McHappy's

I couldn't help myself and watched "Bubble" again last night, this time with the actors' audio commentary. And I was right--it is McHappy's Donut Shoppe! I used to go to the McHappy's in Marietta with a few of my guy friends once we were old enough to drive. McHappy's was open late. That's what a crazy night was for us: instead of partying, we drove around and jumped on people's trampolines and ate fattening food and smoked a few cigarettes. Well, maybe those guys partied, too, but never with me. That was fine. I was happy to eat donuts late at night.

Rob Pollard did the music for the moive. Debbie Whatsername, the movie's heavy-set lead actress who was discovered working as a manager at the KFC in Parkersburg, mentioned in the commentary how she met Rob Pollard and he was so nice and he did a great job with the music. Rob Pollard is from Dayton, and I'm happy they got an Ohioan to do the music. In the DVD extras you can tell what a kind, good, positive person Debbie is. She meets the lead singer of Guided by Voices and makes a point of saying how wonderful he is. There may be a bunch of simpleton hicks where I grew up, but there are a lot of folks like her, too. I miss them.

Just Like Home, Sort of

Finally we saw "Bubble" last night. It was filmed in Belpre, not Marietta, so I didn't recognize too many landmarks. Belpre was on the way to the mall in Parkursburg, and so I think of Belpre as a sort of gateway to the mall. It took maybe half an hour to get to Belpre, and on the way you drove past a bunch of chemical plants that stunk and coughed up all sorts of terrible pollutants. Then in Belpre you crossed a bridge over the Ohio River to Parkersburg, West Virginia. It was a toll bridge: 35 cents. Damn! What a bargain, a 35-cent toll bridge. But here's the even better part: once the bridge was all paid off, they took out the toll booths and it was a free bridge. That's what life is like in the rest of the world, maybe. Instead of $6, it costs 35 cents.

Parkursburg is a pretty gross town. It's not as cute as Marietta, my hometown. But as a child and a teenager, I was always happy to leave the confines of Marietta and venture out to the endless possibilities of the mall. The mall had movie theaters and record stores, two things that Marietta did not. Plus the mall had a Gap and a Limited.

The Grand Central Mall makes no appearence in "Bubble." We see what I think is the interior of a McHappy's Donut Shoppe on several occasions. We also see the interior and exterior of the Lee Middleton Original Doll Factory. The factory is moving to China. The factory scenes are the best scenes in the movie. I saw the characters pulling solidified vinyl arms and heads out of greasy, ugly cast-iron molds and characters airbrushing doll faces under flourescent lights and noisy vents that sucked the poisonous paint fumes away from the doll-face-airbrushers. I saw the white blue-collar folks that I grew up surrounded by performing these tasks unhurriedly, and I imagined the Chinese sweatshop to come where peasants who had recently migrated from the dying countryside performed the same tasks in a much rushed and nervous manner.

"Bubble" made me think of accents. I grew up accent-free, but my parents moved to Marietta and had no accents themselves. None of my friends' parents had accents, either. I hate to say it, but the accent is perhaps a class thing. The Mid-Ohio Valley accent is Appalachian twang tempered with a slowness of speech, like a tongue that's a bit lazy. It was music to my ears last night, but I used to think of it as a tip-off to a person's inferior intellect. This is not ture at all--some of the engineers who work for my dad talk the same way, too. But I don't see why some 3rd-generation Mariettans have the accent while other 3rd-generation Mariettans don't. I think roots on the West Virginia side of the Ohio River may have something to do with it, because the accent is more West Virginia than Ohio.

I had to watch the DVD extras to see something I recognized, and my heart leapt up when I did. It's the old railroad bridge over the Muskingium River in downtown Marietta. No trian pass over the bridge; it's now for pedestrian traffic only. My dad recommended that the bridge be condemned, because it's old and falling apart, but the Marietta Chamber of Commerce opposed that because the bridge is a popular route for tourists' strolls. I used to climb on the bridge and walk across the non-pedestrian side with its railroad ties and gaping holes in between.

Today I may watch the movie with the cast commentary, just to see if I can gleam any more locals-only tidbits. Maybe I won't. If you arent's from the Mid-Ohio Valley, you'll maybe like "Bubble." Really, outside of the doll factory and the Mid-Ohio Valley accent, it could have been filmed anywhere. Trees, roads, grey skies clouded with waning industry, McHappy's Donut Shoppe...

Roses and Blogs Are Free

This morning I was a bad person. I ate the last little yogurt in the house. Fruit on the bottom. It's not mine. My husband eats them. But I wanted yogurt, and we were all out of the plain yogurt that I prefer to eat. Plain yogurt has a better texture.

Today is President's Day. Ther library will be closed. The store where I work will be open; I will work there today. Only a half-day. Some people spend more time at the gym than I do at my job. This week I'll only work 16 hours. I need money, too. I've been invoicing this dude for article reprint fees for months and he still has to respond. Maybe it's his spam filter.

This is the shittiest post I've posted in ages. I'm all out of insights. My friend Bryan finished his comic, I SEE ROBOTS. Buy a copy. It's only a dollar. It may be just me, but it seems like $1 Xeroxed zine-thingies are waning in popularity. Blame it on blogs. Blogs are free, so it costs me 0 dollars for no one to read this.

As a failing freelance writer, I read about the media a lot. I keep on seeing articles about blogs. Blogs are not the next--or even the current--big thing, at least in my mind. No one will get rich from blogs. Blogs are fun to write. Contrary to the fun value of this particular post, that's why I write this blog. Not to get attention or exposure, not to make money or break the big new scandal. Nope. I'm just here for the fun.

"Bubble"-foiled

I really want to see "Bubble." It's not playing in any local theaters, and the one copy at our local video store was checked out. Drat.

"Bubble" was filmed in the Lee Middleton Original Doll Factory, in Belpre, Ohio. Belpre is one town over from my hometown, Marietta. I am now feverish to see this movie. I think it's homesickness. Funny thing is that the movie is, as far as I can tell, not particularly flattering towards the lovely Mid-Ohio Valley. Swell as the place is, my ass has a better economic climate. It's just another cluster of dying small towns in dying industrio-rural America.

But I miss it, and I miss being around salt-of-the-earth folks. Joe teases me that my deepest desire is to move back to Marietta, and he's right. I have to admit it. I'd move back there in a split second, but I think it would take at least a few months for me to regret it deeply. There is nothing for us there. Nothing for me but memories, and nothing for Joe but in-laws. If I could write there, all Joe would have to do is get a job at the college (Washington State Community College or Marietta College), and then we could buy a sweet-ass historic house for cheap. And we could save up money and travel and then have a family and raise them with solid American values.

Oh, it's a sorry pipe dream. My pipe dreams used to be of leaving Marietta, of going off to bigger, better, more cultured places. Well, culture can be hollow and ruthless. No matter where I live, I will always dream of leaving, and I will always dream of returning. To somehwere.

In lieu of my own comments on "Bubble", as we are so pathetically "Bubble"-deprived, here's some local Mid-Ohio Valley color in the form of a rambling blog interivew. One interviewee is impressive on two counts: a) she used to guide tours at Lee Middleton; b) she sounds intelligent. You don't have to live on a coast, east or west, to be smart. Ha.

No Cooky for Amesy

Last night, my writing group met up at the Make-Out Room for the this month's installment of the Progressive Reading Series. The idea is that attendees donate money that goes to funding campaigns for Democratic candidates. In exchange, we reading geeks get to see some literary big guns strut their stuff. I love seeing writers read their work. When it's good, it's better than most any rock show. (When it's not good, it makes a girl pine for a decent rock show.)

Last night's lineup of readers caught my eye because of two names: Jonathan Ames and Curtis Sittenfeld. Regular readers of S&T may already know of my fondess for Ames. He's my favorite living writer, which is a bit embarassing--he can be wildly funny, but also wildly self-obsessed and repetitive. Penis, ass, balding, bowels, trannies, boobs. Repeat. He writes very tenderly of his family, which is a nice change of pace...but he's known as the perverted writer, not the family writer.

And yet this guy is my favorite writer! Why? He makes me laugh. He maked me feel better about myself, and when he's really on he makes me feel better about this larger-than-life character called Jonathan Ames.

As for Curtis Sittenfeld, I read her bestselling book Prep because my dearest friend went to boarding school with her. Prep is set at a boarding school, and though it's not an autobiography, Curtis' time at the real-life school had to color a great deal of Prep. Reading it, I felt privilaged to special window inside the book that the average reader wasn't.

So I saw this Progressive Reading Series lineup and decided I had to be there. No big deal about that. No, the deal is that I also decided I should say hello to Curtis and to Ames. And the bigger deal is that I decided to make them cookies.

Every year around Valentine's Day I make sugar cookie hearts and ice them in pink frosting. Then I pipe names on the cookies in white icing and give them away to whoever the name corresponds to. It's fun; I like to bake, I like cookies, I like pink things, I like hearts. So after piping names across a dozen or so cookies I realized there were lots of leftover hearts, and I piped "Curtis" and "Ames" on two of the hearts on a whim.

Joe and I went over the the Mission last night with the heart cookies in a plastic bag (I had also made name-cookies for the people in my writing group, people we were meeting at the reading). I wondered if I'd go through with the cookie exchange. Why am I compelled to be such a dork? If I were a well-known writer at a reading and a fan gave me a cookie with my name on it, I'd be touched. And creeped out. I'd not want to eat the cookie.

I've done this cookie-fan thing before, at a special Valentine's Day show with a bunch of bands. I made a bunch of cookies, one cookie for every member of every band playing that night. I also made dozens of unnamed cookies for the concertgoers, so I guess that tones down the scary-fan factor.

The reading we packed. Five people read in all. Ames read the thing he always reads, an essay called "Bald, Impotent, and Depressed." It's his greatest hit; he's been reading it for years, that and another essay called "I Shat My Pants in the South of France." He's honed his timing on these essays down to a science, and he elicits lots of guffaws and gasps from the crowd. They make for good reading readings. I felt sort of beyond it, though, as he described his erectile disfunction and flatulence for the umpteenth time; I knew that this man was capable of more. Still, when he was up there the audience was his, and after his reading I felt proud of my Ames. I smirked to myself, thinking how I knew about him way before most of the people in the room, and that made me cool somehow.

Curtis read after Ames. Compared to Ames, whose reading style is deadpan and affected with a charming but unsettling old-timey diction--as if he were a political figure of the early 20th century giving a speech--Curtis' reading voice was natural and comfortable. She read a short--too short, maybe--passage from her book, then skittered off the stage. Maybe she's shy.

Tobias Wolf read last. He seemed like a great guy, a guy who can chum it up with younger folks and gruff old dudes like my Dad. It's nice when really famous writers don't come off as dickwads.
I didn't have a cookie for Tobias Wolf. I wonder if his friends call him Toby.

After the reading, it was still crowded and dark in the club. Curtis Sittenfeld sat in a banquette very close to where I was standing. I stood there stupidly, waiting for just the right moment to tell her--to tell her what? That I knew an old schoolmate of hers? That I remember reading her stories in the boarding school's literary journal? Why did I feel so compelled to say these things to her?

But it was too late. I was in the hole and the only way to get out was to speak to Curtis. I did so, clumsily, like a kid at a high school dance asking their crush to dance with them. The exchange was kind, civil, unextraordinary. I didn't give her the cookie, but I was proud of myself for accosting a writwer whose book I admired.

Then it was on to Ames. The last time I saw Ames read, I asked him to sign my copy of "The Extra Man," my favorite book of his. It's charming and depraved and sweet all at once, and one of its main characters, the extra man of the title, is perhaps my favorite literary character of the 1990s. I've read the book a few times, and my paperback copy is stained with brown spots of hot cocoa that leaked out from my thermos when I worked at Scharffen Berger. I handed the book to Ames to sign, and I said, "Sorry about the spots--it's from hot cocoa. I work at a chocolate factory."

"Are you sure it's chocolate?" Ames said, eyeing me with suspiscion. Stange folks are attracted to that man, and I think he's learned to keep his guard up around fans. But a part of my Ames dream of us being writerly chums crumbled right then. That's life--and that's fandom, just a daydream fancy. Ames has written a books that I treasure, and that's good enough in the end. He owes me nothing. He signed my brown-stained paperback without further comments about the brown spots.

So last night I was especially reluctant to bestow him with the cookies; beside, I'd already spent a chunk of my resolve on taking to Curtis, who seemed much more down-to-earth. How could I have the guts to face Ames? As I exited the bar I passed the booth where he sat with three women. He looked skittish. Maybe he did not want to be around those women. Maybe he did and his wanting to be around them made him nervous. Maybe he was tired of the bar, and the women were his supportive friends. In any case, there was no way I was going to give him the cookie right then, in front of his lady friends--I might mortify him! And me! Why am I compelled to be a giant dork?

My writng group met after the reading, and Joe went home on his own. After our meeting ended, I walked to the BART station and ate Curtis' and Ames' cookies while waiting for the train. They were too sweet, and I felt thirsty and slovenly after gobbling them down. Ames' heart-cookie was broken when I took it out of the bag. I broke his heart. Once I got off the train I walked home briskly, thinking of Joe and how I loved the anticipation of seeing him during the lonely, quiet walk home from the BART station in the dark.

The Wilting Plant

Novella Carpenter wrote in her "Rev" column a few weeks ago that a blog is like a houseplant; it needs to be tended to regularly, lest it begn to take on an unsightly cloak of neglect. So let's say that this blog is a houseplant. It's kind of brown and ugly at the moment. I've been busy doing...stuff. It's been very sunny. What can I say. Life needs to be lived somewhere besides the chair in front of a laptop. To be honest, the less I write in this thing, the better you can assume my life is going.

Life is okay at the moment. Money, as usual, is a problem. Recently I gave myself a haircut and bought a new pair of runnign shoes. My hair was getting bushy, and my feet were starting to hurt when I went on longer runs. I can do an okay job cutting my own hair, but I can't make my own shoes. So I took advantage of the 50% discount I get at the silly store where I work and purchased a new pair for $46. I'd have spent about the same amount getting my hair cut at the salon I can't afford to go to anymore.

I gave myself the same haircut I've been giving myself for about 10 years. I tried out several new looks during my last few years of dallying in the salons, with varying success. My new haircut is not awful, but it is a bit severe. Short. It'll have a month to soften a bit before I fly off to the food writing conference I'll go to in March. why I needed to cut it now. I gotta look professional.

My mom sent me a check as an early birthday present so I could buy a new outfit or two for said conference. I could use some spiffy clothes for this thing, too--the thrifty hipster look won't cut it, at least not for five days straight. But I'm using the money to pay for the new running shoes, plus maybe something else...living? I'm screwed until the next payday, which is fortunately this Friday. I hate money.

Blythe Bomber

What a night. Strange dreams, strange dreams. They kept waking me up, so these dreams stuck to me in my waking moments this morning. One dream had to do with a terrorists threatening to blow up a vast, old-fashioned movie palace (like the Paramount in Oakland) with a bomb hidden in the head of a Blythe doll. It wasn't an angry Hamas or Al Quaeda terrorist, just your garden variety crazed American maniac terrorist--the kind we all know from movies, a la Travis Bickle.

This may sound far-fetched, but if you've ever seen a Blythe doll, you know how creepy they look, and how the huge head of one could easily house a bomb. I think all you aspiring screenwriters out there should pick up on this, as it would be a great element in your latest Harrison Ford-starring espionage script.

Another dream had to do with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, because I woke up trying to remember their names. I made it as far as Leonardo, Michaelangelo, and Donatello...but the last turtle? I could picture the paintings by the eponymous artist, but not his name. This really drove me nuts, because when I was younger, I was into renaissance art the way some kids are into--oh, I don't know, shitty bands like My Chemical Romance or Good Charlotte. I went to college wanting to major in art history and specialize in Christian iconography of the 15th to 17th centuries. What the hell was that all about?

Finally I remembered. Raphael, the 4th turtle. I think Donatello is not a very good name for a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, because Raphael, Leonardo, and Michaelangelo were all contemporaries...Donatello was a bit earlier. Maybe they could have named him Veronese instead, but Veronese came after Leonardo et. al.

Last night I went to see Mr. Bir Toujour's band play a show at Bottom of the Hill. I'm not very fond of that venue, but the parking is excellent. I arrived there and was feeling draggish. I kind of wanted to stay home and watch Bubble, but I have a feeling that I should see Joe's band now while I can; someday I may regret not attending more of their performances. I was a fan of the band before I was a fan of Joe, so to speak. In the early days I would see their band play and it was always amazing to me, exciting and musically challenging and beautiful. Then something changed--probably because Joe and I started dating, and I would never be able to hear the band in the same way again. This spark of magic was lost.

I sort of feel that way about every band I see live these days. I wonder what part of me is missing that can't get the magic back. I'm musically frigid now, perhaps.

These things were running through my mind at the club; they made me feel like I didn't belong there. I stood around acting detached and snobby--just the kind of attitude that I observe in other clubgoers and grow sickened at. Joe's band played, and it was amazing, and most of it passed right by me. Then they started their last song, which Joe had told me would be a reworking of an older song of theirs that I never much cared for. I still didn't care for it much--I just thunk it's kind of boring. But at the end they did an accelerando and it got crazy. I love shit like that--loud, fast, repetitious. It's a tough thing to keep up, but they went on and on, faster and louder, and it began to get tense in a thrilling way out in the audience.

Then Schuyler's smaller crash cymball fell over, and Schuyler got up and started ripping shit up. He began hammering on Joe's cymballs; he knocked over drums; he knocked over more drums. I've never seen Schuyler do stuff like that before. It was spontaneous and wonderful. The show ended in a heap of bandmembers and equipment, and it was all completely without calculation.

I left right after that, because I wanted things to end on a high note. Joe came home much later that night and told me that Schuyler had hurt his knee very badly up there and was unable to walk. What a drag. The one time he decided to bust out onstage and he hurts himself. I think his hust knee had something to do with those Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle dreams. Well, I enjoyed the spectacle/debacle onstage that night, but I'm not sure if it's worth Schuyler's physical harm. The myth is that rocker types love to inflict pain upon themselves for the sake of art, but the truth is no one was around to pay Iggy Pop workman's comp back in his Stooges days.

Manic

I've been feeling wound-up lately. Wound-up in a good way. Yesterday I made a lot of headway on my to-do list, turning in several articles and completing quite a lot of cooking. I wanted to clean the house and go running, too, but I ran out of time. A person can only do so much.

It's disrespectful to people who truly are manic/depressive for me to say this, but I suspect I fall prey to milder versions of such cycles. Maybe it's called being human. In my "depressive" phases I do a lot of reading in the middle of the day. Reading and naps. "Manic" is pretty cool, but I tend to be unfocused and fidgety because I can't decide what to do--there are so many things to choose from! Boo-hoo, the life of an artist is so hard.

Today I have to work. I'll need to leave in a little over an hour. On days when I have to work I get really wound up and want to finish all of these unrealistic projects. For instance, I'll wake up and want to read The New Yorker, vacuum the apartment, check my email, put on makeup, balance my checkbook, revise my novel-in-progress, slap a little entry on the blog...it's too much. Especially since I sleep until 8am. I think on days when I do not have to go to my stupid job I don't have such ambition. Why? Why do we always lust after the impossible?

Oh, yesterday I forgot to mention the thing pertaining to the "I Am Famous" portion of my post's title. Another book I've been into is The Best American Recipes 2005-2006. It's a book that's part of the "Best American" series. I got a copy for free because I have a recipe in the book (they paid me, too. Nice!) That's why I'm famous, even though they spelled my name wrong. The check was spelled even wronger: it was made out to Sar Ah Bir. If I ever need a pseudonym, that's gonna be it.

The cookbook itslef is highly enjoyable, and I'm not saying that because I have a recipe in it. I've been having a lot of fun browsing through it, and the headnotes and tips are breezy and helpful. So far I've made mojo pork tenderloin and Hoosier chicken, both of which I'd make again. But not today. I have to clean the house before I go to work.

On the Bookshelf / I Am Famous

This last week or so I've been in a manic phase of reading. I love it when this happens. Sometimes it seems like there's nothing good around to read...and, other times, there's too much. Such is the case now. I go to bed with literally three book on my lap, because I can't decide which one to focus on. Here's a rundown.

-I Love You More Than You Know by Jonathan Ames
My husband and I love us some Ames. This is his third book of essays--and, I think, his weakest, though I may be saying that because I read half of them once already when they were published on the web or in magazines. It's like how when you wait for your favorite band to release a new album and half of the songs are re-recordings of tracks that were already on an EP. That's the way I am about Ames: a superfan, a fan who seeks out magazines when I get wind that he has a piece in them (I read the articles at Barnes & Noble, then out the magazine back on the rack; I'm not that obsessive). A bit embarrassing, especially since the more Ames I read, the more disappointed I am by his unrelenting obsessions with his malfunctioning body, his malfunctioning career, and his malfunctioning lovelife.

The man is truly hilarious, though. I have a big crush on his literary persona, just like a number of other deranged females. Ames the man I don't know personally, and I have a feeling that he might actually be a drag...but what does it matter? We'll never be pals. So the present arrangement works out splendidly: I have a crush on a stack of books by a neurotic maniac--books that I can put away when I choose--and I have a caring, stable, flesh-and-blood husband to love in real life.

-Comfort Me with Apples by Ruth Reichl
This book came out what seems like ages ago--2001. I am just now getting around to reading Reichl's trilogy of memoirs, and it's both discouraging and encouraging. You see, Ruth Reichl is currently one of America's most respected food writers. She's the editor of Gourmet, a magazine that improved a hundredfold under her direction. Her self-portrait in food Tender at the Bone talked about her early life, but its follow-up, Comfort Me with Apples, is, to me, way more fun to read. That's because it's--pardon the pun--dishy. She becomes a restaurant critic and meets all of these towering figures in food media; she sleeps with some of them, even.

Comfort Me with Apples takes place mainly in the Bay Area--Reichl lived in a commune on Berkleye's Channing Way for over a decade--and it's full of landmarks that I recognize. As an aspiring food writer in my late 20s, I read this book and become inspired--she did it, I can do it too! But I also read the book and run across all kinds of now-famous names and marvel at how some people have a knack for being in the right place at the right time. Have you ever met someone that seems to know everyone and have been everywhere? I should not care about becoming that person, but maybe I do. A little.

-Me Write Book: It Bigfoot Memmoir by Graham Roumieu
This is a follow-up, if not a sequel, to Bigfoot/Roumieu's previous book, In Me Own Words: The Autobiography of Bigfoot. That book gave me and the Mister countless hours of idiotic joy. Me Write Book is twice as long and a bit more thematically complex (it deals with the dark emotional underbelly of fame). Both books are picture books for adults, narrated in Bigfoot's inkblotted scrawl. They are too fuckin' funny. Here's a passage from Me Write Book: "Yes, everyone know Bigfoot smell like shit. Please make effort not to point out every time you see Bigfoot. Thank you." I ripped off this Bigfoot voice 100% in one of my anti-JT LeRoy tirades, but I will happily admit this.

-Marriage, A History by Stephanie Coontz
Whoa! What an eye-opener. This is too heavy for me to read too much of in one sitting. It makes me a little depressed. Love marriage is a pretty new thing for us humans; Coontz maintains that it began to emerge only during the Enlightenment, which--in grand terms, was not so very long ago. What forms did love take prior to this? I think that back in the day--marriage or no marriage--people just did not have very much time to run arounf flirting and fucking, because they were too busy trying to get food and shelter. So maybe, just because of circumstances, many crushes on Oog the next villiage over didn't have time to blossom because Ogg was too exhausted after gleaning millet fields for 13 hours. See what technology has brought us! More time to pine.