Taylor Kate Brown

If there was any justice in the pop world, and radio wasn’t completely bought, this would be a legitimate widespread jam of the summer, deeming “California Gurls” to the back-bins of time:

This song is going to drive me into Marina and the diamonds back catalogue (however shallow depth it has). There’s bits of wacky, morbidity, fun, materialism, and under all that, pure drive. The video seems to be at odds with the song, where Marina sings “Don’t want money/don’t want fame/I just want to change”, and the rest of the song seems to imply that financial success is secondary (but not unwelcome) to psychological success or some sense of self-fullfilment.

That being said, Marina’s own description of the inspiration behind the song makes me like her even more:

["Oh No!"] was written in response to be terrified of not achieving what I say I want to achieve every time I open my big mouth. It’s my part ii to “Mowgli’s Road”. I was paralysed by fear before my trip to the states and couldn’t stop thinking about being a failure “etc” and was convinced that I’d become a self-fulfilling prophecy if my brain didn’t shut up and stop being so negative. So I put it in a song. “Mowgli’s [Road]” questioned who I want to be, “Oh No!” confirms it. It made me feel confident again after a shaky six months

Relatedly: Alyssa Rosenberg and Newsweek writer Seth Colter Walls chat on Bloggingheads.tv about the sincerity or non-sincerity of Lady Gaga and the artifice and honesty of female pop stars.

I know the artistic muse is fickle, and artists should take the opportunity of success to experiment, go in new directions, etc. but how does Gwen Stefani go from this:

To this in the space of little more than a decade?

Perhaps “Don’t Speak” is simply too much of a sacred cow for me.

Speaking of truly interesting actresses who are not Megan Fox, the Times’ magazine ran a profile on Laura Linney last week, notable to my own viewing history as the most compelling, heartbreaking chapter of Love Actually, and the luckiest actress on broadway when I was 15. Frank Bruni goes for the anecdote about how hard it is to report on this person for initial color, and surprisingly, that trope works this time:

To write about her is to succumb gradually to desperation and hopelessness — there just doesn’t seem to be any route around the fluffiest of the puffiest of articles — and to grovel for even a grain of dirt. Is it possible she doesn’t recycle? Files her taxes late? Chews her cuticles?

Linney herself isn’t any help. During one conversation I brought up Alicia Silverstone, one of her co-stars in “Time Stands Still,” figuring that a possible faintness of praise might establish a limit to her generosity of spirit. Linney, after all, came up through Juilliard, Silverstone through Aerosmith videos. “Oh, I love her,” Linney said, “I love her. Because she’s engaged in her life. She’s engaged in her life in a way that’s so admirable.” Then she added, unprompted: “And she’s a great actress. Being onstage with her — she’s a really great actress who’s not been respected.” I scoured those sentences for sarcasm. None present.

The article introduces her new show, the oddness but clear deserved opportunity of a career in bloom past the otherwise Hollywood-dead age of 40. While I appreciate the idea of showcasing her, the tone toes the line of “Oh wow! What an exception to the otherwise sexist, ageist, but not likely to be broken rules of this industry!” a little too much. In comparison, the cover image of Linney, reminiscent of classical painting in a way I could pin down better if I had ever  taken art history, is breathtaking for it’s artistic beauty and unphotoshopped profile.

Bruni’s article, however, makes me wonder what mid-career actress is in the pipeline, waiting for an unlikely break, or who is going to have a fantastic second act. I’m not sure what the openings for those kinds of moves are anymore, but they do seem to pop-up, all too rarely, but at the strangest of intersections of movie-making, art and commerce.

At the risk of possibly self-identifying with too many different brunette actresses (see Morales, Natalie), I really enjoyed Craig Ferguson’s interview with Ellen Page. As a Hollywood personality all but obscured by Juno-mania in 2008, Page originally struck me as someone who could easily fall into an typecasting rut. I’ve not seen Inception, but from trailers, it seems to be a step away from what she’d be pegged as – the wisecracking girl in a bad situation. In the interview she comes across as a decent conversationalist and more importantly, not a giggling-at-whatever-the-host-says buffoon. I’m tired of that talk show shtick, and thankfully, Ferguson usually plays to his guests’ strengths. Points for the innuendo jokes.

My favorite exchange, though, is at the end of the first part:

Ferguson: Do you cuss a lot in your own life?
Page: Ohhh yeah.
Ferguson: Really?
Page: Probably a lot more than people would think because of this face.

I feel you, Ellen. While it’s sometimes nice in my job to be almost entirely unthreatening, it does do a disservice to nastier, blunter side of my personality. It wouldn’t be authentic for me to dye my hair crazy colors or get tats on my neck, but somedays, you just feel like that person, and the most frustrating thing in the world is someone looking at you like, “Oh, isn’t she so sweet.”

Sorry everybody – I was trying to take a vacation, but it turns out I can’t even do that.

I started – and finished The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks today. Partially in the grass of Central Park (my apartment has it advantages) and partially on my couch (the sun has some disadvantages to my fair skin).

The book is a non-fiction narrative about the family, both blood and scientific, that Henrietta Lacks left behind after her death from cervical cancer. Cells scraped from the tumor within her cervix began to grow and divide at amazing rates and became one of the first immortal cell lines, helping researchers develop everything from the polio vaccine to study the effects of cells in space. There’s an entire section of the book artfully listing what HeLa cells have done or helped with and it is astonishing.

I sat in on a talk with the author a few months ago in New York City and now I’m sorely sad I hadn’t read the book beforehand. Something about a master’s degree? While the book deserves every bit of praise for its writing, telling a complicated tale clearly, both the science and the heartache of the family, what most impressed me was the reporting.

Forgive me for my new wide-eyed fascination, but with a been-there-before appreciation of how hard reporting can be and how easily it can be screwed up, the lengths to which Skloot went and the detail and care she showed towards Lacks’ family in the book is monumental. Especially Deborah Lacks, the daughter of Henrietta, whom I’m sure I would have written off within a few months of refusing to take phone calls. But she pesters gently and respects her wishes so much that in the end, Deborah trusts Skloot, even when she panics about her possibly being a plant from Johns Hopkins, the institution which the Lacks’ family felt primarily betrayed by, and for good reason.

Also, she went back. She went back to Clover, VA and found that it had disappeared – a fascinating, heartbreaking denouement for this book, but one that would have never happened if she didn’t go back to check out the story one more time. Go there, a professor said at the start of last year. I’ve never seen a clearer proof than that scene.

Rebecca Skloot on Colbert Report

from left to right: my visual storytelling class after our documentary screenings; newspaper stand in Union Square; party for last class in Feature Writing; camped in late-night at school for editing; Karen Gillan, Steven Moffat and Matt Smith at the U.S. premiere of Doctor Who; j-school class of 2010 on the steps

I’m proud to announce (nay, shout from the top of my apartment building) that I am officially graduated, diploma’d, and done with Columbia’s journalism school. An amazing year, and my lack of blog posts surely reflect that. I’ve run all over this city (Ozone Park, Queens to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, to Williamsbridge, Bronx) and I’m both overwhelmingly tired and beyond excited about my new career. No, I actually am excited about that, it’s not some cover letter talk. I also know that to be true because I have a job.

Yup, a full time job in journalism. I know. I too thought that was a non-existent phrase back in August. Starting in the beginning of June, I’ll be an local editor for Patch.com – Aol’s start-up-within-a-company on local news. More details as they become pertinent, but I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me, especially in the next few months as the site gets built up.

The thing that I’m constantly reminded about j-school is how much I got done in a short time. Since the start of 2010, I’ve made a documentary, bothered school officials to no end, survived a full day job fair, written three features, and hustled my way onto the Doctor Who screening press line.

(Pro-tip: If somebody asks you if you’re with press, say “Yes!”. If you have appropriate-looking equipment, they won’t ask anymore questions.)

I’m also happy to report that nearly all of my friends from school have something that will pay them this summer, either a job or a full-time internship/fellowship. You could feel the tension releasing the last week of school, as people realized they were going to make it through after all. On my last day of class I literally hung out for several hours on the steps, reading, because I didn’t know what else to do.

I have much much more to say about j-school, but that warrants a whole other post. For now, I toast my glass to my family, friends, and the 300-some-odd brilliant people I just graduated with. My senior year English teacher put me on the path of seeking out the crazy, brilliant people. Here, I have found a goldmine.

Happy Engagement by Stefan Geens

A couple days after I arrived in Egypt, our resident advisor, around a hastily assembled welcome dinner of foods I’m still not sure were Egyptian, told us about her experiences with harassment and how we should behave ourselves on the streets. She also shared the fact that her parents were none too happy with a young woman like herself moving out, however temporarily, without being married. Instead she was living in a hotel downtown with 40 American women.

Those two ideas turned out to be knowledge of Egypt derived from the same social understanding: a marriage crisis in Egypt meant economic conditions had so deteriorated that the expensive requirements of a marriage were no longer an option, even as young Egyptians poured into Cairo’s streets from the south. In only four months, the marriage crisis was given to me as the underlying cause of everything from the horrific street mob assaults after Eid to the weakness of the Egyptian press. Young men who can’t marry in a country that exalts marriage,  don’t you know they turn violent?

I, too participated in this sort of explanatory leap of logic to explain my daily reality to friends back home. Sure, I didn’t want to excuse such actions, but was nice to be able to give a sociological salve to my confusion.

Ursula Lindsey, writing in Foreign Policy, reviews a new book on the subject and finds that the latest, greatest marriage crises may be a lot of bluster.

Certainly, men and women across the region are getting married at a later age and, in some countries and socioeconomic groups, aren’t marrying at all. Yet it’s hard to gauge the true extent of the phenomenon, just as it was a hundred years ago.

More interesting, however is the idea that perhaps while the number of single people are still higher, it doesn’t constitute a crisis.

But there is a fundamental difference between the two marriage crises. In the first, the focus was on convincing men to marry, at a time when they were thought of as the only real agents in the matter. Today, the concern is just as much — perhaps more — with women. Kholoussy says that in the early 1900s, “Egyptians did not want to even speculate about the fate of a nation full of unwed women.” Today, that speculation is rampant. And women themselves are discussing more openly than ever their choice to marry or remain single.

Lindsey’s Arabist post is far more convincing on this point, as she quotes a series of exchanges she found on Facebook groups on the subject.

It might be that the ‘crisis’ proceeds an actual change. But redefinition of what’s acceptable to Egyptian maritial customs and social expectations as a whole is not fought solely on a Facebook wall. I should mention that several months after we left, my resident adviser got married, and it looked like a beautiful, expensive affair.

His videos are by design, or by natural inclination, diverse. In the now official version of “Pursuit of Happiness”, Cudi is the center piece of a champagne-and-every-else all night fete, populated with the beautiful of every color and particular style and poise that screams “Brooklyn kids come to Manhattan for the night”. It’s upper-class and aspirational, sure, but also young, and a type of cosmopolitan that doesn’t neccessary mean not-broke. Basically, it looks like my j-school class. I don’t think it’s unimportant that Cudi is biracial himself.

“Day and Night” is his first video that plays a little more on how many ethnic and social classes you can interact with in a dense city. I especially like how he plays on a second identity here, from the odd looking pirate girl outside the bodega and the turn-tabling pizza guys.

Cudi has an acting career as well, on a HBO show about young Americans in a city. And of course, his in-between hit includes a mashup of a live Lady Gaga performance. If not positioning himself for super-relevance in the music industry,  Cudi is at least super-relevant to this blog’s interests.

I have a few more things to say about Kid Cudi, but I couldn’t let the opportunity pass by to share the ‘alternate’ version of his video for “Pursuit of Happiness”.

KiDCuDi.tv: Cudi Feat. MGMT & Ratatat – Pursuit of Happiness (Alternate Version) from DP on Vimeo.

The official version is a pretty standard party scene video, high quality, but still nothing we haven’t seen before. This, however, this I got dragged into the song and can’t get it out of my head. It probably helps that it echoes the problems I’ve been having waking up as early as I’d like, but there’s also a hint of the value of quiet (as opposed to a Gaga-style production) but creatively expansive vision. Watch it before it disappears from the internet altogether.

Good for them.

I say this not as “they should monetize their users in any way”, but in “they have shown themselves to have real, non-fleeting value and need the money to support the media-heavy infrastructure of a growing community.”  Tumblr was hailed as both the death of longer blogging, but that’s not going to die anytime soon.

It’s settled in, a few years later, with actual staying power, as a simple, multimedia heavy style of blogging, and a legitimate community formed from the service’s unique network idea (reblogging, simple like button, embedded question forms). Tumblr’s the self-effacing, cooler older cousin at this metaphorical family reunion. Although I’ve never attended a in-person Tumblr meet-up, they strike me as being about what people like to put on their Tumblr, not about Tumblr’s platform. There’s only so much “techie” recursive content that I can stand after a while.

read more »