Back in Business

I'm in love with the original "Fame" movie. I just re-watched the whole thing and am regretting not buying it permanently from Amazon. I will, I think.

When I tell people what a great film Fame is, they usually reply with "But isn't it just another dance movie?" Ach, what fools. They'll at best hum Irene Cara's famous title track, and envision spandex and legwarmers. Either they haven't seen it, or they've forgotten what a fantastic film it is - mainly because it's really not inspirational in a traditional Hollywoody sense. It's not Dirty Dancing - there's no fairy tale ending, where the ugly duckling is turned in to a beautiful, self-assured swan, floating on the arms of the beautiful boy from the wrong side of the tracks.

'Fame', instead, is really troublingly honest. Not necessarily about LaGuardia, the performing arts school where it's set - I've been fascinated by the film, and the TV-series that followed it for long enough to have quizzed every single graduate I've come across what the school was like. (Apparently, there was singing in the corridors. but not as much). It's not even necessarily honest in it's portrayal of different characters; the teachers are all charicatures and even the students portrayed from auditions to the final performance of "I sing the body electric", are barely more than sketches.

Where 'Fame' is really honest, what I guess makes it speak to me so much at the moment, is about theconcerns that go in to living a creative life; just how challenging it is to try to create something, anything, in the midst of regular life. Regardless of what that life may look like. Regardless if you're a cossetted Jewish girl in Brooklyn, an Upper East Side princess, a Puerto Rican boy who's sister is attacked by junkies in the South Bronx or an illiterate African American dance prodigy from the projects, life gets in the way. It's honest about all the temptations and selfishness and mistakes you make along the way - how easy it is to trip up. But it also portrays how the events around you, or even ones you self-destructively or unthinkingly set in motion don't have to be final. Hilary has an abortion and continues dancing on the West Coast, far away from the frosty family she rebelled against. Ralph doesn't quit after his drug use makes him royally screw up a show. Leroy manages to get back into school despite his feud with his English teacher. Coco stays in the business even after her gullibility and a predatory "movie director" have added up to what's suggested is a porn shoot.


And it shows quite how vulnerable you might need to make yourself to be any good. Montgomery opens up about his homosexuality in a move that probably helps him as an actor, but gives him continued problems in his peer group. Doris's search for originality and her own voice put her at odds with her family. In a film done today, I think these choices would be given some sort of censure or pat on the back, but that doesn't happen in "Fame". Montgomery is still lonely; Doris is still very much part of the chorus. They're better, sure, but they're still not Ralph, who may or may not make it anyway - having ridden on talent and chutzpah for the whole movie, his ambition and drug use may get in the way. Or he'll settle to "just" be a comic, an irresponisble goofball, rather than give his work the depth it's clear he has access to.


Perhaps the most poignant relationship, for me, is the one between Bruno and Coco. Bruno, is an Italian-American musical genius, so wrapped up in his own creativity that he can hardly share his music, let alone his emotions, with anyone. Beautiful, talented, determined and commercially minded, Coco becomes the voice of his music - what makes his work accessible and, you feel, the only person he opens up to. Bruno is clearly in love with Coco, who doesn't care for him like that - she's seeing Leroy who she doesn't know has gotten Hilary pregnant. You feel for Bruno, for loving this girl whos mind is set on bigger things and who only sees him as a creative partner and friend, but you don't hate Coco for it. You respect her, for being so wholeheartedly dedicated to what she's building for herself, no matter how childishly she goes about it; she lies to Bruno and his proud-but-exasperated taxidriver father about where she lives, to create an illusion about herself for the one person you feel probably wouldn't care. But there's no judgment passed on her for this - she does what she needs to do, figuring it out as she goes along. Her honesty's in her voice - her rendition of "Out here on my own", which she sings with Bruno listening in and his father nearly crying in the audience. That song, more than anything else, is really the heart of the movie - and it has very much been the soundtrack of my last few months.

That you, even if it's a slightly dented version of you, can come back from problems of yours and others' making, and keep doing what you care about - not because you want to be famous, or even because you're the very best at it, but because it's what you NEED to do - I guess that's why I love "Fame". You can screw up, sell out, doubt yourself and fail - but that doesn't mean it's over. Love it.

A nap better help

Because I'm dying. I joined a writing workshop in order to give myself deadlines, and now, with the self-deadline of Friday looming, I feel as if I have shit for brains, will never write anything ever again, and should probably never even have given up financial journalism or english tutoring. Disaster.

I went for a walk in Prospect Park to think about the story I'm rewriting and get some exercise and fresh air, but instead of becoming relaxed, my thoughts started swirling towards warped, dark sexuality and violence. None of which seem relevant to the story I'm working on. So I tried thinking about other stories where those images might fit. Instead of purging them, it made them darker, harsher, more nightmarish, seeping in to every story I could think of, all razors edges and pain and fear so intense but disconnected from everything around me it neared the hallucinatory.

Reading David Sheff's "Beautiful Boy", about his meth-addict son Nic, and then going online to read Nic's version of the story was clearly not the best way to prepare for a day of writing.

Obama and Healthcare

Just listened to Obama's speech on healthcare. Started feeling the love for him again and then - ZAP! He said that none of the money from the proposed plan would go to fund abortions. Clearly. Deliberately. Just the sort of shameless pandering to the conservatives that I thought he'd avoid. I understand wanting to defuse criticism that might scupper the plan. I understand being pragmatic. (I never act like that myself, but... I can at least intellectually see the value of it).

BUT: if abortions are legal medical procedures, which they still are, why put them in a separate category? If the health plan is supposed to is supposed to protect vulnerable people, well, I have a hard time thinking about a more vulnerable and exposed class of people than women who want to terminate a pregnancy and who lack the funds to do so.

What's not to love?

I've decided that my main character pretends to like be really in to Indie bands, because, well, she's English and sort of pretentious, but actually listens to Cher. On YouTube.

(and yes, this is different to me because I am proud of my love for Her Fabulosity. And I've stopped pretending I find Indie bands anything other than whiny).

Mother Knows Best

My mother, The Great White Chief, is kind of a genius. I called her this morning, feeling a little low about the now-former-boy and the choices I've had to make recently, my writing and my grad school applications, New York and... most things. Her response? A smack-fest about the behaviour of said boy, an exhortation to not care about whether or not I ever write anything again, a "who cares if your grad school application is terrible?", a "you can go wherever you want to if you're sick of New York" and then, the cincher:

"Go do something that's nice for you, that you enjoy, and take this crazy pressure off yourself"

"Ah, well I might go in to the city and go to a museum..."

"Hmmm...", deeply unconvinced

"And," fumbling for acceptable fun things to do, "well, I might join a Yoga studio..."

"Yoga?!?!?!" she replied in horror, "Look at your face in the mirror - you're my child! You're beautiful and you have the figure of a pin-up girl! GO ON A DATE WITH SOME UNCOMPLICATED GUY WHO THINKS YOU'RE HOT - for ten minutes, two hours or three days."


At which point, I had to laugh. "Ok, Chief, I'll go on a date, I'll flirt with boys and let go of this other thing for now and just go back to being me."

"Well, thank God for that. Have to go, darling," (aside): "Irene, turn off the footfixer, I better not be hearing that in background at 8 o'clock!"

"So the Swedish Idol season has started?" I asked.

"YES - 27 episodes. Daily. SO EXCITING! The auditions start today" (under her breath, snickering): "Yoga? What is wrong with with you, you silly girl?"

Contacting Lenses

My contact lenses are driving me crazy. For some reason I can't seem to put them in properly at the moment, so I blink and they move.

Blink, and I'll miss it.

I'm still sort of new to the darn things. I only started wearing them at the really-not-very-tender age of 27. I'd lost my glasses and figured that it was as good a time as any to experiment with lenses. I'd always hated the idea of poking something in my eyeball, and then leaving it there - seems so counter-intuitive. But I'm short sighted, and looks particularly vicious when i squint. And i always forgot to wear my glasses, or avoided it because i thought they looked silly, or they reminded me of the trauma of buying them.

I was broke and half blind and had just broken up with my boyfriend - who had chosen them, because he thought they looked "feminine, but intellectual" - when i bought those glasses. My school paid for them. And they were pretty. Really. Nothing wrong with them. But they felt unlucky. A friend of mine was telling me the other day, as I picked up a penny, that in Zimbabwe nobody picks up money in the streets. Someone may have put a curse on the money, stuck the bad luck in it, ready to be picked up by someone greedy, or thoughtless, or poor. Anyone, as long as it's gone from you. Maybe my glasses were hexed, like Zimbabwean street money...

I mean, they probably weren't. But it just seemed so unnatural a way to see things - through tiny little windows, that fogged and got greasy and that children would grab at when i was a teacher. And i liked the fuzziness of my vision - the prettiness and comfort of not seeing sharp distinctions and lines and features - most of the time. The sharpness of the change between wearing them and not wearing them was too stark and I'd take them on and off too often to ever really get used to them.

So contacts it was, with inevitably ridiculous finger-in-eyeball efforts, SwEnglish cursing and "is it there, or not" moments, which peaked at me having to ask my boss to gaze in to my eye to see if i'd managed to get rid of the whole thing. Charming.

And now, now that I though I had contact lenses down cold, the last stage in my transformation from laden-with-emotional-history trainwreck to someone who is freed from those constarints and phobias, the little bastards seem to be slipping out and disobeying me. I get tired, and they fall out. I cry (I've had a rough week) and they fall out. I try to dispose of them properly and i find them rolled up and dried somewhere two days late, little pieces of incompetence littered around my room.

To top it off, I just received my first ever forwarded email from my college since I left in 2005. It was from the optometrist, calling me for a new eye exam. Nomadic life is ridiculous - of all the letters I may have received at my old address in the past four years, the optometrist makes it through to me.

I'm not getting new glasses - I wear dailies, so even if they're cursed like Zimbabwean pennies, I get rid of them at the end of the day. At least that's something to be said for them.

Least Favourite Word

Only complete wankers use the word "bucolic".


It's such a hideous sounding word. I mean, why on God's green earth would a word that supposedly describes green, calm pastures and other scenes where fluffy sheep prance around, untouched by the naughty bits of Welshmen, sound like an especially bad case of stomach upset??? "I'm sorry, Miss Fitzsimmons, it appears that you have a particularly bad case of bucolic, I don't expect you'll be feeling better until earliest next week."


And it's deliberately obscure, because it seems so disconnected from what it's supposed to describe. Is there such a thing as anti-onomatopoeia? Because "bucolic" qualifies - and "bucolical" is even worse. There can clearly be no aesthetic reasons to use it; there are perfectly satisfying synonyms that are more widely understood. So if you use it, it's only to show off and make other people feel stupid, which stopped being OK when you stopped being a teenager.

Sometimes, it's an Unexpected Cigar

Catching up with a good friend over the phone this morning launched a thought experiment I'm playing with today.

We started talking about life and co-incidences and trying to know what to do, and it could very well have ended in a fiesta of long-distance navel gazing. But it didn't. Because she pointed out that, well, sometimes people get completely lost in trying to find meaning in the things that happen in their lives. And I, with a self-deprecating disclaimer for my love of tacky astrology and fortune telling, agreed with her. Sometimes, as Freud said, a cigar is just a cigar.

So I decided, just for today, to take that thought to the extreme. Not in a Buddhist way - I'm not meditating and I'm not seeking a nothingness in which everything is interconnected. Instead, I was walking around Brooklyn trying to train my brain to see, hear and smell everything as completely random, without relevance, and completely cut off from anything I've known or thought about before - rendering sense impressions as non-sensical as I could.

One of my current "great theories" is that men are often more productive because they think less. Or rather, that I am less productive than most men I know because I get distracted by everything, despite the fact that I actually seem to myself to be working and thinking constantly, even when I'm not "at work". And, well, my internal monologue is never switched off - as evidenced by my "I can't even find it embarassing anymore" habit of talking to myself. In public.

It's surprisingly difficult trying to switch off associations and "meaning" though.

For instance: Two women walking ahead of me, one says to the other "You know, thirty is just another number, like twenty, but you add ten," and my brain starts rushing off finding it funny, a comment on age hysteria and rebranding of ageing-categories ("35 is the new 21"), giggling that someone would actually PRONOUNCE something so banal, wondering if I was an arrogant bitch for laughing at other people's innumeracy while I've carefully groomed my own since high school to avoid having to deal with anything practical and money related outside the sphere of people who know i'm actually really good at maths, and of course what does that say about women in WEstern society? and...
STOP.

Just two women, walking. One says "You know, thirty is just another number, like twenty, but you add ten." I giggle, and think I find it funny because...


STOP

Just two women, walking. One says "You know, thirty is just another number, like twenty, but you add ten." I giggle.


OK good. I can totally do this.

In the store, soy milk costs me almost five dollars. "Really? five dollars? but surely in this day of genetically modified foods all this is a huge mark-up based on the knowledge that the people who buy the product are either rich or hippies or allergic so they are willing to shoulder the cost, and what does it say about my lifestyle choices and would I have become so lactose intolerant if it hadn't been for living in China for so long and remember the last time when you had to run to a bathroom because there's been cream in your food and how embarassing and annoying it was and..."


STOP.

It's soy milk. It costs five dollars. You are carrying enough change. Pay at the till.

Basically, I figure this experiment is exhausting, but a good reminder of how personal perception is - something i struggle with in any creative, non-biographical writing. I'm a terrible, terrible actress because I can't switch my own thought processes and emotional responses off for long enough to don someone else's - and I'm sick of re-reading my character's thoughts and finding that their minds all run away with them in exactly the same ways as mine does. OBVIOUSLY that's why they all sound the same - and i hadn't thought about that until realising that even when I'm not trying to, my brain sees associations and meaning and co-incidences in everything.

Which, in turn, I guess means that my trying to switch off that function of my brain led me to discover something that'd been clouded by "meanings" before - suck on that "cigar".