computer accepted it, so it’s their new favorite ‘q’ word. No one ever trash talks, though, so I either have extra nice friends or we’re secretly Canadian. 

I have been reading, though. I’ve recently finished Entwined, a retelling of The Twelve Dancing Princesses. Apparently. This wasn’t a fairy tale I knew, so I just looked it up and it’s got some parts that link up, certainly. In any case, the 12 princesses are thrown into mourning at the death of their mother and not allowed to dance for one year. They are angry at their father, who is distant in grief, and determined to keep their spirits high during the year of mourning. A secret passage leads to a magic ballroom where the girls can dance all night. A man named “Keeper” controls the ballroom and would like to have the princesses under his control, as well. The parts of the book that aren’t full of fairy-tale darkness and danger are mostly concerned with the girls’ love lives. No one is in love with whom they should be, but all will be well. All will be exceedingly well.

I read The Julian Game, too. The cover with the blue-wigged girl and the freaky gloves. Popular girl uses nerd girl to help punish a hot boy they both like. The hot boy likes the nerd girl for a whole week or two before he goes back to his default boy-tramp mode. Popular girl punishes nerd girl with cyber bullying during her week of bliss. Nerd girl overcomes all with the knowledge that popular girl isn’t really that happy after all. Blurg. I know I shouldn’t be encouraging impressionable young people to take revenge, (It’s only for adults, like Kahlua), but COME ON. Nerd girl has popular girl’s computer password and can smack popular girl into civility, even if she can’t force her to be sorry, but it’s enough to know that popular girl is only mean because she’s unhappy? Like fun it is. Loser.

Pac-Man Fever

On the back cover of Ready Player One, the reviewer blurbs are full of people I’ve never heard of, who have written books I’ve never seen. But, the first review is from Charlaine Harris, who wrote the Sookie Stackhouse/True Blood books. I don’t have the book in front of me, but her blurb says something like, “I don’t know anything about video games and I loved this book!” It’s an obvious bid to woo the ladies to read the book, but I’m with Charlaine.

The book focuses on a not-so-distant future, when everyone is plugged into a virtual world for most of the day and the real world has become a Mad Max kind of place. The creator of the virtual world, James Halliday, has died and his fortune is held in escrow until a gamer manages to find three keys and go through three gates. Halliday is obsessed with the 1980’s, so almost everyone in the world has become an expert on the decade. That, of course, was the hook for me. I wasn’t lost during the focus on gaming, but I certainly wasn’t enough of a geek to know programmer trivia or cheat codes for Pac-Man and I really don’t know much more about Dungeons and Dragons than the basics.

I’m going to tell you that the book was pretty long, and it focused on one main gamer who didn’t go outside for weeks at a time, his best friends who he’s never met in person, and an evil corporation determined to win Halliday’s inheritance and control of the virtual world. There’s endless 80’s pop culture references and the vast majority of the book is descriptions of a virtual landscape or games within the game. Ignore all that and read it anyway. It’s as engrossing as any adventure movie and moves just as fast.

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.

Take a Look. It's in a Book.

I started an account on Goodreads this week and I think I’m maybe a little obsessed. You can list the books you’ve read, the ones you’re reading, and the ones you’d like to read. It throws lists of recommendations at you and you just click them into the appropriate categories, including “not interested.” At the time I’m writing, I have 1,371 in my read pile and 72 in my want to read pile. I haven’t even really started to list my books, and I’m a little traumatized because they don’t seem to have all the Wildfire Y.A. books from the 80’s even listed, so it won’t ever be complete. 

Really, if I could turn half of this energy towards cleaning my house I might invite people over more often. I picked up the The Manolo Matrix last week, companion to the The Givenchy Code (and, apparently, the The Prada Paradox, but I didn’t know this book existed and had to stop and add it to my shopping cart in Amazon.). The book is about people getting sucked into an online Gotcha!* kind of game called Play.Survive.Win. that moves from the computer into real life. The victims are sent elaborate clues & riddles to solve in order to save their lives and end the games. In the Givenchy Code, the clues related to codes and I think I had just read some Dan Brown book about codes, so I had some idea what in the world the clues were referencing, but in the Manolo Matrix all the clues were about the theater. I couldn’t even pretend to follow the reasoning behind the clues. It was like when I play old-school Trivial Pursuit and answer every sports question with Wayne Gretzky or Sea Biscuit. This strategy works pretty well, actually, to get that little pie wedge, but, strangely enough, the answer to every clue in this book was neither Cats nor Starlight Express**.  Maybe in Prada Paradox the clues will be about Little Debbie's eponymous snack food line. 

Julie Kenner also has an outstanding series of books under the Adventures of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom heading. They’re Buffy the Vampire Slayer gets married and moves to the suburbs, and they’re super funny and sly. And I see from her Wikipedia page that she lives in Texas, now, so I’m even happier to recommend her books. I also see that I haven’t entered the rest of her titles into my Goodread account, so I’ll be headed down that rabbit-hole for the rest of the night. Heaven forbid I not get credit for a book I’ve read.

*Gotcha is an awesome 1985 movie with Anthony Edwards where a campus-wide game of paintball gets real, y’all, when some spies need some secret information that Linda Fiorentino has planted on him. Mostly memorable because Czechoslovakian spy Sasha (Linda) is really CIA agent Cheryl from Pittsburgh and the weariness in her voice when she drops the (really, really bad) Czechoslovakian accent and says “Fine, it’s Cheryl.” in this beautifully flat voice, it’s the equivalent of coming home after work and taking your bra off.

**Starlight Express is about a train that comes to life. And the actors are on roller skates. And Wikipedia says, “It is the most popular musical show in Germany.” I don’t know why this wouldn't be the answer to every question about musical theater, do you?

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.