Moot Point

I was planning to write a longer thing about Twilight and my adolescence and the relations between the two tonight, but I was busy with other things! High culture things.

I maybe somehow went to an Opera gala concert tonight?¹ Culture! Opera’s one of those things that you would think I would like, since I like pretentious stuff and when people sing things they would normally say (or that are their heart’s unspoken desires) and also melodrama, but I really know very little about it.

(Stuff like this is weird for me because I’m a big enough fan of all the aforementioned to enjoy the performing of dramatic songs without a lot of foreknowledge. But I obviously spend a lot of time with “low” culture, but I honestly can’t see that big a distinction between opera and like, a soap opera, besides oldness and the fact that one is performed in a foreign language. They both really are these sensationalist, stylized dramatic forms with ridiculous stories and overwrought emotions expressed through song and other totally artificial behaviours. Though opera does have the whole vocal virtuouso thing. Which is to say, the more I think about it, the more I think opera is probably awesome and is just waiting for me to discover it.)

Then Pamela Martin (of local CTV news fame) came out and said “May all your news be good news.” Then we ate our free cake and tried to have a drink at the Cascade on the way home, but there was a 25-minute wait, so we just bought some IPA since we’re trying to catch up on Mad Men before the season finale Sunday.

…I only wish I had talked Alex into wearing his bow tie.

I’m sorry, I can’t even write anything contemporary or even coherent. I just finished watching Twilight.

Did you know vampires play baseball?

“You’re my own personal brand of heroin”

Also, they sparkle?

“And so the lion fell in love with the lamb…”

Uh, and they take you to the prom and let you stand on their feet and dance?

It’s just so potent, so much Pacific Northwest rainforest and bitten lips and feelings. And it ends with a vampire showdown in a ballet studio full of mirrors that they don’t even try to integrate into the story. It’s totally ludicrous and the things it has to say about women and sex are a bit horrifying, but I can’t stop thinking about it.

So I’ve been thinking about the deal with Gossip Girl this year. It’s not really suffering from the “high school show goes to college” Veronica Mars-type problems, more from “the first couple of episodes of every season feel a little off, until some Secrets have time to Build Up and cause Tension that needs to be Resolved.” For me it hit its stride around Rufus and Lily’s wedding, with the reappearance of Scott, and his big revelation leading to the reaffirmation of love at the centre of the show. And Sonic Youth.

Since then, the stakes are getting weirdly higher. The theme of this week was basically “we’re not in high school anymore,” at least in the A-story. The B-story centred around Dan and Olivia’s one-month anniversary, which is actually one of the most charmingly eighteen-year-old things that ever happened on Gossip Girl and still managed to feature Jimmy Fallon.¹ But I can think of at least three different characters who pulled the “this isn’t high school anymore” line: Vanessa, to Nate when he asks her to sit on potentially damaging video of his cousin who is running for public office because of their “friendship”; Chuck, to Serena, in explaining why she had to suck it up because she couldn’t just take Blair (or anyone) for granted now; and Blair, to Serena again (because Serena really needed it, I guess), about how Blair is trying to “make a life for herself” while S is just kind of treading water, alienating people over her stupid PR job, and fake dating Robert Pattinson, and that’s not really someone Blair Waldorf needs in her life.

The point is: the high school code isn’t working anymore, which is a problem, since for Gossip Girl, high school is supposed to be a sort of mini-life, where you learn to deal with being a public person when that’s something you can’t really control the boundaries of anymore. But the “real world” isn’t so tight or so easily controlled.

My spiel has always been that Gossip Girl’s about letting go, about realizing that “privacy” was out over and has been replaced with this new gossip-surveillance-world. But that this is okay, and that this configuration allows for its own various pleasures and games. You see it in the way that Blair’s liberation started with a public striptease; in the way Serena uses the paparazzi for her own gain, in the way Nate and Chuck and everyone instinctively manage public perception. But that’s easy when it’s as schematic as it is within the high school setup, where Gossip Girl basically stands for the media. It gets messier when the knowledge and power isn’t so centralized; it’ll be interesting to see how Gossip Girl deals with all this.

So today is one of my days where I have Things To Do, that I’m not even really focusing on. Last night I had a dream that I was in London walking around taking pictures, so in honour, I am posting some of my favourite British lady music videos.

Lily Allen:

MIA:

Estelle:

Amy Winehouse:

Making a movie about putting out a fashion magazine — even a fashion magazine as spectacular as Vogue’s epic September 2007 issue — obviously requires some shaping of the material. The makers of The September Issue found a wonderful story in the tension between editor Anna Wintour, “the most powerful woman in the United States,” and creative director Grace Coddington. The film starts out highlighting Coddington’s frustration as Wintour cuts her babies to make way for more shots of Sienna Miller running around Rome. (I actually thought Anna was right about losing the group shots!) As the movie goes on, Coddington emerges a hero, not just for her great creative instincts, which I think people have discussed elaborately elsewhere and go without saying, but her willingness to use the movie to totally fuck with Anna Wintour.

We see her in a meeting bugging Anna about the budget for her (totally stunning) couture shoot. Later, riding down somewhere in an elevator, she confesses that “I love talking to Anna about money in front of you” to the crew. It’s not a big moment, but it’s a way of acknowledging the crew that you don’t see Anna do outside interviews. (Though it’s hard to forget she’s being filmed; when we were headed home, both the work friends I saw it with noticed the intense, make-up free close-ups of Wintour, Coddington, and basically everyone else.) The camera crew clearly becomes part of Coddington’s world, enough that it becomes part of her work, as the camera man shows up in a last-minute shoot she’s assigned for the issue.

Coddington actually puts the camera crew in the issue. I kind of love this, but I kind of love it more when — after hearing that Anna wants to airbrush out the cameraman’s gut — she makes a point of marching over to the nearest phone and calling the retouching department to leave Bob’s stomach alone, as the assistant manning the desk loses it in the background. She kind of knows she’s the hero by this point.

As for Anna? She’s not really a villain, you can’t really see her that way. She’s obviously really tough and really competent, and really an amazing mega-bitch (which I mean only as a compliment, I am all about reclaiming shit); but in the end the movie paints a picture of her as, not really weak or immature, but kind of lonely, I guess? The film starts with her talking about how people who don’t get fashion and who mock fashion — because it’s frivolous and expensive — seem scared of it, and are jealous of the cool kids (I think that was her atual line of dialogue). Later on in the movie, this line of questioning is picked when Wintour’s daughter is asked if she wants to go into fashion. She looks kind of horrified, and says she doesn’t want to knock it, but “there’s more important things to do with your life.” Toward the very end, the subject comes up again — in a talking-head presumably taken from the same interview — when Anna tells the crew about her serious British newspaper family, who are, she says “amused” by what she does. Wintour doesn’t seem wistful, doesn’t seem apologetic or regretful, I don’t want to suggest the tightness in her voice is hiding inner frailty, but it is a tightness.

So remember how I used to post regularly to my blog? And then I graduated grad school and basically stopped blogging, because having a full time job makes it hard to devote an hour or two a day to blogging and to keeping up with a full TV schedule? (And as I write I am weeks behind on Mad Men.) I do miss regular posting, but once you get out of the habit it’s hard to get back in. So I will be doing the National Blog Posting Month thing for November. I have some stuff going on this month, so I can’t promise that some of the posts won’t just be YouTube videos and exclamation points as opposed to thoughtful cultural critique, but I will do my best to make sure something goes up every day.

I hope everyone reading this had a good Halloween. I didn’t really do anything this year (which is lame, but I am Old and have been very Tired lately) except watch the Guy Maddin Dracula Ballet. It was pretty amazing, in that it was shot in classic silent film style (intertitles, coloured filters to set the mood, irises everywhere), but was also Guy Maddin so it was an adaptation that was subtly funny and self-aware in terms of the issues of scary foreigners and the threat of female sexuality in the original. (The ship arrives to intertitles saying “Immigrants!” “Others! From Other Lands!” I love Guy Maddin so hard.) Also, it had dancing.