This blog has ground to a halt over the past year or so, but I thought I’d write one last post before my indefinite hiatus. There was also a loose end in that after twoposts anticipating the film version of “The Giver”, the movie was finally released. It only makes sense to tie it up.
My previous posts dealt with my reaction to “The Giver”’s trailer and my rereading of the book. I read the book when I was 12 and it had a strong effect on me. Still, I reread it so I could separate my memories of the novel from the book itself. That way I could see the movie without judging it too harshly, although my initial impression from the trailer wasn’t so good. The efforts of the 18 years it took to get the movie off the ground seemed wasted.
Ultimately, I don’t think they were. Despite my love for the original story that could never be replicated, despite the fact that not many other people liked or wanted to see “The Giver” movie, I liked it.
Last week, I wrote about my reaction to “The Giver” movie’s first trailer. While I have my doubts that the movie will capture the understated power of Lois Lowry’s book, I knew I needed to put some distance between it and my emotional ties to it if I ever wanted to appreciate the movie. To do that, I reread it last weekend.
Like a lot of kids, I originally read “The Giver” as part of my sixth-grade curriculum. It was unlike anything I’d ever read before. It disturbed me. It haunted me. I loved it.At the end of the school year, each kid was allowed to keep a copy of one of the books we’d read. You can guess which one I chose.
My teacher recognized how much the book affected me and suggested reading “1984” and “Brave New World”. That led to the Great Dystopian Novel Phase of 1997-2000. Looking back, I think my interest in such sad, cynical stories had something to do with its timing. Those years were particularly turbulent for me and I could relate to the themes of feeling strange and detached. My treatment for depression sometimes felt like scenes from those novels. I think that’s why similarly themed novels are so popular with teenagers now. It’s easy to identify with their characters when you’re overwhelmed with feelings and don’t yet understand that your lack of control over your life is not due to some malicious conspiracy.
I have nothing against rabbits. “Rabbit-Proof Fence” is a 2002 movie directed by Philip Noyce. The movie is about three mixed race (Aboriginal Australian and white) girls who try to escape a camp meant to assimilate “half -caste” children into white society. It is based on a true story. It is a very good movie.
Even that bird in the background wants to cry.
Prior to “Rabbit-Proof Fence”, Noyce directed “Patriot Games“, “Clear and Present Danger” and “Sliver“, among with many other movies. After “Rabbit-Proof Fence”, he directed “The Quiet American” and “Salt“. His work is a mixed bag when it comes to critical reception. It is also dominated by action movies. “Rabbit-Proof Fence” is much different. It”s basically about a chase, but it lacks all the tropes of an action movie. It’s slow-moving with subtle music and attention to character-building.
And it is the reason I think Noyce’s upcoming screen adaptation of “The Giver” has a chance at being a good movie. Its source material is the classic Lois Lowry book of the same name. I read “The Giver” when I was in the sixth grade and it left a deep impression on me. It’s still one of my favorite books. When I was in college, I heard from a friend that a movie version was in the works. (In fact, Jeff Bridges had been trying to get the movie off the ground for 15 years.)
I said that it would make a great movie. She agreed, but added, “They’d have to do it right.”
My ownership of A Series of Unfortunate Events was part of my attempt to build a collection of Christmas movies. I am aware that it is not a true Christmas movie. It has nothing to do with Christmas. But you know what? Most Christmas movies have nothing to do with Christmas. The other yuletide DVDs I own, The Muppets’ Christmas Carol,A Christmas Story and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, don’t involve the birth of Christ. “The reason for the season” does not factor into even the most celebrated Christmas movie of all time, It’s a Wonderful Life. Before film, A Christmas Carol and A Visit From St. Nicholas became favorites without involving Jesus either. All you need for a good Christmas story are familial structure (not necessarily traditional) and feelings of hope and childlike wonder. That’s why A Series of Unfortunate Events qualifies.
Unfortunately, I missed the hard-hitting journalism of 1992’s binder issue.
I know. I’ve neglected this blog. My excuse is that I’ve been busy writing for another blog that’s part of a class I’m taking at UNC Chapel Hill. My life is barely exciting enough for one blog, not to mention two. This blog, though, still serves its original purpose as an outlet for things I don’t always get to express in real life.
Like my interest in marketing/advertising. It goes way back. The true origin is my introduction to Zillions magazine in the mid 1990s. Zillions was a magazine published by Consumer Reports as a kid-oriented offshoot of its flagship publication. There were reviews from kids who tested similar kinds of toys and snacks from different brands. There were articles about saving money and keeping a budget. Then there were the articles that told you exactly how companies tried to take advantage of you. Sometime between the ages of 9 and 11, I learned why candy was sold at cash registers and displayed to meet a child’s eye level. I learned the reason why, in the movie Cool Runnings, the only soda they were shown drinking was Coke. I learned why you had to walk to the back of the store to find less expensive items while the newer and more expensive ones were kept near the entrance. There was one Zillions issue that had a diagram of a shopping mall and pointed out all the common strategies involved with attracting each type of customer. It was an education that I wouldn’t have received anywhere else.
This enlightenment sometimes came at a price. Being told that adults are targeting you for money is a little like being told there’s no Santa. It makes sense and it explains a lot, but it’s still a letdown. That could explain my aversion to product placement. I’m not opposed to the idea of product placement. It’s just that most of the time, it’s distracting, and it takes away from the illusion that a movie or TV show is in no way a calculated grab at consumers’ wallets. I thought about this the other day while watching reruns of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia from what I like to call the Early Coors Period.
How am I supposed to focus on this action with all that Coors in the way?
It’s a good strategy: the show largely takes place in a bar, so featuring Coors seems only natural. The problem is that whoever was in charge treated the Coors logo like a 6-year old treats unicorn stickers. They’ve toned it down a bit since, but it’s still obvious. (More subtle product placement is possible: in the movie The Blind Side, it almost looked like a coincidence that everyone wore Under Armour.) I’m not sure if it was Zillions that made me extra-sensitive to product placement, but I’m sure it helped.
Not that I’m complaining. Zillions took apart product marketing and pointed out how everything functions, like taking apart a toy car to see how it works. Sometimes it seemed cynical, but it was also a way to show kids how the world works while keeping it interesting. It stopped its publication in 2000. Trying to start it up again in the current state of magazine publishing is a bad idea, but I’m sure there’s a place for a Consumer Reports-type website for kids, if there isn’t one already. To twist a quote misattributed to Eva Perón: It will come back and it will be Zillions.
I’ve been thinking a lot about TweetDeck lately. It’s a Twitter feature that keeps your Tweets, your followers’ Tweets, your direct messages and anything else Twitter-related in one place. It also gives you real-time updates. Every time a follower makes a new Tweet, it shows up on my computer screen in the right-hand corner. I use it at work.
I was reluctant to even use TweetDeck at first because I was always checking our Twitter and Facebook pages anyway. Eventually, though, I grew to love it because I became amazingly on top of golf-related news. (My job is for a golf retail company.) During the Ryder Cup, I knew everything that was going on from Tiger Woods making his third chip shot to Michael Jordan patting Keegan Bradley on the butt. In another instance, when Fox News’s five-second delay malfunctioned while filming a car chase and the driver shot himself on camera before it could cut away, I knew about it before the news media even reported it because of the Twitter followers who saw it. It was almost like I’d seen it too. And in a horrible way, that made it kind of exciting.
Then Hurricane Sandy hit. I don’t live in the New York area, but that’s where I lived until a couple of years ago and most of my friends and family live around there. So I was already concerned for them, but then there was the barrage of Tweets from news outlets and followers as well as retweets from our followers’ followers. I became fixated. The thing about Twitter is that you get more than the news media can offer; you get personal stories. I knew who lost power, who was having wine and Funyuns for dinner and whose phone’s auto-spell feature turned a text message to his daughter from “I’m fine” to “I’m gone”. Individual followers all seemed to be doing okay, but the reports of flooding, fires, death and general destruction were overwhelming. One of our followers said that her Twitter feed “read like a disaster movie”.
I didn’t need 99% of this news. I heard my coworkers having a conversation about the show “Revolution”, which involves a widespread power outage. One them said, “Isn’t that what’s going on in New York?” I didn’t say anything, but I felt disgusted that he had no idea of the scope of what was going on. Then again, he has no personal connection to the Northeast and he has his day-to-day life to be concerned about. I may have been up to date on the hurricane photo hoaxes and anonymous Twitter user @ComfortablySmug’s deliberate spread of false information, but I could barely get any work done. Eventually I just turned off TweetDeck and tried not to wonder what I was missing.
A few weeks ago, I was talking with someone about social media and he asked if always being updated on the news and on my friends’ lives felt intrusive. Generally, it doesn’t because I only use Twitter for work and with the exception of the past two days, I don’t go on my personal Facebook account more than a couple of times a week. Besides, I said, I can always log off. That was before I discovered it was possible to get so much information about a certain thing that it becomes necessary to consume every last bit of it. Stopping it means withdrawal. I don’t know why information is addictive or why it lends itself to a certain kind of greed. It could be a power issue. Anyone who’s been in situation where everyone in the room gets a joke or knows a secret that he doesn’t has felt the insecurity that comes with it. Everyone hates being taunted with that sing-songy “I know something you don’t know…” But in reality, if you know everything about something without being able to do anything about it, that’s just as crippling as not knowing about it at all. Maybe more.
Regardless, it took just three hours before I turned TweetDeck back on. And of course, by then, everything had changed. At roughly 4pm EST, Hurricane Sandy’s reign over the Twitterverse was over. It was replaced by reactions to Disney buying Lucasfilm for $4 billion and announcing that Star Wars: Episode 7 was in the works. Back to the frivolous things Twitter’s known for.
That’s definitely not to say that the aftermath of Sandy doesn’t matter. My heart goes out to everyone affected by it. The storm’s technically over, but there’s still a lot of healing to be done.
A couple of my co-workers and I had a discussion about Charles Dickens’s classic Oliver Twist the other day. It sounds like I work in a very intellectual and refined environment, but it was really about whether or not Dickens intended the character of Master Bates to have such an unfortunate name. (Verdict: Probably). I have a vague recollection of the story to begin with, and it made me wonder if I’d read the full version at all. The one I know that I’ve read was part of a series of adapted versions of classics for children. My grandmother gave them to my siblings and me, and we referred to them as “the little books”.
After doing some research, I found out that the series was from a publisher called Moby Books. Each book was about 5 1/2 by 4 inches big—that’s why we gave them that nickname. It makes sense that I remember them with brownish pages and worn covers because the books were published in the 1970s and 1980s, which means that they were second-hand when Grandma bought them or they were passed down from my cousins, so by the time I read them, they were pretty old. That part didn’t matter, though. The books had a lot of text but they had very detailed illustrations as well.
The little books also weren’t bowdlerized too much as far as I know. In fact, two of them scared me. One was, predictably, Edgar Allen Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Terror. “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” didn’t bother me as much as “The Cask of Amontillado” did. I still remember the illustration of the narrator building a wall around his confused drunk victim in the jester suit. I particularly remember a sentence describing how the jester’s cries for help died down into the sound of the bells on his hat jingling quietly. I read the full version of the book later on and that story didn’t seem so scary as some of the others, but as a child, it’s a lot easier to grasp the terror of a man being essentially buried alive as opposed to that of hearing an imaginary heart beating.
Still, even the Poe book didn’t scare me as much as the misleadingly named The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood. Oh, his adventures are merry, as are his men, but that’s what makes Robin Hood’s death all the more shocking. Here’s how Robin Hood dies: he’s not feeling well so he decides to go to see his cousin, who’s a nun/doctor. She prepares his arm for bloodletting because that’s how everything was cured in those days. Then she cuts open a vein in his arm and he bleeds to death. It’s not an accident, either. Something was up with Cousin Nun to begin with because one of the Merry Men offered to go with him as protection, but no, Robin Hood had to be all trusting and everything. There’s a picture of her greeting him at the door of the abbey too. Find that in the Disney version.
That’s not to say the little books scared me off of classic literature. Far from it. Grandma’s attempts to get me interested in science didn’t progress beyond the fun of rock tumbling, but I’m pretty sure I’ve read everything she gave me, and that’s stayed with me. Except for Oliver Twist. I don’t think I made the leap into the grown-up version. You know, the one with Master Bates.
I’m posting part of a Divot.com story I wrote last week because, well, it’s one of the more reflective things I’ve written in a while. Divot stories are supposed to be funny and this ended up being a requiem for my adolescence. It’s a good thing it appeared on a Sunday, because that means fewer people read it.
Spongebob: A Loving Tribute
Over the years, I’ve found that it’s impossible to convert people into being fans of Spongebob Squarepants. And by “people” I mean “adults”. I don’t have any kids, so I can’t use the excuse that I became a fan by proxy. The other stereotype of Spongebob’s adult viewership, the stoned college kid, doesn’t apply either. It was all just the timing.
Spring’s here. It is also allergy season, and therefore headache season. For some headaches, the best solution is for me to lie down with a washcloth over my eyes. The problem with that is that I don’t necessarily want to fall asleep. I could listen to my iPod, but it’s easy to drift off when you’re listening to music. I found a solution during my junior year of college: I’d just read an article about some prominent person (whose name I forgot) who liked to listen to old-timey radio broadcasts of The Saint, so I downloaded a few episodes off Morpheus and listened to them while my eyes were compress-covered.
The Saint is about a detective named Simon Templar. The radio show is based on a book series. Later on they inspired a TV series that starred a pre-Bond Roger Moore, and eventually came a movie with Val Kilmer that if nothing else, had a very good soundtrack. In the movie, Mr. Templar was called “The Saint” because he used various saints’ names as aliases. I’ve never seen the TV show, but on the radio, Simon Templar goes by Simon Templar, so there’s no real reason he’s called “The Saint” unless you’ve read The Da Vinci Code and believe in the connection between the Templar knights and the Holy Grail. He’s also played by Vincent Price, so it took some time for me to believe that Simon Templar’s a suave ladies’ man and not the villain behind Peter Brady’s tiki idol, Edward Scissorhands’ creator/father, or the victim of a vampire Kermit on The Muppet Show.
In general, listening to crime shows can be soothing because people talk in low voices. Often I did end up falling asleep mid-episode, but I didn’t need to have a headache to enjoy them. In the end, The Saint ended up being one of the influences on a detective story I wrote for my fiction class. Although it needs revision if it will ever resurface, it was a lot of fun to write. Now that I’m currently reading a mystery novel (The City and The City by China Miéville) I’m toying with the idea of writing one myself. I no longer have my original Saint episodes on my computer, so I found some public domain episodes at radiolovers.com just in time for my first headache of the spring.
I have to say that the episodes I recently heard must be early or late in the series, because they’re not all that great. At some point Simon acquired a goofy New Yawk cab driver sidekick and the show became more lighthearted and less suspenseful. The more serious episodes available are ones I’ve already heard, so they’re not exactly mysteries to me. That’s why I switched over to The Adventures of Philip Marlowe. This show was inspired by a book series by Raymond Chandler, who incidentally was a major influence on The City and the City. Miévelle even included him in his acknowledgements. I listen to the show more often when I want to fall asleep because so far I’ve only had one major headache. That’s why I have yet to get all the way through the case of “The Hairpin Turn”.
This is not a political post. This is the story of how, almost ten years ago, I wrote something so stupid that I forgot it was published on a not-too-shabby literary website. The memory was triggered when I heard the song “Dear Mr. President” by Fitz and the Tantrums. (The album’s a year old, but it’s new to me. I’m kind of behind on the times right now when it comes to music.)
Anyway, in 2002, former Marine Gabe Hudson wrote a collection of short stories called “Dear Mr. President” that drew on his experiences in the Gulf War. He is also the editor-at-large for the literary magazine McSweeney’s, which has since branched out into a sort of media empire. Roughly around the same time his book was published, he and two other McSweeney’s editors began selecting and publishing actual emails sent through their website to then-President George W. Bush. The letters are sometimes poignant, sometimes very funny, and often both.
In 2002, I was a bored high school student. I spent my lunch periods either in the library or the art room. One day during a library lunch, I decided to take up the site’s offer to send President Bush my thoughts. I wrote a few letters under a few different pseudonyms, but it was my first one that was put on the site. It was very exciting. I didn’t tell anyone it happened. The writing itself is not worth bragging about:
Dear Mr. President,
My U.S. History teacher says that if I write a letter to you, I will get Extra Credit. Then maybe I will pass and even graduate. I can go to journalism school and maybe even become a correspondent in Iraq. On the Spanish channel they spell Iraq “Irak.” I think that it is funny. However I do not think it is funny that so many people die out there.
Sincerely,
Jessica Ferrara
It’s not poignant. It’s not funny. It definitely doesn’t belong next to a letter like this one:
Dear Mr. President,
I’d like to tell you about my cousin, Jay. … Jay served in Iraq for a year, leaving his wife and family behind to fight a war that was based on lies. He came home a few months ago, on a short leave. He looked haunted, and hunted. The burdens of what he had done in Iraq slumped his shoulders and lowered his head. He rarely met anyone’s eyes. I don’t know if time can ever erase these scars on his mind and soul.
Sincerely,
Anastazya Pencak
or this:
Dear Mr. President,
Wanna come over? I’ll make you some hot dogs.
Sincerely,
Stephen Gwinn
With all the submissions to various websites and publications I’ve made over the years, this is the one that makes it. The only reason I think anyone could possibly find it amusing is that it could have been mistaken for an actual letter from an ambitious student. After all, it was published right after this one:
Dear Mr. President,
Hi. I like politics and I want to become President in 2032.
Sincerely,
Patrick S. Sheridan
Actually, the part about forgetting about it for nine years isn’t entirely true. I alluded to the letter when I applied for a head writer position on a college TV program by listing McSweeney’s as a publication. It didn’t exactly impress the producers, and it didn’t help that I also left out the fact that it wasn’t under my name. That’s not to say I regret using a pseudonym. The reason I’m proud of it is that it not only made the site, but it’s still there.
For the record, Jessica Ferrara has no namesake, and I do find it funny that the Spanish call it “Irak”.
This blog has ground to a halt over the past year or so, but I thought I’d write one last post before my indefinite hiatus. There was also a loose end in that after two posts anticipating the film version of “The Giver”, the movie was finally released. It only makes sense to tie it up.
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In 2002, I was a bored high school student. I spent my lunch periods either in the library or the art room. One day during a library lunch, I decided to take up the site’s offer to send President Bush my thoughts. I wrote a few letters under a few different pseudonyms, but it was my first one that was put on the site. It was very exciting. I didn’t tell anyone it happened. The writing itself is not worth bragging about:
Megan Robb: Writer Extraordinare 