Three Things I'm Obsessed With Right Now

Like a lot of people I'm sure, I get obsessed for weeks at a time with certain music, movies, etc. Sometimes it ends up turning into a long-time love (like George Orwell), and many others fade. In what may become a semi-regular feature, here are three things I'm Obsessed With Right Now:

1. Yeah Yeah Yeahs It's Blitz! I've been lukewarm about the Yeah Yeah Yeahs for years, there are a handful of songs that I really like, but the rest kind of annoyed me. But then I fell slightly for the hypnotic songs of Karen O's music on the Where the Wild Things Are, which led me then to this CD, which I haven't stopped listening to for the past two weeks. All the songs are good, but there are a few stand outs, the best of which is Hysteric.

2. George Carlin. I've been reading his autobiography Last Words over the past couple of weeks, which has inspired me to re-vist a lot of his stand-up. Such a funny, insightful guy. It's also inspiredme to start thinking about going back to writing some stand-up of my own.

3. How I Met Your Mother. I had seen a few episodes here and there on TV or on a plane, and always thought it was pretty witty and not typical laugh-track sitcom triteness. It wasn't until I interviewed Alyson Hannigan in December that I decided to really get into the show. Mark and I got the DVDs of the first four seasons and have been watching them regularly over the past month. It's....wait for it....Awesome!

An Open Book

I had written an exhaustive post the other week about my six-plus weeks (and counting) of unemployment. I wanted it to be a kind of an inside look at what being unemployed is like (i.e. it’s a lot of work) but it didn’t make for a very interesting read, and was probably more than anyone would really care to know. So instead I’ve decided to re-visit another post I started and abandoned:

My Top Five Books (in no particular order)*

1) 1) 1984 by George Orwell: To know me is to know my obsession with all things Orwell. I’ve read all of his books, several essays, and a biography or two. He is the kind of writer I want to be, both in style and content. 1984 is of course his most famous work, but it wasn’t one of the first I read by him, and it’s one of the classics that’s a classic for a reason. It’s a book that stays with you forever. I’ve seen the (US-banned!) film version and a stage production, and both were mostly well done, but nothing has ever compared to the way the book draws you in and changes the way you look at the world.

2) 2) Pull of the Moon by Elizabeth Berg: Sure, she’s an Oprah Book Club alumni (but sometimes Oprah has really good taste) and maybe her books aren’t high literature and the target audience may be middle-aged ladies, but Elizabeth Berg knows how to write characters and dialog like few authors. She writes honestly and without pretension, and creates people that you actually care about living in a world that seems familiar even if it’s one you don’t live in. Her main characters are always women and in this book it’s a woman in her 60s alone on the road trying to find herself writing journals and letters to her confused husband she abandoned at home. I read it as a 19-year-old and knew just how she felt. That’s good writing. Plus I met Elizabeth Berg in Chicago once; she’s a wonderfully nice lady.

3) 3)The Bell Jar by Silvia Plath: This one goes out to my angsty 14-year-old self. I’m sure I’d feel differently about it now, but at the time it just all seemed so…deep. I remember sitting on the porch and in my bedroom reading Silvia Plath and all J.D. Salinger that spring and feeling so misunderstood.

4) 4) Without a Net edited by Michelle Tea: The only non-fiction book on my list. While some parts are more well-written than others, the message in this collection of essays by women who grew up Working Class articulates parts of my own experience growing up as well as issues such as racism, sexual identity and feminism, and the co-opting of downtrodden cultures in a straightforward and honest way that few books I’ve read have.

5) 5) Caucasia by Danzy Senna: Reading this book was the best thing to come out of my short lived time in a Book Club, and one of the most interesting multi-layered discussions about a book I’ve ever had with a group of people. On the surface it’s a book about race (in fact Borders seems to think it’s only for Black People http://fullofwit.blogspot.com/2008/12/is-borders-racist.html), but aside from racial identity, it was a beautiful and artfully woven story of a girl’s relationship with her father, politics, growing up.

Honorable Mentions:

· Down and Out in London and Paris by George Orwell : His best book about class and that’s saying a lot), I read it while I was living in London and it gave me a new perspective on the city’s history, plus this is actually the first Orwell book I ever read and your first is always special.

· A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith: I was reading this book when I was in the process of moving to New York and several random people approached me while I was reading it to tell me how much they loved it. It was a memorable story and an interesting history lesson about the city I was moving to.

· Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides: An epic story that covers the gamut from sexual and national identity, and a lot of history of my home state.

· Oh the Places You’ll Go by Dr. Seuss: Along with the Lorax, the best Seuss books, plus this one makes a perfect graduation speech.

· Without Reservations by Alice Steinbach: The best travel book I’ve read, it was particularly meaningful because I was reading it as I was moving abroad.

*Anyone who loves books or music or movies always has a hard time picking their favorites, and so there are tons of books I love that I didn’t think to include.

What was Great in 08

So it’s a month late for a “year end/best of” post. But here’s my list of the my personal Best of 2008.*

Music
In 2008 I got into a few artists that I only peripherally listened to in the years prior, here are the albums of those peeps that I listened to the most last year:

Cat Power…The Greatest
The Roots…Game Theory
The Fugees…The Score

I also started listening to more Lupe Fiasco, Talib Kweli, Dead Prez, Atmosphere, but more songs than albums stand out.

New music I really dug in ’08:
She & Him…Volume One
Sea Wolf…Leaves in the River
Chris Mills…Living in the Aftermath

Best soundtrack:
The Hottest State (even though it came out in 2007)


Concerts
Sadly I didn’t see much live music in 2008. So with that in mind, here are my winners.

The best show of ’08 that I didn’t attend
Outside lands Music festival August 22-24. The line-up looked awesome and I love San Francisco, wish I could have made it.

The best show I did attend
The Feist concert at Hammerstein Ballroom on April 30th. The simple and elegant shadow-puppetry wasn’t at all as lame as it might sound, it was in fact beautiful and she had an incredibility endearing stage presence. Also, I ended up singing the version of Inside + Out on this album for about four months of last year.

Movies

In the theatre
Tie between Rachel Getting Married and Slumdog Millionaire

Netflixed
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead and Lars and the Real Girl


Books
2008 was the year I decided to finish everything that George Orwell has ever written. Having already read a handful of his novels, the book of his I probably enjoyed the most in 2008 was Burmese Days and Finding George Orwell in Burma by Emma Larkin was a good primer with interesting insight.

Personally
Without getting too personal, here are some of my personal bests of 08…

Best Moment
Hard to say exactly, but election night was pretty awesome and my solo bungee-jumping/waterfall-rappelling/rainforest zip-lining trip was really cool too.

Biggest accomplishment
Unfortunately it’s not anything I wrote (although I did have a big feature come out in May). I think it’s my relationship with my Little Sister. We were matched last January and I was a little trepidatious about how challenging hanging out with a 13-year-old would be, I’ve been surprised how much she likes and trusts me and how even though I’m under no disillusions about “changing” her life, I do feel like having me to hang out with is something she looks forward to.


*Note: Many of these things didn’t come out in 2008, but I discovered/rediscovered them during the year, so they still fit in my personal Best Of.

Is Borders Racist?

Yes it’s a big corporation, but I've always liked Borders, it started as a small bookshop in Ann Arbor, MI, they carry Paperchase products that I loved in London…and I get free gift cards to their stores from my credit card. But today when I went to spend said gift card at the Borders in Columbus Circle something happened that made me wonder…is Borders racist?

I was buying my Little Sister the book Caucasia by Danzy Senna, a book that yes, is about race issues (amongst other things), a book I read years ago and bought in the general fiction section of a book store. But alas when I went to the fiction section to find this bestselling, award winning book…it was nowhere to be found. So I asked an employee, who looked it up and told me it was in the “African American literature” section…now this wasn’t the African American Studies section, which is totally valid and for non-fiction books…this is a section of novels….for black people.

How is this OK? They don’t put the Joy Luck Club in “Chinese American literature” as far as I could tell fiction books for adults were divided into general fiction, western, romance, (maybe thriller or mystery or something like that), and African American. This is like calling the Rap and R&B CD section “African American Music.” Just seems kind of offensive in my humble opinion. This is the first time I’ve noticed this, maybe other bookstores do it too, maybe it doesn’t bother other people…just seemed a little Jim Crow-y to me…