dreams can come true...

It is rumored that there might be a VERONICA MARS MOVIE! This is unbelievably exciting. It'll take a few years at least, but the mere thought has set me all a-jitter.

Manufactured Desire

The thing about New York...is fashion. It's not really an industry in Austin or Swarthmore- both of these places share a sort of anti-consumerist green fashion. But NYC is home to Project Runway and the Bryant Park fashion shows, SoHo and Chelsea. There is an Uptown style and a Downtown style and of course the Williamsburg hipster scene.

And what this does to me is make me want things that I don't really want. Like a Chanel purse or (another) Coach purse. A Tiffany necklace. An entirely black wardrobe. A UWS apartment. Four inch heels. Huge chunky necklaces. It's just that the women you walking down the street are so in tune! The majority of female New Yorkers pay attention to fashion and try to stay on the ball or even ahead of the curve. And it seems like such hard work!

The subtext to all this fashion is status. Like peacocks, fashion is way of displaying fine plumage. There are two kinds of status that are the most obvious for me to read on the streets: "cool" punkness or wealth. Those who want to be read as cool have a sort of Olsen Twins grunge look but it's still incredibly expensive grunge. Then their are the clean, manicure females who have obnoxious ugly Louis Vuitton bags.

And then there are things I find myself wanting despite every brain cell in my head. Like a Chanel purse, the trademark of the ultimate clique girl, Lauren Conrad. I pretty much hate everything she stands for but I want her purse? Some part of me wants the "look at me" aspect of owning such a status symbol. Maybe its like having six pack abs for a guy. But I don't want the Vuitton purse, which I associate with Jessica Simpson (hello, chicken of the sea). Whatever. Right now I'll just poke around and see if their are any good fakes. Now that's a fashion statement I can live with.

notes on life

1) this is my 101th post!

2) I disapprove of the New Yorker habit of watering side walks. Really, concrete doesn't need water to grow.

3) If you walk through the flower district in Chelsea on your way to work (like I do) then NYC smells like lilacs

4) apparently you can write off your cable and internet bills if you work at a television station. I'll have to look into that.

Beijing 08

why are the girls on the US gymnastic team wearing scrunchies? scrunchies!!! get with the times, girls. and while you're at it, could you stop with the plucked eyebrow dark blond clone look? its a bit scary.

okay so im not so much into the sports side of the olympics. so sue me.

major shout out to my man:

Pieter van den Hoogenband!!!

the official HOTTIE Of the Olympics. I've loved this guy since Atlanta 1996- ya'll that's more than a decade! I was 11 when I first fell in love.

http://en.beijing2008.cn/spirit/pastgames/halloffame/v/n214046860.shtml

HAIR!!!!!!!!!! long beautiful hair...

Last night I went to see Hair in Central Park. Talk about a NYC experience! Hair is very much about NYC and a bunch of it takes place in the park. It was neat how they used the space: the stage was merely a half moon of cropped grass surrounded by a curved fence which was also used as stage space- the actors were continuously hopping on stage from behind the fence or going back over the fence, or perching on the fence and surveying the audience. It was a reference to Central Park right beyond the stage and the fact that the show was free and open to the public, embodying the hippie ideals of the time.

On the free side, the show was ridiculously easy to get into. I joined the Virtual Line the night before at midnight (which means I clicked a button) and wa-la! I went to pick up my tickets that next day. So it was a bit hilarious to hear the people behind me talking about how they spent the night in the park or got there at 5 am to wait in line for 6 hours for tickets.

Now the show was fantastic. The songs were unbelievably harmonized and full of energy. The leads, especially the girl who sang "Aquarius," were rocking it out of their souls. Berger was sexy sexy and Claude was genius genius. Chrissy sold "Frank Mills" to the audience in a way that stole the show. It was quite touching to hear a girl in the subway after the show singing "But unfortunately, I lost his address...": I thought Mom would have loved that moment when one her favorite songs becomes popular again. Only Shelia was a bit weak and I found her rendition of "Easy to Be Hard" lacking in heartbreak and soul- it was too much of a ballad.

In the second half, the plot got left behind and Hair entered a drug induced haze of random snatches of song, which was enjoyable to a degree. I got treated to the gems "Black Boys/White Boys" and "What a Piece of Work is Man" but other wise there was a major loss of editorial discipline, which I suppose is expected. But it ended on a great bang with "Let the Sunshine In" when the cast invited the audience to come dance on stage.

What an awesome experience! Thank you New York and Hair! :)

Sci-mance

Recently I read two interesting books- The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegge and The Host by Stephenie Meyer. Both are science fiction by female writers featuring a Love meets Sci-Fi approach. They are both novels that focus on a heterosexual romance as the main tension and make this trite approach more compelling by interweaving science fiction (for Time Traveler, obviously it was a time traveling male lead, for The Host it was an alien female protag). Now, if we wanted to be really simple we could imagine this new/revived/niche brand of books as

the romance novel + the science fiction novel= sci-mance
OR
a traditionally female genre + a traditionally male oriented genre

both with lower class/taste associations (trashy paperbacks, either one) but with enormous fan cultures. This hybrid breed of rom-sci or the scimance could possibly be linked with the success of Lost, as Brilliant Brandy points out. or Battlestar Galactica, a futuristic melodrama. I enjoyed Lost a lot more when it focused on the emotional relationships of the survivors and less on weird smoke monsters. But it's an interesting clash of two gender associated genres.

It brings to mind Buffy, but I think there's a gender difference between magic/fantasy and science fiction. Which is the reason I'm not going to talk too much about Meyer's Twilight Saga. The vampire myth is very much still rooted in the gothic romance rather than the futuristic science stuff I'm talking about here.

But back to my original point: TTW vs Host. My problem with the Time Traveler's "wife" was that it wasn't really about wife/Clare at all. Once again, we have a woman waiting while the action goes on around her. She really does nothing at all, has no growth, makes no interesting choices. Now, I did not hate the book. I actually give it a B+ for originality and trying to give equal shares to both Henry (the typical male action-maker, who travels constantly through time) and Clare (the literal "stay at home" or "stay in time" wife). But did the sci-fi stuff save it from presenting a sort of traditional Peter Pan-esque tale of courtship? No. At the end, Clare is clearly a version of Wendy, old and wrinkled, waiting at the window for Pan to visit her before she dies. She has chosen to grow up and old, to give up hectic age defying maneuvers and the chaos of constant action seeking.

But The Host was cool. I think that's exactly the right word. I enjoyed it so much, both academically and on an escapist level. It's about a breed of aliens that take over the bodies of whoever they invade. For example, they might live in seaweed on oceanic planet or in the bodies of dolphins or humans. In this case, it was a female alien named Wanderer who took over a human female body. This female presence was the protagonist- it was her journey, she was the different one, and it was her story. Her male romantic figure sort of followed her about and provided interest to the story. This is not a "great" novel: it is very fun pulp fiction, in a Veronica/Buffy way. The sci-fi frame was a great way to explore what it means to be human, to have a soul, to have different ideas about living- and dual personalities!

Point being, The Host was refreshing in the way it actually let a female be the true protagonist. It is a love story, and a science fiction novel, but it is also a book that sets the stage for a female figure to go on a voyage of self discovery.

So the scimance has a new mission:

To explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no woman has gone before.

it's an August Rush

Today is August 1st. It's been exactly one year since I got on a plane and flew into adulthood, and I have to admit, that although there has been some turbulence, it was a pretty smooth flight! Ok, enough of the metaphors. Last night I went to a Missy Higgins concert. Today I got my first paycheck for my job at a...gasp...television station! (like its actually related to my major, OMG!)

But a year in New York...searching for a job, swimming in Sunset's Park free pool, realizing that drinks were $10 a pop, catering at venues I could never get in to on my own, the endless interviews over and over and over, the great friends, the delicious tamales, the beautiful parks and places to get lost in, walking until I have blisters and then doing it again the next week, becoming an Anthropolgie stalker, finding Times and Herald Squares annoying, sleepovers and restaurant week dinners, cheesy over the top plays that I love, strolling over the BK bridge with an amazing view of Manhattan lit up at night...it's been one hell of year. But now I seem to have all my little ducks in a row and am sort of waiting for the sky to cave in. Life can't really be this good, can it?