How many times has this happened to you? It’s the day after a big episode of television show X. You’re standing around at the copy machine or water cooler with some co-workers. “Did you see what happened on television show X last night?” you say to the group, knowing that most everyone in this circle watches and enjoys television show X. “Yes!” exclaims a co-worker, “I couldn’t believe it when….”
“STOP!” yells another in the circle, seemingly in a state of panic. “It’s on the DVR but I haven’t watched it yet.”
The conversation grinds to a halt. Everyone sighs and stares listlessly into the swirling galaxy of creamer in their coffees, or mechanically shuffles papers in silence to put in the copier. “Nice weather we’re having,” someone offers.
How did this state of affairs come to exist? How is it that those of us who simply watch television as television ended up deferring so quickly and definitively to the TV-tardy generation? As TiVO and then more generic forms of DVR technology spread through the marketplace, why did the broadcast generation so eagerly accommodate those who prefer to watch their programs in weekend marathons of digitized fast-forwarding? Why is it impolite to “spoil” a show by revealing plot information, and yet not impolite to force a larger group of people to clam up during a spontaneous discussion of said plot?
These are perplexing questions, to be sure. At first this deference was perhaps simply techno-intimidation. In its earliest days, TiVO marketing (and TiVO owners) enjoyed making the non-time-shifted feel as though they were slaves to the manipulative agenda of network puppeteers. To watch broadcast television when it was actually broadcast was to admit you had nothing better to do, that you let television rule over your life rather than taking charge of the technology itself.
As the years have passed, however, we can now see that this was an utterly ridiculous proposition. Who is more enslaved by television: the person who tries to make it home in time for Modern Family, but if he misses it just does something else with his time; or the person who loads up a brace of Modern Family’s that have to be “cleared” from the DVR, maybe over Thanksgiving or after the spring finale? For me, there is no sadder sight than an otherwise young and healthy individual hunched over a laptop watching something like The Jersey Shore, trying to “catch up” with a program that God intended us to watch by accident while channel-surfing from the comfort of the couch.
I suppose this impulse can be defended in those who watch serial narratives, an audience that would be devastated to miss even a second of the complete storyline (unlike viewers of old who, if they missed an episode, caught up in the first five minutes of the next installment and simply carried on). Like so much of what has gone wrong with contemporary television, we can blame much of this on Twin Peaks, the series that probably did more than any other to ensure that the college educated would feel an obligation to view every moment of every single program and somehow still think they were smarter than the cathode tractor-beam that had just transfixed them for upscale target practice.
Many are happy that television is now often afforded the status of “art” in the same way as the cinema. But I’m not so sure this has been a good development inasmuch as it has destroyed the pleasures of quotidian disposability that were so long a part of the medium (like being able to engage in casual day-after conversation about an episode without someone freaking out that you’re about to read Molly Bloom’s soliloquy aloud before they’ve had a chance to buy their copy of Ulysses). 
The “artification” of television has gone hand-in-hand, of course, with the industry’s amazing success in convincing otherwise intelligent people that they should buy multi-disc DVD/Blu-Ray copies of a television series in its totality. Sure, Captain DVR has disrupted the imperious power of the network schedule—only to then get ensnared through appeals to art, quality, and archival depth so as to drop a few twenties on a deluxe boxed-set. All the old NBC wanted was my time and eyeballs—but the new Comcast/NBC/Universal wants me to think I have a responsibility to own the complete run of Heroes, neatly filed away alongside hours and hours of other forgettable shows that in an ideal world would remain elusive and ephemeral. Why anyone (other than a media teacher, of course) would go to the trouble of brushing off a box set of The Simpsons in order to watch a specific episode rather than simply allow Homer, et al. to pop up as a welcome surprise during unfocused leisure time is a true mystery. It’s rather like keeping bottles of tap water in fancy bottles even though the faucet remains completely functional.
Some might argue the box set is a good way to catch up with an important series one has missed—but even here, I would suggest it is enough to know that Series X will undoubtedly return, like a comet, and that arriving at that welcome rendez-vous in an unspecified future will make the eventual viewing of the series much more pleasurable than burning through it in an obligatory 22 hour marathon. I can’t think of anything currently on TV, or indeed that has ever been on TV, that I would absolutely HAVE to see RIGHT NOW.
This stockpiling of episodes—either on DVD or on the DVR– is especially nonsensical and even a bit depressing when it involves programs that were designed to be wholly disposable in the first place, shows like Storage Wars, Kendra, Hoarders, and House Hunters that work best as random encounters with sporadic time-killing. Indeed, if you like a particular show in one of these formats, wouldn’t it be better to keep a few in the quiver? That is, rather than systematically make sure that each and every episode has been accounted for in the DVR queue, wouldn’t it be more rewarding to allow for a few strays to escape as breeding stock so that they might unexpectedly return sometime in the future? Incredibly, I actually encountered an episode of Seinfeld the other day that I had somehow never seen before. It was a profound, moving, and even magical experience, akin to necromancy or time-travel, and a pleasure that the DVR’s mandatory efficiency in consumption makes increasingly rare.
Many have bemoaned how cable (along with an armada of other technologies) has led to a balkanization of public culture and the centripetal hardening of “egocasting” as the new media sensibility. This fragmentation is inevitable, no doubt, and I am certainly not nostalgic for the days of 3-Network pseudo-consensus broadcasting. But, in a world where increasingly you only share film, television, and music choices with a very narrow cross-section of your demographic, how frustrating is it when one slothful DVR-owner can singlehandedly bring a discussion to a halt?
Here’s a good rule of thumb in television: if you can’t be bothered to make the time to watch a show on the day it actually airs, if the idea of watching a particular show isn’t something you actually look forward to enough to plan your precious leisure time around it, then it probably isn’t all that important to you in the first place. Television is so relentlessly of the present and moving ever onward into the future, why would anyone go back in time to resurrect an experience so demonstrably unimportant?
That’s why I think those who still have affection for the flows and rhythms of broadcasting as broadcasting should quit being so deferent and polite in this conflict. I’m tired of feeling like a public masturbator simply because I bothered to sit down and watch Revenge on the night it was actually airing. If you feel the same, then take the vow to discuss whatever you want, whenever you want, and let the TV-tardy assume the responsibility of shunning human company until they feel “caught up” enough to contribute to the basic social cement of televisual “small talk.” After all, we never had a vote on which way this social convention was supposed to go.
Tag: health
January 21, 2012
Spoil Everything Now
January 21, 2012
Diabolical Codyism
REGRESSION crisis currently bedeviling the western democracies, a mass and now multi-generational stagnation in adolescence largely engineered and sustained by a culture industry that needs all of us to remain fixated on the products and fantasies we consumed when we were fourteen. The promo art for Young Adult announces this crisis as its central theme: “Everyone grows old. Not everyone grows up.”
Before unpacking Young Adult, however, we must first revisit Juno. Below, the semiotic square illustrates how the four main characters embody positions derived from the film’s structuring opposition of ADULT – CHILD.
JUNO (2007)
Before proceeding with the individual characters, it should be noted that the “semiotic square” typically does not have a baby at its center. I have added one, however, because it is the precious, precious baby that provides the bedrock of the Codyverse. Indeed, one could argue that both Juno and Young Adult are primarily concerned with arriving at the appropriate answer for Question 3 above: “Who shall and shall not be granted proximity to the precious baby?”
Juno herself, of course, assumes the “contrary” position at the top of the square, a wise-cracking teen who, though she seems mature beyond her years, must learn important lessons on the path to true adulthood. As the only fully functional “adult” in the story, Vanessa (Jennifer Garner) will assume the Adult/Non-child position. I will assign Paulie (Micheal Cerra) the “neutral” term at the bottom of the square as he is caught in a limbo between adulthood and childhood and is thus neither (as opposed to Juno’s more forceful transition from Child to Adult). But the crucial term here is on the right side of the square: Mark (Jason Bateman) in the position of Child–Not Adult. While Juno is about “Juno,” obviously, its main ideological task is to punish Mark for his transgressive regression so that he might be expelled from the text and kept as far away as possible from the precious baby.
Mark’s transgressions are these: 1). he still enjoys “punk rock” and “horror movies;” 2). he shares his expertise in these forms with a teenage girl; 3). he verbalizes his attraction to this same teenage girl, probably because she also likes punk rock and horror movies; 4). he bitches about how marriage forced him to renounce his ambitions to be a “rock star”; 5). he expresses a desire to live in a loft downtown; 6). he expresses some degree of hesitation over coming into proximity with the precious Juno-baby. It’s very straightforward, really. Mark is the regressed male who, unlike Steve Carrell in The 40 Year Old Virgin, does not have a hip and patient Catherine Keener to save him from wallowing in perpetual adolescence. Juno ends “happily” to the extent that Mark is exposed as a creep and must leave the world of wholesome suburban reproduction.
Now, let us move on to the even more diabolical case of Young Adult:
YOUNG ADULT (2011)
In this case, we will put Mark (Patton Oswald) at the top of the square. Taking a page from Planet Apatow, Cody uses the narrative shorthand of a superhero figurine collection to signify Matt’s regressed status. And yet, Matt remains the only adult “conscience” in the film, consistently trying to talk Mavis (Charlize Theron) out of her ridiculous scheme to win back her old boyfriend, Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson). Buddy is for the most part a cipher, but as a seemingly committed husband and enthusiastic father, he fills out the necessary position of Adult–Non-Child.
Now, you might think Cody was somewhat harsh with Mark in Juno for punishing him so excessively just for enjoying the rock ‘n’ roll music and finding a witty teenager attractive. Thus the genius of Nipple Confusion. By placing Buddy’s wife, Beth (Elizabeth Reaser), in a cover band made up entirely of new moms, Cody finds a more nuanced strategy for engaging question #2: “What is the proper relationship for a “normal adult” to have with popular culture?” While Juno addresses this question in its most general form, Young Adult provides a much more focused analysis of the spectrum of regression by asking, “What is the appropriate relationship for a ‘normal adult’ to have with Teenage Bandwagon?”
Recall that during the opening sequence, we witness Mavis obsessively rewinding and re-listening to the first verse of Teenage Bandwagon’s song, “the Concept”–included on a now 17 year old mix-tape that Buddy made for Mavis when they were dating. Mavis’ fixation on repeating a moment of pop epiphany (crucially, she only wants to listen to the first verse/chorus over and over again) suggests that her relationship with Teenage Bandwagon is profoundly regressed and thus wholly dysfunctional. Mavis’ rewinding of the tape is offered, initially at least, as a playfully regressive memory for any audience member old enough to remember the courtship and technical protocols attending analog “mix-tapes”–but as the story proceeds, her fixation on “The Concept” retroactively becomes a sonic marker of Mavis having become “stuck” in the past. She therefore has an “inappropriate” relationship with Teenage Fanclub.
As the drummer in Nipple Confusion, however, Buddy’s wife Beth demonstrates a healthy and non-regressed relationship to Teenage Bandwagon. This is because Beth, unlike Mavis, enjoys Teenage Bandwagon within the context of successful marriage and reproduction. Indeed, Nipple Confusion is “cool” precisely because they have the “proper” perspective on life by virtue of their marriages and collective motherhood. Single and without children, Mavis foolishly regards “The Concept” as a powerful anthem of romantic affect and possibility; Beth has the higher knowledge that the song is simply a quaint curio of their generation’s heritage in ’90s indie-rock culture. Thus Mavis’ profound horror when she discovers that Buddy has shared “their song” with obstacle-wife.
Which brings us to Mavis, who we see occupies the same position as Mark in Juno: CHILD–NOT ADULT. And, also like Mark, the ideological work of Young Adult is to ensure that Mavis be kept as far away as possible from the precious, precious baby. Taken together, the two films demonstrate just how profoundly invested the Codyverse is in maintaining rigorous moral parameters related to proper suburban breeding.
Young Adult, however, is a much more mean and nasty film. Consider that in Juno Mark must leave in shame because he questions the centrality of breeding and parenthood in adult life. This is a harsh judgment, perhaps, but at least Mark has some agency in his own fate. He chooses to end his marriage and go live in a loft where he can spend more time listening to punk rock and watching horror movies.
Young Adult, on the other hand, makes the following division:
Successful Breeders “Crippled” Breeders
Buddy (functional penis and sperm) Matt (crooked penis)Beth (functional uterus and ovum) Mavis (had a miscarriage)
Thus, Matt and Mavis’ “regressions” are explained by a physical inability to assume the role of an adult breeder. Unlike Mark, they are denied even the opportunity of questioning the breeder position–it is simply assumed that both desperately want a marriage and family (especially Mavis), but have “regressed” to a non-adult position as an effect of their reproductive failure. Matt and Mavis are doomed because, in their cases at least, biology is destiny.
I would submit this is a fairly loathsome position to take on these issues.
Okay, I’m done.
January 21, 2012
Ten Best List
I don’t typically compile a “ten best” list each year as I find the entire ritual a narcissistic and even imperious performance of one’s own taste. This year, however, I decided to get off my high-horse and share the most outstanding films I saw this year. After all, I am highly credentialed in film studies/analysis, so it would be criminal of me not to share that expertise with the lay public. Be advised, however, many of these films will prove difficult to see, especially if you live in some God-forsaken, cultural backwater.
1. Seven Tangerines (Poston)
Reportedly shot for less than $50,000 without permits in an abandoned brownstone in Queens, Jack Poston’s Seven Tangerines succeeds less as a well-crafted work of cinema than as a raw document of extraordinary writing and acting. As a play, Seven Tangerines never even made it to off-off-Broadway, Poston staging only six performances at a rented community center in Astoria before taking it before the camera. For many productions, that would be a mistake. But here there is a sense that Poston and co-star Jakov Lund, May-December junkies slowly freezing to death in a Bronx tenement, might have over-cooked their characters if they had waited any longer to capture them on film. And the ending remains as haunting as it is enigmatic– do the two men, at the brink of unconsciousness, see the face of God, or is it merely the lights of a police helicopter? Thankfully, Poston allows the viewer to make his or her own decision.
2. The Winter of the Mouse Friend (Fu)
On the surface, Su Jing Fu’s study of a girl’s dormitory during the Cultural Revolution may seem like a straightforward celebration of female bonding and empowerment. When a small and very bedraggled mouse wanders into the dormitory during the first winter snowfall, the girls nurse it back to health and make it their communal pet, going to great lengths to hide their furry friend from their harsh housemother. The charm of the premise gradually mutates into something more sinister, however, as Xiaobai (“Whitey”) becomes hostage to the various interpersonal struggles between the roommates. Cantopop singer Denise Ho Wan-See is surprisingly good as the dorm’s primary villain, Bao-yu, manipulating her peers for chocolates and other favors by constantly threatening to reveal the mouse’s hidden den in the wall.
3. Jacques et Jacqueline (Courbet)
Hopes were not high after comedian Ricard Courbet’s first feature, Les Idiots sur un Bateau (2009), a broad physical comedy set at a failing yacht rental yard in Nice. And Courbet probably did himself no favors in the follow-up by playing both “Jacques” and “Jacqueline,” combative fraternal twins brought together by the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. But Courbet surprised everyone by crafting a rather poignant character study amid all the requisite yucks, making Jacqueline in particular a stealthily tragic composite of poor life decisions. And while the ending set-piece with the frozen baguettes and broken teeth was a bit crass, overall it didn’t derail this surprisingly complex portrait of sibling rivalry turned bittersweet affection.
4. Zero-Muybridge-One (Muybridge/Locklear)
Experimental cinema can often be unbearable, and on paper, Zero-Muybridge-One looks like it would be no exception. Digital artist Camden Locklear has digitized every single frame of Edward Muybridge’s foundational “motion studies” and then re-sequenced them according to a cryptograph derived from the texts of Walter Benjamin. The effect is a haunting flow of sepia-toned light and shadow punctuated by furtive images that struggle to cohere on screen. Horse and cat strobe toward one another from opposite sides of the frame. A tumbler appears to somersault in and out of oblivion. A nude man strides into the very maelstrom of modernity itself, chin held high as he enters the new century with what we can now see was a sadly misplaced sense of confidence. Credit too must be given to Philip Glass’ architectural scoring that gently accents the emerging images even as it stolidly anchors the overall flows of amorphous light.
5. Yellowknife (Slidell)
Two painfully shy teenagers, he from Vancouver and she from Montreal, find themselves “exiled” together for a summer in the remote wilderness of Yellowknife. While their fathers work together on a geological survey, Marcus and Claudette negotiate a relationship they know is both inevitable and doomed, brought together by their mutual distaste for life in the wilderness and yet knowing their time together will be over come September. First love is an old story, of course, but director Felicity Slidell does an excellent job here undercutting the genre’s more maudlin elements by refracting them through the precocious sophistication of her leads. There are a few missteps (the scene where the young and still awkward couple happen upon moose copulating in the woods flirts a little too heavily with the American Pie series), but overall a touching meditation on the millennial generation’s turn at “summer love.”
6. El vano heredarán la tierra (Urueta)
Transplanting William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair from Regency England to the slums of contemporary Mexico City is an audacious move, as is placing a 14 year-old male hustler in the role of Becky Sharp. But Urueta’s satire of the links between social mobility and sociopathology shares Thackeray’s at times misanthropic eye for the often brutal violence underlying custom and convention. And by removing the “Amelia” character entirely, some might even say Urueta has improved on Thackeray.
7. Tarantula (Emmerich) 
Given his last three spectacularly interesting failures (10,000 B.C., (2008), 2012 (2009), and Anonymous (2011), many suspected that Roland Emmerich might just have one truly outstanding film in him struggling to get out. Who could have known that Emmerich would finally strike gold in a remake, especially considering that his 1998 attempt to reboot Godzilla was such a giant reptilian turd? And yet, in reimagining Jack Arnold’s 1955 classic of an irradiated spider on the rampage, Emmerich achieves an emotional depth wholly absent in his turn at the Godzilla franchise. Wisely, Emmerich transforms Arnold’s creepy-crawly Other into a more sympathetic fellow citizen of earth, one that never asked to be trapped in a laboratory much less forced to ingest radioactive grain. In a testament to the director’s subtly in making us identify with what is, after all, merely a CGI program, our attachment to the giant spider is really only apparent at the very end. As “Tarantula” looks down with his 8 eyes, seemingly betrayed by his former scientist protector (played with surprising verve by Tara Reid), we hope for just a moment that the seemingly inevitable laser blast and explosion will not come. But of course, as it must, it does. So far Emmerich’s Tarantula has not found a U.S. distributor, but hopefully that will change in 2012.
8. Reflections (Corday)
Very few people have had the opportunity to see the first feature film by avant-garde video artist Christian Corday, but fortunately I was invited to a screening last month for 25 or so people at the artist’s new loft/studio in DUMBO. It is truly stunning, and I highly recommend you try to see it should it come to a theater near you (although that’s probably unlikely—given the film’s formal and thematic complexity, it is likely only to play in New York City and Los Angeles for the foreseeable future). Corday begins with an odd but intriguing premise. “A” and “B”, married artists in Chelsea, decide to cover every surface of their apartment/loft/studio with mirrors. From there, they decide that all of their daily interactions—both in and out of the house—will be conducted through mirrors as well. Gradually the inevitable happens. Their identities become ungrounded and uncertain, eventually transferring between their two bodies. From here the film engages a series of metaphysical dilemmas—what happens when “A’s” subjectivity is in “B’s” body, and vice versa? Original, profound, and utterly unsettling—it’s a must see for anyone with an interest in film, philosophy, or both.
9, The Royal Disease (Dankworth)
Excruciatingly detailed bio-pic of Prince Leopold, the Duke of Albany and fourth son of Queen Victoria. Leopold lived a short and troubled life, his hemophilia keeping him under the watchful eye of his mother the Queen. Dankworth’s film only has time to sample a few of Leopold’s many failures at love, focusing primarily on his combative relationship with his overprotective mother. But the true star here (no offense to Jude Law’s turn as Leopold) is the set and costume design. Shot entirely on location, The Royal Disease’s painstakingly accurate reconstruction of every costume, object, and room of its Victorian milieu unfolds almost as a type of time travel. One forgets they are watching a movie so complete is the immersion in period detail. Elegantly stunning and highly educational.
10. Up My Own Asshole, with Vigor (Farren)
Playfully self-reflexive morality tale of Hollywood manners, focusing on a screenwriter who sets out to write the most damning critique ever of the Hollywood system, only to find himself co-opted at every turn by the very system he detests. While this material can often lead to a type of insufferable navel-gazing, Farren very effectively foregrounds the film’s recognition that it is nothing more than navel-gazing, thus allowing it to gaze even deeper with absolute impunity. Amanda Seyfried has a wonderful turn as the embattled screenwriter’s on-again, off-again girlfriend, a “granola” type constantly hectoring him to do something more “useful” with his life (until, of course, she lands a role herself in a network mini-series). By now, one would think the public would be tired of “insider” tales of Hollywood’s glamour and duplicity, but Up My Own Asshole, with Vigor proves the genre still has yet to exhaust its creative possibilities.
January 17, 2012
The Peculiar Arab Chronicles: Love and Defecation by Nour Ali Youssef
Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or Bends with the remover to remove.
O, no! It is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken.
It is the star to every wandering bark,
whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
— William Shakespeare
- – -
So in short, love is that thing that obliges you to pretend to respect opposing views, wear deodorant, and fight your gag reflex to watch a movie not of your liking for a special someone.
Love is one of the few default elements in life… much like defecation. You need it for the general satisfaction of your nether region. Some have the good fortune of a healthy bowel movement. Others have constipation and genuine resentment towards those who are doing it so regularly.
Why me? They must wonder, as they write sad songs about love’s painful absence, because while they’re spending the night home alone with a homemade enema, others so easily contract explosive diarrhea.
Love, in Shakespearean and entirely unscientific terms comes out of your heart and you cannot mess with it, the same why poop comes out your anus, and you cannot mess with that either… unless you’re an underpaid Japanese porn star.
From this loving-is-pooping perspective, I systematically scanned my environment to learn something new about my fellow Arabs: how they love!
We’re very passionate people by nature. We throw shoes at those who disagree with us and yell when we greet each other—not to mention the occasional bombing when you really hit a nerve. I hate to break stereotypes, but some aren’t like that. They’re all soft and civilian! And they defecate rather differently as well.
This is why I’ve categorized the different types of affairs that are only available in a country where no one owns an umbrella.
The Romantics
They refer to themselves as “lovers” and modestly flirt via eyelashes, missed calls, and text messages. Arabs are not too keen on public affection, or intimacy, or any physical expression of emotion between a man and a woman. This is troublesome for obvious reasons for a betrothed you couple, so the modest girl must modestly incite the modest guy in order to retain a modest virgin aura. To do so, she resorts to frequent eyelash fluttering and the very Egyptian, cat-and-mouse calling. Usually the guy calls the girl who is not supposed to answer (as not to cost him money), but merely indulge herself in the ringtone.
Unfortunately, the Egyptian movie industry revolves around this category of lovers, which results in grossly sexual movies. Despite showing little skin, they somehow manage to out sexualize French movies (which aren’t gross at all, for obvious reasons!) through this modest-sexually-suppressed demeanor. It’s like being stuck in a humid human-sized, misty glass bottle with your parents fondling each other.
The Pickled
These are people who have been soaked in the bitterness of their own tears inside the sad, rusty jar that is their life. They are single, and acutely aware of it. This category includes the fat, the flat, the spinsters, the widows, the ugly, and the barren. The celibacy takes its toll on the males first, who then channel their frustration onto the closest female relative or neighbor. They refer to themselves as “secret admirers,” with extra emphasis on the secret. Their hobbies include stalking, hair sniffing and love letter writing.
Female pickles, on the other hand, merely eat and glare at their surroundings. If love really was poop, they would kill for the weakest breeze of a fart.
The Sufferers
This is when a pickle meets a romantic, and they fall in shit.
It’s double the misery, because they’re in pairs. They’re always a young couple; old sufferers go to a retirement farm or switch to full-time pickles. They suffer from the same old sob story, it’s either lack of money, parental approval or less likely, conflict over religion. They must spend several years eye fluttering and text messaging, before finally coming to terms with reality.
As far as Egyptians movies are concerned, one of the sufferers must die or get paralyzed from the waist down by the end of the movie. Also they must feature a train in a climatic moment.
The Sinful
When the sufferers do it, baby.
To Arabs this is the equivalent of taking a gun to the relationship’s head and pulling the trigger. Theoretically speaking, intimacy should breed love and pheromones. But apparently, all it does is “taint” the affair. The girl is commonly grief-stricken to the loss of her ticket to the land of the happily married, while the guy is hit with the sudden realization that he cannot marry a girl who slept with him before marriage.
In movies, the sinful always produce an illegitimate “seed,” which is to be flushed out by an unethical doctor in a shady clinic. The girl is destined to wretchedness and shame, while the guy moves on and marries a “good” woman.
The Regretful
They were lucky enough to evade the four categories but ended in the fifth and worst.
This category includes everyone in their late 20s and above.
They are fucking married.
January 10, 2012
CNNs Political Team Has It Covered by Pete Reynolds
WOLF BLITZER: Welcome to back to the CNN Election Center, right now, and our continuing coverage of the 2012 Republican presidential primary. I’m Wolf Blitzer, and I’m here in the CNN World Headquarters, which houses, but is not the same as, the CNN Election Center, with CNN’s political team, starting with Roland Martin, David Gergen, and Dana Loesch, right now, and James Carville live via satellite from Washington, James Carville. We’ll also be checking in with Alex Castellanos and Erick Erickson in New Hampshire, Erin Burnett, Gloria Berger and John King over in the CNN Studios in Atlanta, and in the Situation Room, we’ve got Anderson Cooper, Ali Velshi, and Piers Morgan, who will be breaking off at the top of the hour to form his own rogue panel with Ari Fleischer, Dana Bash, Amy Holmes, Isha Sesay, Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez, actress January Jones, and pop star Nikki Minaj, all as part of CNN’s America’s Choice 2012 coverage from the CNN Election Center, right now, Nikki Minaj. I want to start off by taking a look at a clip from a speech by Mitt Romney in Manchester, New Hampshire, right now, campaign, Mitt Romney, take a look:
MITT ROMNEY: This economy is putting a strain on the middle class. Many Americans have lost their jobs, and many more are feeling the pressure as the cost of living keeps rising. At kitchen tables across the country, there is genuine concern about our economic future.
WOLF BLITZER: Is Mitt Romney right? Do people still have kitchen tables, Roland Martin?
ROLAND MARTIN: I think they do, Wolf. People need something to eat on, after all, and kitchen tables provide the flat surface of a coffee table without the inconvenience of having to lean forward to reach your drink.
DANA LOESCH: I have to agree with Roland on this, Wolf. With a kitchen table, you don’t bump your knees like you do with a coffee table.
WOLF BLITZER: John King in Atlanta?
JOHN KING: Wolf, I’m happy to say that I have a kitchen table, and the numbers show that of those people concerned about our economic future, 64% have a kitchen table. That number jumps to 87% when you count breakfast bars, removable folding tables, and sheets of plywood laid across two sawhorses.
WOLF BLITZER: James Carville in Washington?
JAMES CARVILLE: I eat in the tub!
WOLF BLITZER: Anderson Cooper in the Situation Room, think you can handle it?
ANDERSON COOPER: I’m sorry, are we still talking about kitchen ta—
WOLF BLITZER: — Ali Velshi?
(VELSHI stands in front of an interactive map of New Hampshire.)
ALI VELSHI: If you’ll take a look at the map of New Hampshire here, Wolf, you’ll see that we’ve color-coded each county according to the number of tweets in the last thirty seconds using the hashtag #kitchentables and/or #CNNElection and/or #tubdining, and combined it with a motion-sensitive illustration of polling results in each particular county. Each Republican candidate is represented by a different special effect—here, you’ll see Rockingham county is reddish-orange and appears to be bouncing, which indicates that it leans Huntsman and is very kitchen-table heavy. Merrimack County, as you can see, is purple and appears to be violently spinning, which indicates almost no kitchen tables and a strong preference for Mitt Romney and taking meals in the bath.
ANDERSON COOPER: What about Grafton County, which is green and appears to be dry heaving?
ALI VELSHI: Grafton County is actually responding to biofeedback from our cameraman as he sprints around the CNN Election Center.
ANDERSON COOPER: So what does that have to do with New Hamp—
ALI VELSHI: —I just put together a second, interactive chart explaining the first interactive map-graphic and posted it on Facebook for our slower viewers and Anderson Cooper.
WOLF BLITZER: Try and keep up, Vanderbilt.
ALI VELSHI: Now I just tweeted about the meta-chart.
ROLAND MARTIN: And now Foursquare says I’m the mayor of the CNN Election Center.
WOLF BLITZER: Some breaking news, we’ve just received word that Roland’s CNN Election Center mayorhood is now trending worldwide on Twitter. We’ll be keeping a close eye on that, right now, mayor, let’s take an even closer look at this next clip, January, from a town hall meeting in Concord with former Speaker Newt Gingrich, talking about health care, Concord, a very important issue in this campaign season, America’s Choice 2012, right now, take a look, Speaker, Nikki Minaj:
NEWT GINGRICH: We need to get America back on the path of long-term financial security. And the first step is getting rid of the President’s disastrous health care law.
WOLF BLITZER: David Gergen, right now?
DAVID GERGEN: That was a guaranteed applause line, Wolf. It worked very well in that venue, because, let’s face it: it’s fun to applaud.
WOLF BLITZER: James Carville in Washington, fun to applaud?
JAMES CARVILLE: You know it!
WOLF BLITZER: Dana Loesch.
DANA LOESCH: (applauds)
ROLAND MARTIN: Wolf, I saw this as a slap in the face to Mitt Romney, who implemented a similar health care plan in Massachusetts.
WOLF BLITZER: Slap in the face, Anderson Cooper, Ali Velshi?
ANDERSON COOPER: Which one of us are you—
WOLF BLITZER: —James Carville!
JAMES CARVILLE: Taco night tonight, Wolf!
WOLF BLITZER: Crunchy or soft shell, right now?
JAMES CARVILLE: Off to the tub!
WOLF BLITZER: There you have it, folks: crunchy taco, the official taco of the CNN Election Center. Anderson Cooper, your tacos?
ANDERSON COOPER: I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.
WOLF BLITZER: We’ve got to take a short break, kitchen table, but when we come back we’ll be watching very closely as John King explains to us how math works, and how that pertains to elections, so stay tuned for more political coverage, John King, crunchy taco, live, watching very closely, right now, the CNN Election Center, Sophie’s Choice 2012.
January 6, 2012
Aliens With Benefits by Teddy Wayne
Amigos, welcome to America! It’s okay, you can come out of hiding—we don’t care that you’re so-called “illegal aliens.” In fact, we love aliens, as long as they’re cute and cuddly, like E.T., or willing to work below minimum wage while being exploited at jobs most Americans won’t touch, like you!
Just because you’re here illegally doesn’t mean we’re withholding your slice of good ol’ American apple pie that you baked under a fast-food franchise’s heat lamp. There’s much controversy about whether you should be insured in our health care system. Well, you can put your mind at ease, after you’ve finished your 16-hour shift, because you’re covered for a host of ailments and preventative care treatments, such as lung-cancer screenings for all those toxic chemicals you’re inhaling in the factories or wherever to ensure that you can continue working until you retire at 85.
And what good is your health if you’re not able to enjoy it in your golden years? That’s why we’re instituting the new 401(k)(ia) plan for illegal aliens. For every cent you put into a pension from your $2.50 hourly wage, the government will take it, invest it, then give the original amount back to you in 40 years so that you don’t lose it—free of charge!
What about dental insurance, you ask? How do free toothbrushes every six months with our dentist’s phone number on them sound? Heck, we’ll even throw in some barely used floss.
A guy in our office also found a pair of backup glasses from eight years ago that just might fit a certain someone’s prescription.
Paying someone to take care of your kids during the day can be prohibitively expensive, so under the Illegal Alien Child Care Bill your children will be legally permitted to work alongside you. Don’t forget to snap a picture of junior’s first time helming the slaughterhouse deboner!
You will receive time off for all our major holidays: Flag Day and New Year’s Half-Hour.
We know you came to the United States for greater opportunity, to escape oppressive regimes, and because our reality shows are great and you should buy the wonderful products advertised in their entertaining commercials. Providing you with benefits is our way of saying, “You’re welcome!” and keeping you just enough above water to encourage your relatives back home to join in the fun and risk their lives crossing the border. In return, we simply ask that you work hard, abstain from bathroom breaks, and agree every election cycle to serve as a scapegoat.
Finally, you’ll receive the greatest benefit of all: a tax rebate (because your income will now be recorded and taxed in the highest bracket—hey, floss doesn’t grow on trees!). To guarantee you’re first in line, end-of-year filing is due January 1. We suggest using New Year’s Half-Hour to complete it.
January 4, 2012
Excerpts From My 2012 Day-By-Day Mayan Calendar by Avery Monsen and Jory John
January 1st
Wake up and shake off that hangover, sleepyhead! Take a deep breath and smile. This is the first day of the rest of your life! (The rest of your life, of course, will be 354 days long.)
February 14th – Valentine’s Day
Love is in the air! Also, you’ll notice that there are no honeybees, for some reason. Where did they all go? And what do they know that you don’t?
April 1st – April Fools’ Day
We’ve just spoken to some top scientists, and apparently the Mayan calendar was totally incorrect! There’ll be no apocalypse. You’ll get to live a nice, long, healthy life.*
*April Fools! You’ll be dead in exactly 263 days.
May 1st
Today, make a list of the 25 places you always wanted to see. Got em? Okay, now cross off 20.
May 5th – Cinco De Mayo!
Here’s a quick Spanish lesson to help you celebrate: En siete meses, mi vida será una pesadilla tenaz. (Translation: In seven months, my life will be an unrelenting nightmare.)
June 21st
The first day of summer! Grab some brewskis and head for the beach! Wait, does the sun seem closer to anybody else? It’s probably hard to measure that sort of thing, but the sun definitely seems bigger or hotter or something.
July 4th
The Founding Fathers never could have guessed that we’d have our independence for exactly 236 years before the earth imploded in a terrifying inferno. Lucky for them, they’re already dead. God bless America!
August 15th
Today, you should go to your local grocery store and buy as much bottled water as you can. Make sure the cashier doesn’t know where you live, though, or you can bet he’ll come looking for it when all the Earth’s water is on fire.
August 16th
Today, head back the grocer’s and stock up on canned tunafish. You’ll need that protein to nourish your ever-weakening arms when all the fish of the world are on fire.
September 20th
Seems like the bands of looters are becoming more ruthless, huh? Today, take fifteen minutes to visualize killing a home-invader with your bare hands so you won’t hesitate when the time comes. Because the time absolutely will come.
September 26th
[Elaborate blueprint of a man-trap.]
October 31st
Happy Halloween! Don’t even think about opening the door tonight. In fact, now is as good a time as any to barricade the doors and windows.
November 2nd
What the fuck was that noise? WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT NOISE?!
December 20th
On this second to last night of Earth, you, the reader, and I, the professional-calendar-man/survival expert, are connected. As you gaze down at these words, our hearts beat as one and, though we’ve never met face to face, in a very real sense, we have shared something. A year of laughs, a year of tears, a year of elaborate homemade boobytraps and DIY weaponry. In this world with no future and and a quickly-fading present, a connection is all we have. Tomorrow is your last day. Spend it with someone you love.
December 21st
If you don’t have someone to love and if you live near the Denver area, please send a full body pic to endofdays69@aol.com. I have five spare gas masks and an industrial-sized vat of sexual lubricant. Good luck.
December 21, 2011
Newt Gingrichs Letter to Virginia, Regarding the Existence of Santa Claus and Claims That He Said Otherwise by John Flowers
Dear Virginia:
I’m not going to talk about what I have previously said on the topic of Santa Claus. The record is perfectly clear: Yes, Virginia, I am in favor of a Santa Claus.
What I do want to talk about is what I see you and your friends doing, which is playing into the media’s game. You are buying into the fiction and the rumors and the outright lies the media peddles about Santa Claus. It is a liberal invention, one designed to get 8-year-olds fighting each other so that they don’t pay attention to the absolutely abysmal record of job creation under the current President. And, frankly, I’m against it.
I don’t say this as someone who doesn’t understand how Christmas works, Virginia. I’ve been there. I know the lists. I know the kind of deals kids try to make with Santa to get that new toy.
I remember when Santa Claus came to me with an idea about spreading good cheer. He wanted to do it in August and he wanted the gifts to be books of coupons.
I said, “Santa, that’s just not going to work.” I said, “You’re not going to be able to locate most of the good people, because they’re hard workers who don’t ask the government for anything, and come August they’ll be on vacation. Plus, a lot of people have their chimneys closed during the summer months. It’s impractical.”
“Also,” I told him, “coupon books are fine for cousins you’re not sure will show up to the big family get together, but for kids, they might want something a little more fun.” Callista and I just made a movie that goes into great detail about this topic, incidentally.
Basically, I told Santa, “What you have to do is fly in at the end of the year. It serves as a nice coda for people, plus it works better from a tax perspective.” That’s what Ronald Reagan and I did in the ‘80s, Virginia, and it’s what I was able to accomplish as Speaker of the House under the dictatorship of one of the most liberal presidents of all time: work until the last minute in service to the American people to lower taxes.
I also told Santa, “Give the children toys they might actually like.” However—and this is where the media has intentionally distorted what I have said because they fear my candidacy—I told him, “You have to be aware of something called ‘moral hazard,’ Santa. If kids think that toys are an automatic giveaway at the end of the year, then they will feel no repercussions for any bad behavior. Make sure the bad kids get something a little different.” And that is why bad kids today get something that’s actually quite useful: Good, honest, American coal, which—and I’ve said this many times, you can look it up—is the answer to the fundamental question of how we end our dependency on foreign oil.
You see, Virginia, you can’t just give everyone a toy, no matter their record. That’s what Government does: It rewards people for bad behavior. I wrote about this in my last book (all of which, I might add, are available in stocking-size paperback editions). I explained how you can’t expect, in good times or bad, for someone to just fly in while you’re asleep and give you whatever you most want, free of charge.
Now, I wasn’t referring to Santa Claus when I said that. I was using a metaphor about an outsider, much like myself, to whom all the world looks for answers to the complicated issues being debated in Washington today. But what’s in my sleigh, Virginia, is a bag filled with facts. Also in that bag: the most conservative voting record in the history of Congress. If you don’t believe me, Virginia, write to Santa and ask him to give you this Christmas a copy of the American Conservative Union’s report on the voting records of members of Congress. You will find that I—and none of the other candidates can say this—was rated consistently pro-life, pro-growth, and pro-capitalism as Speaker.
Virginia, to not believe that I have been consistent on the question of “Does Santa exist?” is simply ludicrous. You might as well not believe in fairies. And if you want to talk about inconsistency in message, then ask how the current President can say that there are no fairies, then pass legislation that would, effectively, create “death panels” for fairies.
Remember: Just because nobody in the media sees how clear I’ve been on my position regarding Santa, doesn’t mean that I haven’t been clear on my position regarding Santa.
Santa lives within us all, Virginia. A thousand years from now, or ten times a thousand years from now—which is how long the socialist number crunchers at the CBO say it will take to pay off the President’s disastrous health care plan—Santa will still exist.
Yours,
Newt Gingrich
Former Speaker of the House
December 21, 2011
Historys a Bitch: A Dog Walk Through Time: Down in Whoville by Robb Fritz
“He loaded some bags
And some old empty sacks
On a ramshackle sleigh
And he hitched up old Max.”
- Dr. Seuss, How the Grinch Stole Christmas!
- – -
March last year after a good solid three months of my daughter asking me to read her How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, my lifetime love of the book was being tested. I understood it was her way of holding onto Christmas, but still. I explained it was time to move on to reading other things until next Christmas, and that we would kill the book’s magic if we read it too much. “But PLEEEEZE daddy. I just love it so much!” Big wide earnest eyes. So, okay, all right. I read it to her again. And maybe one more time after that. And then I hid it.
Not that I don’t sympathize. I’ve always loved Dr. Seuss, to the point that I used to have philosophical debates in my own head pitting Richard Scarry’s workaday depiction of life versus Seuss’s surreal, play-based one (shockingly, the surreal, play-based vision won). And while now I’m more than happy to wave goodbye to the holiday season via the inevitable booze and food hangover on January 1st, there was a time in the hazy past when it killed me—KILLED me—to leave the warm cocoon of Santa and presents and no school and (some) family visits and Peter Ustinov’s arch British accent narrating Ogden Nash’s rendition of The Nutcracker Suite and my mother-the-Christmas-candy-factory’s amazing, endless stream of chocolates, cookies and sweets.
The Grinch himself, that curmudgeonly almond-eyed crank of indeterminate species, was an annual mainstay in both book and TV form, with his loyal, ever-wary dog Max and his bottomless dislike of the raucous, festive Whos down in Whoville. Like so many things associated with Christmas—Santa, Scrooge, Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer, Jimmy Stewart’s annually televised suicide watch—it seems strange to realize that the Grinch didn’t just appear fully-formed out of our collective yuletide unconscious.
Regardless, he was in fact the creative output of one particular man and appeared in the world on a specific date. That date was November 24th, 1957, (with Sputniks and a dog named Laika both flying overhead) and the man who created him was Theodor Geisel, known to the world at large as Dr. Seuss. The Grinch arrived in bookstores just as the 53-year-old Geisel was becoming children’s lit’s version of a rock star. In March of that year, he’d released The Cat in the Hat, the first of his Beginner Books aimed at getting younger readers to read by providing literature with simplified vocabularies. He’d spent 20 years writing mildly successful children’s books and was content living his very modest lifestyle on the $5,000 a year he was making in royalties. Suddenly, after a nine-month long battle of wills with the only 236 words he was allowed to use in writing The Cat in the Hat, he discovered that he had suddenly produced a monster critical and popular hit that within two years would be bringing in millions. By May, two months after The Cat’s astounding debut, he had submitted his new Christmas-themed book to his editor at Random House with the note “Hope you like it. I’m sorta happy about the drawings.”
He was much happier about the book than the note let on. It was the easiest book he’d ever written, and this even with the deteriorating health of his first wife Helen, a children’s book author herself, who, despite a small stroke in April, still acted as his best editor and creative sounding board. Her illness seems to have even provided him with one of his key lines; as a result of her difficulties Helen said that it always felt as though her shoes were “two sizes too small,” exactly like the Grinch’s shriveled heart.
The one difficulty he had with the book was the end, the part after the Grinch hears the Whos rise up on Christmas morning in unexpected song. “I got hung up getting the Grinch out of the mess. I got into a situation where I sounded like a second-rate preacher or some biblical truism… Finally in desperation… without making any statement whatever, I showed the Grinch and the Whos together at the table, and made a pun of the Grinch carving the ‘roast beast.’… I had gone through thousands of religious choices, and then after three months it came out like that.”
The Grinch almost immediately became a holiday symbol as pervasive as Charles Dickens’ Scrooge, and as readily applied to peevish fellow humans immune to the season’s charms. Still, for all that people tend to use the terms Scrooge and Grinch interchangeably, there are definite differences between the two characters beyond the obvious ones of species and a predilection for not wearing any clothes. There’s no indication that the Grinch, unlike Scrooge, is a wealthy, malevolent, card carrying member of the 1%. He’s more just a finicky grump who hates it when his downstairs neighbors have late night parties, ostensibly because the noise keeps him up, but maybe just possibly because he hasn’t been invited. So, faced with his own bitterness that he masquerades as a moral judgment on the Whos’ holiday excesses, he comes up with a brilliant plan for ruining everyone’s chance at fun.
Also, unlike Scrooge, the Grinch has a dog, Max. In the book, Max is little more than the Grinch’s weary, put-upon canine slave, made to dress up as an unconvincing reindeer with one heavy faux-antler roped onto his head. When I lived in Brooklyn with my brother John, his dog Mary, a so-called natural dog with the sleek facial lines and large bat ears of the Egyptian god Anubis, would get the same look of resigned disappointment in her eyes—“please don’t do this to me”—every Christmas when we’d dress her up with a fake antler headpiece. Laden with his one heavy antler, Max is forced to drag the Grinch on his sleigh down into Whoville, then, once the Grinch has loaded the sleigh so full it looks like an undergrad’s laundry bag on a trip home to see the parents, Max is forced to pull the sleigh “three thousand feet up/up the side of Mt. Crumpet.”
Max’s species is basically “cartoon dog” (although Wikipedia curiously insists—on what basis, I have no idea—that he’s a Redbone Coonhound) but the essential point is that Max is a likeable, sympathetic mutt. If Geisel had chosen to give the Grinch a menacing, growling pit bull, say, it would have made an entirely different book, and made the Grinch a wholly different character.
In the 1967 TV version, Max’s participation is expanded substantially. Geisel made the adaptation with his friend, legendary animator Chuck Jones, who Geisel had met over 20 years earlier when serving as a captain in the Army’s so-called “Hollywood front” tasked with helping to make the Why We Fight series at a studio located at the intersection of Sunset and Western Avenues. He reported directly to Major Frank Capra, already a Hollywood legend and destined to make his own Christmas classic with Jimmy Stewart in 1946 right after the war’s end. Geisel was always impressed by his mentor’s patience and ability to teach, and credited Capra with training him how to trim a story to its essentials.
In Jones’s TV adaptation, Max is now a much more active sidekick in order both to expand the storyline and to give the story an innocent silent comic victim on which to unleash the full brunt of Chuck Jones’ classic animated physical shtick. My six-year-old eats up every goofy yank and drop and kuh-zow and fuh-zhang with mustard and relish, which I find obscurely pleasing despite the fact that I’ve apparently grown pretty Grinchy on the Jones brand of slapstick myself.
Scrooge, unlike the Grinch, not only doesn’t have a dog, but is so horrible he can’t even cut a break with man’s best friend (not that he cares). “Even the blind men’s dogs appeared to know him; and, when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and then would wag their tails as though they said, ‘No eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!’”
The two classics also aim at different morals, and as a result entertain different unlikely fantasies about human behavior. Scrooge is more the popular conception of modern day Wall Street, the 1% seeking to enrich itself while beggaring everyone else, and if they do become so beggared, then they most likely deserve it. Like a good hardcore American conservative, Scrooge is dead set against the nanny state, espousing a thorough-going social Darwinism in which, if people would rather die than go to the workhouses, then “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
The warm fuzzy fantasy that Dickens paints is this: if the heartless controllers of wealth could only resolve their soul-deadening childhood issues, they’d suddenly become generous and charitable and filled with a desire to spend the rest of their blessed days doing nothing but good for the Tiny Tims of the world. Having done my hired slacker time for years at the now-defunct Lehman Brothers, if you actually believe that any investment banker worth his M.B.A. from Wharton would ever have such an epiphany, then I’ve got a nice bundle of lucrative subprime mortgage-backed securities to sell you.
Seuss, on the other hand, was taking aim not at the wealthy overlords, but at the growing commercialization of Christmas. This was the same target Charles Schulz aimed at even more explicitly in his equally enduring A Charlie Brown Christmas, in which Charlie Brown is dismayed to discover that even Snoopy—the most famous cartoon dog of them all—has gone commercial, angling for the $1,000 grand prize in a Christmas decoration contest. As Lucy says with comic specificity, “Look Charlie, let’s face it. We all know Christmas is a big commercial racket. It’s run by a big eastern syndicate.” And at that point in the mid-60s, neither Seuss nor Schulz had even experienced Black Friday, that American version of the annual running of the bulls, only more deadly.
The fantasy Seuss paints is that the Whos, upon awakening on Christmas morning to find every present and decoration and speck of Christmas food vanished from their homes, do not immediately set out on a Christmas witch hunt—as would most likely happen with Humans down in Humanville—but instead gather in the town square to sing a heartwarming Christmas carol that grows the Grinch’s heart three sizes that day and sends him and Max back down Mt. Crumpet with all of the Who’s stolen Christmas in tow. Perhaps this generosity of spirit comes from living on a dust mote floating through the Jungle of Nool.
So far we’ve watched and read the Grinch this season, and we’ve watched A Charlie Brown Christmas. She still won’t watch Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer; apparently the emotional scars that the Abominable Snowman left when she saw it at age three are still too fresh and too deep. After she watched A Charlie Brown Christmas, she told us there were no adults in Charlie Brown’s world, only ghosts, which sounded kind of cool and mystical and wicked existential. During the holidays especially, for me, that sentiment makes all the sense in the world.
December 16, 2011
A Tired and Struggling Actresss Biography in the Program Notes for a Community Theatres Production of Sweet Bird of Youth by Mike Carrier
Hannah Poitras is ashamed to perform in this community theatre production of Sweet Bird Of Youth. Prior to landing her role, she tanked a number of actually worthwhile auditions due to her inconvenient shortage of anti-depressants.
Before ditching her family, friends, and a happy lifestyle for the cramped stages of Los Angeles, Hannah grew up in the suburbs of Dayton, Ohio. Being unfit for athletics, she stuffed her rosy cheeks full of bologna sandwiches and watched an excessive amount of movies. This love of cinema blossomed into an unhealthy obsession that was never snuffed out by a caring parental figure.
Hannah would like to thank her family for all their sarcastic support. Criticizing the value of acting behind her back has protected her from realizing the inconsequentiality of her aspirations. Being somewhat supportive didn’t propel her to dive wholeheartedly into theatre training. Thus, she has been able to meagerly survive as a full-time receptionist and part-time forgettable performer.
Acting teachers all across the country fell in love with Hannah’s misconception that talent can be purchased. They milked her bank account for every nickel she had. This culminated with a bachelor’s degree in acting from an elite community college in a Mid-Atlantic state. Her credit isn’t strong enough for taking out the loans necessary to pursue a master’s degree at this time.
Now approaching the age of forty, Ms. Poitras is on the brink of giving up acting forever. The constant barrage of wedding photos and baby portraits online are eating away at her sanity. In a desperate attempt to rescue herself from obscurity, she spends most evenings scouring the Internet for lonely film producers on dating websites. “BananaGirl1972” has yet to meet a suitor. Her thinning hair is all too visible in her profile picture, as well as the cheap headshot on the left.
This large non-speaking role arrived at Hannah’s doorstep out of both pity and the previous actress’s abandonment of such an impossible career. Ms. Poitras believes she got this part due to writing on her résumé, “Past accolades speak louder than present abilities.” She should have been nominated for the 2004 “Best Offstage Personality Award” and the “Best Eye Contact Onstage Award” at the Jacksonville Theatre Company. In her humble opinion, politics are to blame, not her lack of emotional range. This snub-job was one of the greatest injustices of the modern era.
Hannah would like to thank her golden retriever, Harley Masterson, for his willingness to listen after all those days where she wants to ignite the Hollywood sign in flames. The silly mutt knows she wouldn’t really snort the embers and stab every last casting director in their black hearts.
All her “friends” claim they would love to see her perform but are too busy “raising families” to see a Sunday night show at 10 PM. Ms. Poitras considers them all petty narcissists who need to grow up.
After the show, Hannah will make an appearance in the parking lot. There she will be sobbing loudly and cursing out any patrons that make eye contact with her. It is their fault that she feels unfulfilled. As the last driver refuses to give her a ride, she will eat a Cliff Bar for dinner and contemplate the meaning of life.
