Flat white (middle class) habits

I realised something over my morning coffee today. Sometime in the not too distant past coffee became the new wine. It’s probably not going to come as a suprise when I tell you that the coffee in question was decidedly average and I was sitting there trying to work out just exactly what the barista (I’m being charitable) had done wrong. Was the coffee overcooked? Was it the milk? Did it have something to do with the kind of beans? All these questions, are, you see prime examples of just how coffee is these days, just like wine, something to bitch about.

This probably explains the cuts backs at Starbucks . There’s nothing to be gained by drinking Starbucks coffee these days because it just doesn’t cut it in terms of cultural cache. In Australia at least its just *too* easy to make fun of the bad coffee at Starbucks: the big cups, the bad uniforms, the decor (oh! the decor!)

I’m not really saying anything new here. You know it, and I know it and we all bitch about Starbucks. And others, much to my chargrin have said it all already and with lucrative book deals behind them. So, hats off to those guys. It still doesn’t explain however just when and how coffee got to be so indelibly associated with aspirational lifestyle culture. I’ve been to Italy, people don’t swan around wanking on about an adorable little spot just by the Lido where Antonio the barista knows just how you like your morning macchiato (NB: Tourists do this). One of the refreshing things about Italian coffee is that it gets slung out to you across a bar by people who are largely indifferent to your preferences and you get one of two choices – espresso or cappuccino. The coffee is unfailingly good no matter whether you’re in Rome at a cafe or in a bar on the side of the railway platform watching Italian lottery on the TV. Even the auto-machines on the trains make excellent coffee. And not once does anyone have to comment on the incredibleness of this consistency. No one says a word about Antonio’s sheer brilliance or about his masterful handling of the machines. You order, you drink, you leave. You don’t make a song and dance about it. It’s not because Italians are exceedingly restrained – or don’t give a care about coffee. Both of these things are patently untrue.

I’m just going to put forward an educated proposition here and say that for Italians coffee is just life, rather than lifestyle. And it’s not like the Italians have one up on the rest of us here. About a decade and a half ago, America shared a very similar attitude (though their coffee was a little less palatable to the rest of us). Anyone who’s seen Twin Peaks can attest to Lynch’s love affair with drip filter coffee. Garfield used to drank great mugs of the stuff, and he was a cat! A cup of joe is as American as well, as apple pie (for which a coffee is a great accompaniment). So when did coffee change and become something you could drink to increase your cred?

Well, I’ve got a book here on my desk which might hold some answers (Hip: The History by John Leland). But as a rough thesis I’m going to suggest that Starbucks did a lot to establish the idea of coffee as something cool and worth paying more than 50 cents for. I’m also going to say that the Olsen twins have been a serious force. Those two are photographed more often with oversize Starbucks cups than Britney is with underwear–which is saying something.

Unflattering Author Photos

A new, irregular column I've just decided to start. Inspired by this effort discovered while browsing Guardian Online. Contributions are welcome.

George Eliot: deeply unattractive

Celebrity Schadenfreude

I'm slightly confused as to whether this post really belongs here or is better housed at my summer residence - the beach house - where I take a playboy bunny and a crate of Bombay Sapphire every year and just, y'know, cut loose...
Anyways, comments welcome on where it's best for this to live.
It's like The Atlantic.com has become my new Salon. Found a couple of great things on here in the last few days and no doubt I'll blab about the rest in due course. This, however, was simply too delish to ignore. What you'll find here is a great article about the "new papparazzi". I like to think of the new paps as akin to the "New Journalism" - And I wonder if there's a specious argument to be made advancing that idea... I'm thinking, yes. [Incidentally, and this is of no interest to anyone but me in the future reading this, I'm reading Tom Wolfe at the moment and it almost seems like the "vanity" at stake in his novel and his new journalism stylisitics (relation to reality tv?) are a neat match for the idea of "new papparazzi"]. But I digress...

So, David Samuels, our intrepid reporter, gets to grips with the world of the new paps. I won't bore you with the details, but things have changed, my friends - theres a whole new economy of selling photos of stars and the business model is one more example of accelerated, globalised, electronic communication, blahblahblah. Believe me, it's good - just read the damn article for yo'self. What grabbed me though were the minor details seems somehow more revealing in this fascinating story about life today, about - excuse the obscure pun which follows - Us.
Interesting stuff - consider for instance that most of the shooters who work for the new agencies are Brazilian; shooting pics of stars in their Prius as they cruise by the local Starbucks is - get this - their first job in America! Welcome to the land of frikken opportunity! Something about this is so surrealy exciting that it needs a novel devoted to it - seriously. The "shooters" work together in gangs (complete with gang names that also act as trading names: MBF, X17). They shoot video as well as pictures - though the video seems to be used mostly as "proof" of their work tracking and staking out stars.
Then there's the fabulousness of Us Weekly. A magazine which seems to have somehow been responsible with changing the role of photographers, celebs, mags, audiences. You name it. Here's the deal:

"The evolution of Hollywood paparazzi from a marginal nuisance to one of the
most powerful and lucrative forces driving the American news-gathering industry
is a phenomenon that dates back to March 2002, when a women’s magazine editor
named Bonnie Fuller took over a Wenner Media property called Us Weekly [...]
What Fuller brought to Us was a keen understanding of her audience. “...what was
interesting to me was to look at celebrities going to the dry cleaners and
pumping gas. I loved looking at these pictures of celebrities who were just like
us.”
The genius of Bonnie Fuller’s new approach was that almost any picture
of a celebrity doing something ordinary would do, with a little help from an
inventive caption writer who could come up with a snappy one-liner"

And we haven't even got to the best bit yet [stay tuned fans - Perez Hilton is coming up!] Samuels suggests that this new currency in star photos also tapped into a drive in audiences: not only did we all feel better knowing that Lindsay pumped gas - one step closer for us to our idols, right - but in feeling that bit closer we started to get a taste for "getting personal." Right now, as I type this, there's a mag I've fished out of someone's recycling bin [guilty, your honour], the cover of which features Lindsay Lohan and proclaims beneath "I'm Fat & A Failure." So, you get where this is going yes? If they pump gas just like us, then the have cellulite just like us, drink too much, screw around, get cold sores. Stands to reason. BUT, and here's the kicker, when we get to see them in this less glamourous light we like to attack them for it. Maybe part of it is celebrity schadenfreude ? (Yay! She's wealthy and can do what she pleases but she's also crazy and has fat ankles and ohmigod who let her out of the house in that!) But I'm inclined to think that it's also a big big helping of some of the less flattering aspects of human nature. Something akin to the hothouse social environment of the school yard. Perez Hilton is, probably, the best demonstration of that tendency. And, hell, it's nasty, but it's also funny. Perez is a bitch and he brings out the bitch in his readers, but it sorta seems to me that it's no different to the schtik of Southpark.
Ok, I could go on and on. The last thing that grabbed me is this concept of "giving it up" devised by the paps. "Giving it up" is their term for celebs who are willing, or at least, consenting participants in their own papping. When the see the boys coming they at least try to act natural and do something photo-worthy (like, what, keep on pumping gas?). As Samuels rightly notes this sexualised lingo suggests something nasty and special. Giving it up is all about being popular; like the cheerleaders in the teen movie. Giving it up makes the paps like you, they treat you good, they give you the publicity you need as a starlet confined to driving around LA in search of another double mocha latte. The real worry is, I suppose, the next inevitable step (one which Britney has already taken) instead of metaphorically giving it up to paps stars will give it up "for real" thus ensuring a complete union between the two sides of celebrity industry. Brit might be crazy, but there's method in her madness.

Cheque's in the Mailer

Lamest blog title EVER. I know, I know. But serious guys, what gives? I have to wait two days to discover that we've lost that little crazy little nugget? Couldn't somenooe have called? I was looking for things to blog about and everything! This suggests that I ought to spend some time reading newspapers rather than exams or Facebook profiles.

One thing I noticed about Mailer in recent years is his slow transformation into Yoda - the tuft of hair, the large floppy ears, the increasingly incoherrent ramblings: "Mailer I am"; "Sorry when I beat you to a pulp, you will be"; "Mailer, famous novelist, mention did I?"

Even better than Yoda-Mailer is the image of the author captured in this short but sweet Obit from New York Magazine.
[http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2007/11/norman_mailer_warhols_inverse.html]

His hair looks like a craft project completed by first graders. But I digress...

Homans makes a neat point that Mailer and Warhol were two sides of the same coin - a coin destined for the slot machine of fame. Three cherries and you hit the jackpot. So the argument goes, Mailer's greatest art was his public life. Like my man DE before he turned nice he was out to make himself a star - a grumpy, irrasicble star. A legitimate star at that even though his public life was filled with enough wild and violent public outbursts to rival Britney. Once again I'm back to the same question (for which I still don't have an answer) - why authors, do you long for somekind of "stardom"? Why do you love the attention? I mean, hell, we'd all love the attention, right? We'd all like to fake it til we make it. And yet, and yet, authors seem to do it through the guise of writing. Not, note well, that they hope their writing will earn them fame, but that writing will be a act through which fame will be thrust upon them. It's like the writing is an act (Barthes talks about this), a performance that will attract attention - like dancing on a table after midnight, or stepping out of a car without underwear. This act isn't noteworthy in itself it's the balls-out bravado of the act that's worth talking about. And no one had his balls out more often (metaphorically speaking) than Mailer. Like I said, DE did it for a while til he got tired of people telling him that rountine was tired and maybe we'd all like to hear a little more about gee, I don't know, something other than how cleverly self-aware he was about being clever. Now he just keeps it to himself and his buddies.

And Homans is right, Warhol did it too, but in the opposite direction - he invited every exhibitionist to the party, plyed them with booze and waited til they ALL got up on the tables to dance. Then he stood on his own in the middle of the dancefloor and waited for people to pay attention to that creepy pale guy standing on his own. That, at least, was a suprising role reversal.

It's nice (in a kind of *wrong* way) to think that of everything a writer might be capable of having done in their career their lasting legacy is that they helped invent modern fame. Balls out fame. No underwear at the nightclub fame. Reality TV fame. It's nice to think that writers had a big impact on our culture.

RIP Norm - see you in hell.

The Great American Slumber Party

There’s a thing I’ve been thinking about on and off for a few years and this is it: how is it that contemporary fiction, post modern fiction (what-you-will) is somehow associated almost exclusively with a small coterie of young(ish), white guys? Eggers, Franzen, Foster Wallace, Euginedes, Lethem, even the newer ones like Kunkel. Go back a bit further: Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerny, DeLillo, my latest flame The Pynch. Ok, now keep going (and yes we’re moving away from Post modernism here but go with me) Roth, Bellow, Updike, Mailer. In this list the closest thing we get to “not white” is Jewish. The closest thing we get to “not guys” is Euginedes channelling a hermaphrodite (female body, male identity) in Middlesex. So, what gives? I’m not complaining exactly, I’m just trying to work out where being a “dude” fits in with the whole “postmodernism thing.”

[Side note: I’m curious to know where I fit into all this. Don’t I disprove my own theory? I’m a girl. I like postmodern, clever, show-offy stuff. Aah, yes, but, dollars to donuts I don’t like it for the same reasons many dudes do. And sorry guys, but for some reason when I think about this you’re all “Dudes” – is it the pernicious influence of Lebowski? Likely, and certainly the “dudeness” of The Dude in that film is the result of some uber-white-guy cool that so many of these novelist and their male fans aspire to, surely.]

And so, while scratching my head and browsing the stacks I happened to stumble across this on Salon today. [http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2007/11/07/teen_girls/]

This, I thought, is an eye opener. Enough of the white guys/dudes. What if teenage girls were to constitute the new literary zeitgeist? Now, THAT would be SOMETHING. It sorta makes some kinda sense too given that we’re all living in a Facebook, MySpace, virtura-land where we mediate ourselves down to the last detail in order to most faithfully project the simulacra image that is our true self-i(sh)-ness. Teen girls are experts in this field. Their self obsession is no different to that practiced by the newer (or the older) white guys mentioned above – perhaps just skewed a bit differently. Where the Dudes agonise about TV and indie music and technology and charity and ethics and international travel and proving that they’re worthy, these girls are trying to find ways to capture the experience of being young and female – itself an exercise in proving worthiness. Look! At! Me! I’m an outsider, a rebel, a sexpot…
Really, there’s much difference at all when you spell it out. And now here’s a compelling thought: Norman Mailer as the self absorbed debutante at the Super Sweet 16 party. Franzen as the hormonally charged girl on the dancefloor grinding her way to various ecstatic levels of gratification. Eggers as the deadpan ironist who refuses to join the swim team. It’s the Boys Club meets the Baby Sitters’ Club…

And what’s the deal with me and my inner teenager over the last few days?

W.W.W.D? (What Would Warhol Do?)

Another morning, another entry. Saw intriguing doco last night: My Kid Could Paint That.

Here's the lowdown: Marla paints abstract expressionist works that take the art world in America by storm. From humble beginnings on the walls of the local coffee shop Marla's work makes it to the major modern art galleries in New York. Stuff she's dribbled paint on is selling for $20,000. Then someone proposes the theory that her work is not her own. The word "hoax" is whispered. Great stuff, right? Thing is, Marla is a four year old girl. Ooh yeaaah. This is a dream come true for people like me. Who doesn't love a hoax, who doesn't love a scandal, who doesn't love a cute kid story gone bad? (ok, maybe that's just me).

Clearly I'm not the only one... Artist and gallery owner Anthony Brunelli is actually caught on tape telling the director that even better than the art itself is the fact that Marla and her little brother Zane look like they could be in a GAP ad. Classy! It should come as no suprise that as a character in the film Brunelli comes across as the most opportunitistic sonofabitch who plays each side against the other. At one point he claims that Marla is a genius then, upon rumours of the hoax, promptly backflips, statinging that his whole hand in this affair has been simply to hold a mirror upto self-righteous modern art. "I specialise in hyperrealist works" he says dismissively, "modern art is really just a sham." This from a guy who spends his time painting pictures which resemble photos.

Things don't get neatly resolved. We never really know if Marla is totally responsible for her own work, but I think you'd have to be foolhardy in the extreme to even contemplate that a 4 year old has any concept of the "abstract" as a counterpoint to the representational given that all kids of that age are struggling to use art to get to grips with the representational world: "I'm painting a picture of the sun, and here's me and here's Timmy and that's my new red truck". At best all you can be sure of is that Marla seems pretty happy to sit around most days pushing paint around the canvas. More than once the film captures Marla telling her father (who, it is rumoured, is the real author of her works) "you tell me what to do" or more painfully, "I didn't touch that one Daddy, that was ALL Zane". Aah, kids, bless 'em.

What she did or didn't do seems pretty immaterial, really. What's most interesting is just how much people have invested in the notion of what constitutes "Art" and "Talent". One collector of Marla's work tells the camera tearfully that her work captures the poignancy of youth - it shouldn't come as any suprise that this particular art lover just happens to be a middle aged woman who teaches art to other middle aged ladies. We see what we want to believe we can see. Art, like religion is all about faith.

The demands of some faiths do, however, boggle the mind. In one of the most amusing scenes a dedicated "Marla collector" talks about the narrative in her work - he sees a green path, a blue door, two shadowy figures at the threshold, a blurred image that resembles a sonogram of a foetus. What, he asks Marla, stonefaced, was she trying to communicate with these images? Mr Collector finishes this anecdote by telling us that Marla only replies cryptically by saying, "I don't know" ("in her sly and knowing way" according to Mr Collector). Now, I don't know about you but when someone says "I don't know" I don't see that as a really, err, cryptic concept. And when 4 year-olds say it it tends to mean: "You bore me, old person, with this constant questioning. Give me a horsey ride and some ice cream and maybe you and I can discuss CareBears, but don't bring up that shit about the blue door again or I'll cry."

So, it's funny isn't it - where/how people invest meaning (not to mention money) in art...

This film touches so delicately on so many interesting ideas without ever whacking anyone over the head with things. First and foremost, the movie isn't so much about the "did she/didn't she?" problem but about a much bigger problem: modern art. One of the subjects interviewed talks about how her mother was so offended by Jackson Pollack because his work seemed to make a mockery of the "little people" (who liked their art representational and straight up); for her mother it was like a big "fuck you" to those people who just enjoyed the simplicity of being able to easily tell if something was good or not. And that's it in a nutshell really - How do I know if it's good if I can't even work out what it's supposed to be? Here's a comment I found in the Salon review of the film which summarises the love/hate relationship the modern public has with modern art:

As New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman discusses in the film, Marla's story appealed to two contradictory popular prejudices. First of these is the idea of prodigal artistic talent as a lottery prize handed out to random toddlers by God. Second is the notion that modern art (at least in its abstract or nonfigurative guises) is a pseudo-intellectual con game that has no standards and conveys no meaning, so the apparent success of a 4-year-old debunks the whole enterprise.

While I was watching this movie I could help but think to myself: "What Would Andy Make of All This?" Would Marla have been one of the new muses at the Factory? Or would Andy have privately schemed to get this little cutie-pie scrubbed out? Is she a further example of his preference for the brightly coloured "blank" canvas? Or would she have been capitalising on his market; outplaying him at his own game with her "GAP ad" cutsiness? I was heartened to discover that Warhol had some real foresight before his death: in a curious move that seems to preempt the existence of Marlas in our future Warhol was in the 80s making art tailored for children (read, displayed a kid height in the gallery). Sean, aged 8, noted that the paintings would look "sort of" good on his bedroom wall at home. Neat, I thought, given that "sort of" is about the only response you can give to Marla and her artistic authenticity.

An interesting side note: In the Salon article a line from New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm - every journalist "is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse." Once again, the second? the third? time in as many days that I've encountered someone advancing the theory that writers (of any stripe) are dodgy motherf$%^ers who live to make us hate them. Are writers like the new cops or what?

Reflections (Projections?) On Screens

Happily for me Salon just keeps on giving.

The review is for "What Happens Next: A History of American Screen Writing" by Marc Norman.
More interesting than the book itself are the reflections offered by Laura Miller. In particular:

Writers (of any sort) invoke deep suspicions in the rest of us and ought to be treated cruelly to keep them on their toes [witness, Sunset Boulevard]. Aside from a steady diet of Tuna sandwiches and milk and an indentured space in the darkened cell known as the "Gag Room" (seriously, read the essay) screenwriters were regarded as worse than hacks...

Norman attributes some of this animosity to the essential mystery of the writing process. To the tough, practical, working-class men who founded the movie industry, it looked suspiciously like loafing. "None of them were quite sure what a screenwriter did," he writes, "or even how he did it. Certainly he or she delivered an artifact, a screenplay, that worked or didn't, but where did it come from? ... Did it take them a year to write a screenplay, or only one day and then they waited a year to hand it in? There was no telling because nobody could see the work occur."

And here's something REALLY curious for those interested in literary connections to the cinematic:

Screenwriters have it worst of all because (and Norman really only grazes this point) writing is invisible and internal and movies are all about -- really only about -- what you can see. The movies need writers, and are intermittently struck with the desire to celebrate and enrich this one or that one, but can never entirely trust them, and vice versa. The movies and writing transpire in fundamentally different worlds. Norman winds up his book with a paean to the screenwriter's privilege in getting "to see the movie, first, entire, in their minds," but the whole point of a movie is that it's not in your mind -- it's right in front of your face, 15 feet high. Otherwise, it's a radio play, maybe. Or a novel.

A couple of points here--
There's a striking similarity between the suggestion of the screenwriter having access to the "movie in your mind" first and yesterday's recounting of JK Rowling as having a personal TV set in her head on which she could invent and rerun as many charming stories about Ron's socks or Hedwig's lineage. So, what gives? Writers aren't writing books in their minds but movies or tv shows. That's a pretty fascinating development in the conceptualisation of the creative work of the mind.

And another thing... This article makes the claim that screenwriters are in a bad way because they work with words but the medium for which they are creating "product"cares only about the visual. The suggestion being, what exactly? That telling and seeing are incompatible? That telling what you see is a fundamentally different thing from seeing what you see. Ok, fine. Then what?
What about this question of TRUST. Is this guy/gal doing the work I want them to? Or more importantly - are they even capable of knowing how to tell a story in images by using words? Don't trust a writer (a scriptwriter/ a cinematic writer) to capture something which can only be experienced firsthand. So then, are all these writers inherently suspicious because they take something and make something else from it? The answer is probably, probably. Certainly I'm feeling more suspicious than normal but I suspect that has rather more to do with the narrative lines of James Ellroy. And so, I offer this all too perfect moment at the closing of Miller's article:

from film critic David Thomson:

"a writer is like a divorce lawyer or a private eye: when you want them you have to have them; but later you despise them."

I love the obsessive quality in this characterisation...
And, we ask for them to hurt us. Ouch! That's some cold hard truth.