In the very first paragraph of the prologue, Nina Simone reflects on a statement James Baldwin – Jimmy, to her – had directed to her, “This is the life that you have made, Nina. Now, you have to live in it.” She doesn’t come back to acknowledge that simple but important truth until the end of her tale but it is the one that stuck with me throughout my reading.

To be quite frank, Ms. Simone is much less effective with prose than lyrics and melody. This is not about insight into her psyche or much reflection on the challenges and triumphs of her life. If you’re looking for that, if you’re interested in her passions and emotions, stick with the music. You’ll find no new access here. If you want to know about her life’s loves, her relationship with her family, and her near constant lack of business acumen, well, this is for you.

This is not what I was hoping for. I wanted her to delve deeper into her connection with the civil rights movement. A good portion of the middle passages deal with this part of her life but only anecdotally. I yearned for a stronger discussion of her politics and how she reconciled that with her music and her career and her station. I wanted less about how her relationships with men dominated her emotional state and effected her movements.

What we do get, however, are glimpses into her genius and how, despite suggesting up and down at the opening of the book that she wasn’t proud of her skill as a musician, her awareness of her own genius gave her a unique point of view. Wealth was not really a concern for her but respect – for her celebrity, her craft, and her skin – were incredibly important to her. This ego—a hallmark of her career, her performances, her relationship with her audiences – rears it’s head often. I found these glimpses into how she saw herself most fascinating. We could all learn to demand to be treated with the kind of respect Ms. Simone often required.

As Jimmy noted, “We are the creators of the worlds we live in.” If that’s the case, might as well make it a world where our own brilliance is acknowledged.

Mildly recommended but, really, I’d just recommend picking up as much of her catalogue as you can. The recent re-issues Nina Simone Sings The Blues, Forever Young Gifted & Black, and Silk & Soul are great starts.

As Carrie noted on our trip to Disneyland a couple weekends ago, I’ve moved from just drinking the Kool-Aid to making it. It’s true. I make few apologies about it. Since the day I started at the mouse, I’ve been challenged by my job in interesting and enjoyable (and frustrating) ways. I’ve also been rewarded for how I handle these every day struggles. Plus, there are those days when we’re just doing stuff that is so fun and cool, I’m a bit overwhelmed with what I get to call a job. Like The Muppets and Phineas & Ferb and Here Come The 123s.

Be Our Guest is all about what we do “backstage” to make the Disney magic happen. Online, just as in the parks, you don’t get to see what goes on behind the curtain. You’re never aware of our process, our heated discussions around guest experience and quality of content and everything else that goes into our show. You just see the pixie dust.

I won’t dig too deeply into this here. I know there is only so much Disney crap people can take before they want to smack me around but the most significant part of this book for me was the discussion around communication and specifically about how Cast Members at the park are taught to deal with what, on the surface, seems like one of the silliest questions ever to be asked: “What time does the 3 o’clock parade start?”

This is one of the most common questions asked in the parks. The answer, however, is about engagement and understanding that guests aren’t really asking about the time. They are probably asking about where they should stand, what the route is, what time it will be at this specific location or a whole host of possibilities. Rather than give a glib response or even one that answers the question (but not the guest’s need) like a bubbly “Why, 3 o’clock!” it is an opportunity to make someone’s day with special attention and empathy.

I need to remember this at work. I need to remember this in life.

As the unfrozen head of Walt might say, “Never forget, the magic always begins with you.”

Recommended.

Lars and The Real Girl by Nancy Oliver and Craig Gillespie (2007, MGM). Is it ironic that a film that, at its root, is about loneliness, I’d rather have watched it alone? In the midst of a half full theater, instead of being as engrossed into the striking story as I should have been, I found myself questioning the whats and whys of other people’s laughter. I should have been thinking about why a small town went willingly with another man’s delusion. I should have been challenging myself to consider “Bianca” under these different circumstances. And, to some extent I did but I still wanted to ask people, “Why is this scene funny?”

Was it the absurdity? Because, of course, a Real Doll is absurd. It’s offensive and gross. That said, Ryan Gosling’s Lars is far from absurd. He’s a sweet, gentle soul who takes in the world from a very safe distance. So, theater patrons, is it his curious mental illness that is laughable? I might be able to accept that. I, however, only occasionally got the joke. Most of the time, I was just sad for Lars and his hurt and proud of the simple acts of kindness and honesty that this entire town shows him at the right moments to provide some level of therapy and healing.

But still, that fucking doll. I know we imbue objects with our own feelings and hangups and I’m trying to accept that this creepy sex toy could be anything to anybody in the right context—something the movie showcases time and again—but still. There are dudes paying thousands of dollars to hump an inanimate woman (with a backstory like she came from the Cabbage Patch) who won’t reject them. Or talk. Or think. Or be.

You’ll forgive me if I struggle with accepting her as Lars and his community does.

And yet, even though I squirmed in my seat with my brow furrowed, it is a wonderful film. The acting is spot on. We get to know these people in both their little and big moments. And, I cared.

Real Doll notwithstanding…recommended.

Mouse Guard Volume 1: Fall 1152 by David Petersen (2007, Archaia Studios Press). Halfway through Special Topics in Calamity Physics, I lost interest. I was reading a line here, a paragraph there, a chapter during an ambitious afternoon and then this arrived in my PO box and saved me. I don’t remember how I learned of the Mouse Guard but the lush fall colors and illustrations drew me to it. Perhaps it’s nostalgia, although I shudder at the thought of being that corny and pedestrian, but it does remind me of some of my favorite elementary school reads—an encyclopedia about Gnomes and the illustrated The Hobbit.

Much like the lush worlds of those stories and art, the Mouse Territories are not for those with weak constitutions. Terror hides in every dark corner. Friends are lost in battle. Treachery and treason infect souls. I’m not sure if David Petersen intends his Mouse Guard to be children’s lit but I’m sure it will be considered as such. Taken that way, it’s the kind of kid lit I like. It doesn’t lie or coddle. It tells children what they need to know, not that bad things exist (they already know this) but that bad things can be dealt with (why do I feel like I’m stealing that from something I saw this week?).

Each chapter opens with words of wisdom from Mouse Guard text and guide books. I was particularly taken with this one:

"Clouds, leaves, soil, and wind all offer themselves as signals of changes in the weather. However, not all the storms of life can be predicted."

Recommended.

I sat outside the Beehive next to two women kanoodling over coffee and an unopened copy of Potter. I was reading Sylvia Plath with Sleater-Kinney blaring through my ear buds. I am Jack’s riot grrrl lesbian sister. Tomorrow, I’m auditioning for a Heavens to Betsy tribute band.

I kid. Sort of.

I’m struggling with what I want to say about this book. You don’t need me to tell you it’s a spectacular piece of writing. It is feminist canon for a reason. It is also, perhaps, one of the most brilliant recollections of mental illness and depression. Plath is also witty and wry and wonderful.

Her Esther, and Plath by extension, would be a chore of a person to care about but I’d like to think I’d get her. Not that it would help anything.

[I’ve written and deleted a paragraph here three times. We’re going to leave it deleted and start fresh.]

Suicide has been a prominent part of my life. I get those who ponder and attempt it. They call and announce their pain. They, generally, don’t want to end their lives. They want help. Or to be heard. Whether doing suicide hotline in college or with friends and family in extremely hard times, those people have reached out to me.

Those who are successful at suicide…don’t. They dissapear. They simply show up dead.

The two times I’ve felt intimately involved with someone who has committed suicide, I perceived them as intelligent and special as Esther is written. They saw the world differently. They found absurdity in what most of us consider normalcy. Their response to seemingly “normal” situations were generally so far outside expectation as to be both mesmerizing and often insufferable.

They also had incredible bouts of sadness and solitude. They came up with extreme ways to solve what they considered to be the problems of their lives and the world. They failed to get their desired changes at every turn.

And then they were gone.

I have a friend like that right now. This is her favorite book. She’s the reason I read it.

And, I worry.

I wouldn’t ever want to be trapped in the bell jar but it’s not much easier being on the outside of it either unable to uncork it, smash it, or otherwise break free.

For the insight into what that mindset might be like alone, it is highly recommended.

For the style and skill with which Plath composes her signature work, it is a must.

Books). What I expected to enjoy the most about this story of changelings and trading places were the moments that the two main characters paths intersected or felt similar. And while I did find those elements fascinating, particular during the middle of the book, what I enjoyed most was that the tale is told over a large swatch of time. I’ve never really thought about it before but I tend to really like stories were time is a key element—Middlesex, The Time Traveler’s Wife, The Known World, The Dark Tower series, and so on. That two significant turning points in this story take place a century apart for the protagonist who would become known as Henry Day is right up my alley.

And, although the story is told in alternating perspective for two characters, Henry Day and Aniday, there is only one true lead here and that is Henry. Henry is the changeling as man and his very long con is what propels us forward. Aniday’s adaptation to the fanciful world of faeries, or hobgoblins if it suits you, is interesting but, ultimately, a less satisfying journey. A child for the duration, his quest for love and to know himself and the “real world” that he has been denied simply doesn’t move me.

But a pretender trying to figure out what it means to be human? What it means to be an artist? What it means to love and care for something other than yourself? I could’ve gotten with that for another hundred pages at least.

Recommended.

I sat in Lulu’s Beehive this morning with my coffee and banana bundt amongst a sea of laptops, a painting of ducks that looked suspiciously like a picture in my own flickr photostream, and a friend’s ex-boyfriend with another girl I knew but couldn’t place. While I wasn’t the only one with white buds in my ears, I was the only person cracking the spine of a book. The women that kept walking into the cafe were all cleavage and caffeine and cigarettes and a welcome distraction from the chapters about grief in this love letter to music and marriage and life. I kept catching myself staring too long at these ladies and thought, either I need to get laid or get loved.

Probably both.

I kind of hate Rob Sheffield for making me feel like all the relationships I’ve had in the past have been inadequate. I have never loved anyone like he loved his Renee. He doesn’t even hide the feelings he had for her in ebullient metaphor or shlocky hyperbole. He just tells it like it is and it is wonderful and amazing and way shorter than it had any right to be. While I did blow through the chapters focused on his loss and his dealing (or not dealing) because I don’t quite have the emotional armor right now to handle more mourning, it’s a beautiful love story all explained in terms I totally get—song lyrics and beats and all the feelings and emotions that we associate with music.

There’s probably a mix tape of my own that will come out of this that includes “Symptom Finger” by the Faint, “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)” by The Arcade Fire, “Mushaboom (Postal Service Remix)” by Feist, “One More Hour” by Sleater-Kinney, “Keeping You Alive” by The Gossip, “Misread” by Kings of Convenience, and “Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime” by Beck, almost all of which acted as my soundtrack this morning. Somehow, I don’t own nor don’t think I have ever even heard “One More Hour” by Sleater-Kinney and it is the one song he goes into detail about in the book that I want to know everything about. I can imagine the track in my head by his description. I can hear Carrie and Corin going back and forth. I’ve already attached an emotional response to it. I will love it. Even if I was deaf, I would love it.

Sheffield goes into great detail about the significance of Nirvana on his life and, in particular, “Heart-Shaped Box”. I decided while reading that I’d add Joe Hill’s (Stephen King’s son) recent debut novel of the same name to my queue. While reading, I aped a line of his that he stole from some outfit a member of Pavement was wearing for a twitter message. I took down quotes, one for me that’s a truth I’m going to keep for myself about love and loss and fear and the real agreement that people make to each other when they go into a commitment like marriage and one for you:

"Most mix tapes are CDs now, yet people still call them mix tapes."

There’s a reason for that. I leave it to you to figure out why.

Highly recommended.

Children of Men directed by Alfonso Cuaron (2006, Universal). Alfonso Cuaron is on some next level shit. In all the reviews I read prior to screening the film today, a comparison is made to Blade Runner. They are all correct to do so. Not since Blade Runner have I ever felt so viscerally connected to a future world. When we are dropped into 2027 as the youngest person on the planet is being eulogized and Clive Owen’s Theo orders a cup of coffee, you smell this Britain. The stench of desperation, defeatism and life is all over this UK of two decades from now.

This is the most lo-fi sci-fi film I’ve seen in quite awhile. Cuaron makes no visual flights of fancy to wow the audience. He captures you with the possibility of this time. We aren’t so far off from this now he seems to say. Don’t sleep or this is your tomorrow. He doesn’t leave us caught out there in this dismal time without a life preserver, however. At all times, we are shown characters who cling tightly to their humanity despite how close the world teeters on oblivion.

And, make no mistake, this is our world. Where I noted in my review of V for Vendetta last year,

I know that Alan Moore’s source material serves to guide this choice but if they’re going to gloss over the big picture concept of fascism vs. anarchism—the two extremes that are the base of everything within the comic books—and essentially bring it down to a question of neo-conservatism vs. revolutionary action, then maybe we could have had some brown people on the screen. Modern Day England has roots in the Middle East and Africa and those groups are growing. Surely, a near future UK would be even more culturally mixed.

here, Cuaron makes no such misstep. Having already diverted significantly from the source material, he creates a near-apocalyptic Britain that is as diverse racially as it is today. Perhaps even more so. The anti-immigrant fervor of this UK obviously has racial overtones but isn’t as simplistic as Vendetta’s white-washing makes it. Dark skinned folks are still a part of the country, although in obviously fewer numbers, and are often relegated to large refugee ghettos where Islamic extremism prospers. The rich whites have the freedom to live high above it all and “not think about it” while even the liberal anti-establishment whites are able to hole up in private enclaves and get high while people of color and whites with foreign dialects are put in cages and whisked away. They may be out of mind but they are never out of sight.

Sci-fi films often create a very white future. Spielberg’s futuristic movies all have this conceit. Minority Report’s Washington D.C. is the cleanest and most vanilla the chocolate city has ever been. A.I. and Back to the Future, part II have similar issues. Even Will Smith’s starring vehicle I, Robot lacks the multicultural casting any version of our soon-to-come years must have.

The world has become more diverse and more connected, not less. That Cuaron remembers this is achievement enough and should get you in the theatre. That it is, also, a spectacular movie that hits on all cylinders, comes in at under 2 hours, and leaves you with grim but hopeful thoughts of the world to come makes it one of the very best films of 2006 and the best sci-fi flick in ages.

I’ve masturbated to a Rolling Stone Magazine. RS 526 from May 19th, 1988. Lisa Bonet is on the cover of “The HOT Issue” barely clothed. Her sheer white shirt or dress or whatever it was strategically placed put my 13-year-old mind on fire. There was a full nude to accompany the story about her (not that I read the story) and, yeah, I totally indulged my growing sexuality with that one.

That said, Rolling Stone hasn’t been my pop culture magazine of record throughout my life. Going through all 1,000 covers featured in the book there are distinctive covers I remember and periods of time when I know I was regularly buying it (there are several 4-6 month patches in the early nineties—my high school years—when I must have been stopping by Waldenbooks in the Fashion Square Mall or the newsstand on Victory and Van Nuys to pick up every issue or every other issue) but in my formative music years of the nineties, I was up on Vibe and URB and occasionally The Source. Currently, I look to The Fader and Wax Poetics and online to take the pulse of pop culture.

I imagine I would have loved the magazine in the late 60s to early 80s, though. There’s an energy to the covers they produced, the people and sounds they wrote about that isn’t duplicated often currently. This collection seems to notice this as well. Broken down by decade, the 60s, of which the magazine was only in publication for 3 years, takes the longest to get through. Jann Wenner’s introduction, a love letter to his creation that sends you searching through the book to find the iconic covers he notes, gives a great primer to the mag and what they were trying to do creatively and how the best covers, most in the early years when Annie Liebovitz was behind the camera, came about.

After the deaths of John Lennon and John Belushi in the early 80s and as the magazine gets more glossy and polished and as their pop culture subjects become increasingly less like people and more like commodities, there are fewer articles they publish that matter and fewer covers that can be considered inspired. The 90s, in particular, are so vapid that it is only when Clinton or anything associated with Kurt Cobain that the icons they are creating or following seem relavent. There are something like 4 or 5 seinfeld covers over the decade. Is that really necessary?

When Rolling Stone is good, though, it is really good. I’m not sure another publication eulogizes better. They have also done some pretty great investigative journalism over the years and pulled some inciteful quotes from people long before we knew how spot on they were. I was struck by this quote from Jon Stewart on the significance of the Clinton/Lewinsky Sex Scandal (RS 799, 11.12.98)

In the end, something really terrible is going to happen. Truly catastrophic, like some guy is going to get anthrax in a bottle and put it in our soft drinks or something. We will look back on these days with the kind of nostalgia that people have when they talk about nickel movies. We’ll look back and go, “Oh, remember the days when all we worried about was the president blowing his load on someone’s dress?”

Hmmm. Whether it’s my president or my 7th grade sex symbol, Rolling Stone is best when it’s about getting off.

I’m a fan of metaphors and similes, so it is frustrating that “America’s Report Card” defies those kinds of descriptions. It has a kind of indie film aesthetic but not reminiscent of anything I’ve seen before. It’s smart and biting in a McSweeney’s kind of way but without the pretension and heir of superiority that sometimes plagues writers who attempt that style.

But, never mind all that, the point is that it is good.

Underneath all this wry satire about our post-9/11 America, where an art teacher believes the government is spying on her and a standardized test is used to profile citizens and mollify its workers, is a realism that is often quite striking.

The motivations of the characters—these characters that seem both cartoonish and very real, scarily real in some cases, not unlike our President—are never their politics. They make moves based on love and loss and while this big machine of corruption and absurdity is chugging along all around them, the curtain is never pulled. The focus is on average folks trying to make sense of the looney tunes time they live in.

Sure, by the end, McNally has run out of interesting ideas and falls on some predictable and well-treaded plots but the journey to get there is enjoyable and thought-provoking.