Mar/094
We Don't Really Live In Public
The joke about "overshare" and "living in public" is that no such thing actually exists. The story actually happens between the status updates, not in them.
When I think back on my years of compulsive blogging, what's most striking to me is how much I didn't say, how much didn't get documented or only got referred to in the vaguest of terms, mostly because I didn't want to upset anyone or worse, have to explain myself. It becomes about pleasing you, the audience, the reader, whoever I happen to be writing for at the time, intentionally or not. The audience that screams at the girl in the horror movie to just run outside or not to get into the car.
And yeah, sometimes I wish I'd said more, even in those webpages that will never see the light of day ever again, that will never be accesible anywhere, ever, but the truth is, I know what happened. I can piece it together.
Mar/092
South By So What
The below originally appeared at Counterforce.
I owe so many people stories about South by Southwest (if you don't know what SXSW is, kill yourself) I'm starting to think I should just print out the million text messages I must have sent to get some kind of comprehensive account of what exactly just happened in the past week.
sxsw remnants. giant cup of dr pepper from whataburger optional.
As Marco mentioned, Bruce Sterling had his annual talk (his legendary post party was supposedly canceled) at SXSW Interactive. Yeah, you know who else had a talk at the conference? Me. And guess what this bitch got? A mainstream news mention. Which means... you will never hear from me again. I'm moving on to the big leagues. Now we sip champagne when we thirsty.
when you're very important, you get giant pieces of paper with your name on it.
The best party at SXSW was the Gawker invite-only party, where they served theme drinks based on all the Gawker media properties (red wine for Jezebel, a screwdriver for Lifehacker, and a Manhattan for Gawker, etc). The second best party was the RVIPLounge, a party that came out of my dreams and into reality. It was a moving karaoke RV with cheap tequila and wine on board.
I lost two items of sentimental value and most of my dignity as I harassed an Internet celebrity who's online clique I used to worship (uber.nu for the old school dorks) and then went on to berate the founder of a new location based iPhone app we were all using that gives you fake badges for the amount of times you announce your location. I asked if I could just cheat and get the badges anyway and he was upset that I was pissing on all his hard work. I never did get the Slut badge (which you get for checking into three hotels in one night) but I did get the Redford badge for attending film screenings, like one of Creative Non-Fiction directed by a fellow Oberlin College survivor.
One of the films I saw was a short called Coffee, about a woman just trying to get a cup of the tasty nectar of the gods. It starred Amy Locane, who you may remember as being from Melrose Place. At least I did. Her transition from TV actress to starring in a short film at an independent film festival is intriguing. How did she get here? The short was kind of perfect because it was just a moment in time, but it had a clear beginning, middle and ending. It was just enough of the character.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZQbWn9HKZM&hl=en&fs=1]
Don't ask me about SXSW Music because I'm still flaggelating myself for not upgrading my badge when I had the chance and missing the chance to see Third Eye Blind and get even more free drinks. Instead, I kicked it with the anti SXSW festival of free shows in Austin. One was an acoustic show at a dirt parking lot where I imbibed on Barefoot Cellars Pinot Grigio. Because the 7-11 we stopped at was too classy to carry Sparks. I did get to catch Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, an old college favorite, who was playing a free show across from the dirt parking lot show at an old man dive bar that only served two kinds of beer. Here, have a dance party break:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=la227pWNtSc&hl=en&fs=1]
In numbers, let's put it this way. Number of Julia Allison sightings: two. Number of real celebrity sightings: just one, of Dave Navarro in the airport. Number of times consumed things covered in smothered cheese: every time. Number of times I consumed barbecue: 4. Is it a nerd spring break? Yes. Is it filled with marketing wankers who want to monetize the Internet? Totally. Is it also filled with people rambling on about their shitty band and trying to get their film picked up? Uh huh. But you know what? The haters can hate and the jealous ones can envy. The reality is that this one of the highest concentrations of pure awesomeoness (and smoked meats) in one location and that is a beautiful, gorgeous thing. So South By, I can't wait to see you next year, where we we can drink tequila at 1pm and lick barbecue sauce off of each other's fingers before exchanging business cards.
portrait of the author wearing her most prized sxsw accesory: her gold badge
(pss, for more of my SXSW coverage, peek underneath the jump!)
Mar/091
Revenge Porn
I just submitted a speaker proposal to the Sex 2.0 Conference inspired by my Bravo blog. So, this Gretchen Rossi person on Real Housewives, who I always felt was annoying (that laugh!) but harmless, has had her life ripped apart by a dude posting photos of her on Myspace. I'm obsessed with the idea that things that were formerly secrets really can't be anymore.
There is also this other trend in online porn, of people posting photos of their ex girlfriends either naked or engaged in sex. It's a big thing now, whether or not it's true (you can of course label any porn video anything you want on the Internet), it still speaks to the fact that this is now some kind of trend. If you break up with someone and dared to experiment in this manner, now you risk having that person put your business all over the place. And now with everyone on Facebook and tagging? Forget it. One false move and everyone's seen your naked photos.
I'm certainly not going to recommend slut shaming. Take naked photos if you want, but I still think it's alarming and only going to get worse with everyone now obsessed with photographing and documenting every thing that ever happens to them.
It should be an interesting discussion, especially amongst a crowd that normally puts naked photos of themselves online and blogs their sex lives.
This time tomorrow, I'll be in Austin. When it's done, I'll be a SXSW speaker. That's pretty cool. The song of the day is Lily Allen's The Fear. I post it because she got in big trouble for beating up a paparazzi today.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-wGMlSuX_c&hl=en&fs=1]
Mar/091
Poor People Are The Only Ones With Real Emotions
I flew cross country on a plane without personal televisions today. I know. How dreadful. I also was without reading material (procrastinated on packing and woke up 10 minutes before my super shuttle came to pick me up) and using my laptop without power is a cruel joke I choose not to play on myself any longer. You know the minute you stop messing around and doing Important Things like organizing your iPhoto library or reading all of your email from 2 years ago on Mail is right when that thing decides it has 5 minutes left to go.
And so, I was forced to partake in the common entertainment. At least American Airlines doesn't make you pay for headphones. The movie was Four Christmases which at first I ignored but once I saw a scene involving Kevin from The Office and Cedric Yarbrough from Reno 911!, I decided to stop being an asshole, turn off my podcast and watch the movie.
Of course, I found the headphone jack right as the scene with the funny dudes was ending and ended up watching the schlocky, over acted remainder. It stars Reese Witherspoon and Vince Vaughn as two hateful San Francisco yuppies (let's say they live in Russian Hill) who have ignored their families for years and who end up having to give up going to Fiji to spend time with them instead. As to where in the Bay Area their families lived, I'm going to say that Vince's dad probably lived in Sonoma County (the sticks, basically) and Vince's mom was a total Sausalito/Larkspur monied Marin County lady. I'm going to say the same for Reese's dad.
In the movie we learn: (1) adult man children can get rid of their Peter Pan syndrome towards avoiding commitment in the span of an hour especially when their tough working class dad teaches them what true love is really about over a beer, (2) only poor, uneducated people with children can feel real emotions, and (3) you should always pretend to never have had a past in front of someone you're in a serious relationship with. See, Reese Witherspoon's character used to be fat and made fun of in elementary school and OMG that's the worst thing EVER. The movie treated this fact as if Reese's character was hiding serious jail time. And we're supposed to believe that these people had been dating and going on vacations together for 3 years and they didn't know any of this?
What really drove me crazy with this movie was how the writers really hate Witherspoon's character. She suffers much more humiliation than Vaughn's, who is just guilty of having a weird post divorce family and lying about his white trash name. Reese however, gets puked on, is forced to endure having to steal a peed on pregnancy test from a group of children and doesn't even get the satisfaction of being pregnant. They allude to the fact that her mom and sisters are hitting on her boyfriend and she comes off as weak and baby crazy.
I went to sleep right as the couple was doing their fake reconciliation dance over cheesy music. It was just too much to bear.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LG0nmabeQN8&hl=en&fs=1]
Mar/090
My rate is 250 dollars worth of attention an hour, 50 more if you book after 5pm
I'm putting together my SXSW panel finally. I came to the realization that just downloading Keynote and having some notes in my journal were not going to present themselves, so I started typing a few things up. It is still a mess, but there is still time to clean it up. Keynote is so much more beautiful than Power Point there is no comparison.
But it got me thinking about the term "Attention Whore" and how that is the worst thing anyone can be called online, especially for women. It is usually the argument people give when they get upset over something someone said on a blog or online community. I can recite the litany because I've heard it so many times now:
"You are still upset people didn't love you in high school"
"Your father/mom/grandparents neglected you"
Go to any online community and they will all be there. Like admitting you like it when people pay attention to you is the worst thing in the world. I guess we are all supposed to put our heads down and write quietly and wait patiently for the hot guy to ask us out at the Comment Prom.
When I was keeping online journals in high school, I totally did it for the attention: I went to a high school full of idiots and I liked being able to meet people from around the country who were into the same stuff as me and it was always nice to hear your stuff was being read and enjoyed. So, it's a combination of feeding the ego and feeding the soul via a community.
A complicated answer to a complicated question (why post so much of your life online?). Fancy that, peanut gallery.
Today's soundtrack is my Pandora station, which means I get to enjoy lots of Junior Boys, which for some reason, I always forget when I am acquiring music. The song "Birthday" is my favorite song today and makes me want to make a music video (which is the same for every song I've ever listened to):
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUCwmMQ4yWg&hl=en&fs=1]
Mar/090
Foods Filled With Shame
Uncrustables
Virgin America offers Uncrustables on their in flight food menu. If you sit in first class or Main Cabin Select, which is a bootleg first class (no massage chairs), you can order as much food as you want for free. You could have dozens of Uncrustables! An Uncrustable is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with no crust, packaged together. It sticks to the roof of your mouth just like a normal Pb&j sandwich, but makes you feel exciting, unlike a normal pb&j.
2 out of 5 shame stars
Spam
A highly misunderstood food. I know people who would shove hundreds of dollars worth of blow up their noses who would refuse to eat this nitrite filled pink packet of delicsiouness. The best place in the world to eat spam is at Lucky Chances Casino in Colma, California. The 24 hour diner attached to the 24 hour card room serves up Spam with eggs and garlic fried rice. It is one of the most perfect food combinations you've ever seen. The card room is full of old Chinese people gambling away their SSI checks and the diner is full of people who use Xanga as a blogging platform. It's worth it.
5 out of 5 stars (people really hate Spam)
Anything off a fast food dollar menu
We've all been there. We'll all go back there again.
3 out of 5 stars
Celeste Pizza For One
Not only is it a frozen pizza, it's a frozen pizza for ONE. It's a frozen pizza of sadness that will likely be covered in tears and followed by a Nyquil chaser. However, the salt content is so high it will kill any possibility of a hang over and possibly your biological ability to have children.
2.5 out of 5 stars (their cheapness could override any guilt you feel for eating this)
A sandwich purchased at a drugstore
A far better investment would be diet pills.
4 out of 5 (walgreen's is for buying plan b, not for sandwiches)
Foie gras
High end self loathing. A vulgar display of wealth and callousness. Foie gras is made by ducks being force fed grain so their livers can expand and a pate can be made of it, to be spread on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (as I've had it served to me once), stuffed between giant pieces of steak and smothered on baguette sandwiches. It's not much worse than the harsh reality of factory farming in the US, but something about foie gras takes the creepiness of meat eating to an entirely other level.
5 out of 5 stars (prepare for any ethical people you know to despise you)
Originally Posted At Counterforce
Mar/090
Fever Dreams
when the sun shines, we'll shine together
On this week's The Bachelor (that's a television show ), Jason, the bachelor, dumped the girl he originally chose, Melissa and picked his second best, Molly (Mollies get everything). In six weeks, he will have moved on to the next girl he eliminated, Jillian (never mind, she has just been cast as the Bacholerette) until he works his way through all the eliminated fame-mongers and the camera crew. His true love is Dolores, the Craft Services lady. She unwraps the Hostess plastic donuts and lays them out just the way he likes it, in a semi-circl, not a straight line. He'll move into her apartment in the Valley, and become a stay at home dad to her 3 cats and pet lizard. She'll bring him home leftovers from the craft services table: "Here's some spinach and artichoke dip in a bread bowl from the set SisterHood Of The Traveling Pants 5. That Alexis Beidel is wasting away! She won't eat anything but carrots and Orbit gum!" And he'll smile, feed her a bit of the dip off his finger, before throwing the bread bowl to the floor and ravishing her underneath her vintage All About Eve poster that hangs above her bed while the cats feast on the white and green delicacy below.
i want a tv embrace
One other obsession I've maintained while lounging about in my sickbed was the TMZ website and their hours of cheaply shot paparazzi videos of celebrities. The real gold is their nightly television show which airs at around 11:30, the typical hour most office workers are just about to doze off after the Daily Show. The television show is just the web clips aired with some very cheesy voice overs interspersed with scenes from the TMZ news room, with head Harvey Levin, usually seen clutching a tumbler full of coffee with a straw hanging out the top, to protect his delicate mouth from the scalding hot tempature of the beverage. The staff bounce stories off of him, which usually involve saying they saw a celebrity at a store buying something. We're supposed to believe this is like a real newsroom, but of course, the joke is, if the story has made it to the show, there's no need to run it by Harvey. Just read your lines and think about all that work you spent getting your MA in J-school has lead you to: working at TMZ.
my life ain't no holiday
TMZ is like landing on soft core porn, making it past the one sex scene and staying up to find out who killed Shannon Tweed's husband. The tastelessness at which they handle everything is both horrifying and enormously entertaining in a way that makes you want to puke: they juxtapoz a water skiing Chris Brown with photos of his beat up girlfriend Rihanna to Katrina and The Waves' "Walking On Sunshine." TMZ just broke a real news story, inexplicably someone fed them a tip that Northern Trust Bank had used unsolicited bail out money to fund a three day party in Los Angeles for its clients, which forced the bank to return the money to the government. Harvey Levin is proud of his staff, but not as proud of the hours of footage of a confused Britney Spears, hounded by dozens of paparazzi, needing their help to drive her car out of the Hollywood Hills. He added a little Bailey's to his coffee that day and changed the straw to a My Little Pony one in celebration.
it must feel good to stand above me, while i make you so proud of me
Originally posted at Counterforce
Mar/090
Unhappy with the riches because you're piss poor morally
I've been listening to TI/Rihanna's "Live Your Life" on an endless loop for the past few days. The song is so simple yet so complex: just live your life.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOFDaB1Sh20]
The bravado of hip hop is excellent for when you are feeling sorry for yourself from listening to too much music by whiny white people who think everything is the end of the world. Hip hop encourages you to never back down, even when you're wrong, even when you've fucked up beyond belief: just live your life.
Lately, I have been feeling like the very defenition of the word malaise, which is a medical term, a catch all for when you're feeling crappy but you don't know why. It's a precursor to a more serious illness. I feel like I am viewing everything through a hazy lens, like I'm in a coma and I'm just watching as things happen to me but I can't react to them. I'm a little heart broken and a lot anxious. I'm waiting, and waiting for something to occur, something to happen, and nothing ever does. Like a female version of Groundhog's Day. But you know, funny and watchable.
It's at this point that I have to derive inspiration from my whiny white people:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIEOZCcaXzE]
enjoy yourself/take only what you need from it