This is not a trick.

There are two people for whom—no matter what public (or my own) opinion might say to the contrary—I will turn on the television and watch every single episode of every show they ever create: Aaron Sorkin and Joss Whedon. And between the two of them, they pretty much cover the range of what I find interesting in scripted television: all the way from ensemble-driven shows about small groups of multi-faceted characters and their internal dynamics, with smart, funny writing and a flair for metaphor, to ensemble-driven shows about small groups of multi-faceted characters and their internal dynamics, with smart, funny writing, and a flair for allegory…which also incorporate some element of the fantastical.

See, among other things, I read a lot of fantasy novels, and as much as I’m a fan of realism, there’s something about setting a story in a world that is different from our own—where the impossible can, and does, happen—that makes a story lighter for me. I don’t mean “lighter” in terms of the ideas the novels address, or what they hope to accomplish. I don’t mean that these books are necessarily lighter in tone or in impact. Instead, I think that by stepping outside of our own day-to-day lives, these books ask us to shed the assumptions that we have about the way that society, culture, class, gender, race, etc. work in this world. (Or, the well-written, well-thought ones do, anyway.) By separating us from our preconceptions, these stories force us to rely only on the internal information provided. We become completely dependent on the author to introduce us to the rule and governing institutions, norms and unusual behaviors, even the color of the sky of the world we are entering. Cutting us off from our usual frame of reference, fantasy novels give us the freedom to get completely lost in a story.

Or maybe I just like magic.

I know that no one is going to believe any of this. That’s okay. If I thought you would, then I couldn’t’ tell you. Promise me that you won’t believe a word. That’s what Zofia used to say to me when she told me stories. - “The Faery Handbag”

Stranger Things Happen is the name of Kelly Link’s first short story collection, but it is also an apt description of her second, Magic for Beginners (which, with the title spelled out in huge type across the front, I will admit I found mildly embarrassing to read on the subway). The stories in Magic for Beginners are brilliant little slices of a life running right alongside of, but never quite touching, our own. They’re like fairy tales for grown-ups; just similar enough that I could see myself in the main character’s place, just off enough that I wasn’t sure I wanted to. They’re unsettling, and in places laugh out loud funny, and they lingered in my mind long after I put the book down. The best thing about them, though, is the way they twisted my perspective so far around as to illuminate an everyday aspect of life in a completely unexpected way.

There was something about clowns that was worse than zombies. (Or maybe something that was the same. When you see a zombie, you want to laugh at first. When you see a clown, most people get a little nervous. There’s the pallor and the cakey mortician-style makeup, the shuffling and the untidy hair. But clowns were probably malicious, and they moved fast on those little bicycles and in those little, crammed cars. Zombies weren’t much of anything. They didn’t carry musical instruments and they didn’t care whether or not you laughed at them. You always knew what zombies wanted.) Given a choice, Soap would take zombies over clowns any day. - “Some Zombie Contingency Plans”

I was, for many years, pretty active in one of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer online communities. “The Library,” the longest story in Link’s collection, sent me right back to the feeling of those Tuesday nights in the late 90s and early 00s: of anticipation and hope and excitement and the unspoken fear that maybe this one wouldn’t be able to keep all those balls—of comedy, and the horror of both high school and living on a hellmouth, and action, and romance—suspended up in the air. “The Library” encapsulates the feeling of being utterly caught up in a television show, while going the extra step further that is every fan’s secret dream, of being actually caught up in a television show.

The syllable by syllable analysis of dialogue, the cataloguing of details of costume and location and props, the hopeful identification of signs and portents; Link has perfectly nailed the joys and whimsies of fandom with a story of boy and his group of friends, and the television show that they have coalesced around. And then she steps over the edge of the expected, and brings the show to life around him, while also establishing the entire story itself as simply one more episode of the magical show. In conception, it’s a neat—and potentially confusing, or precious—series of nesting boxes. In practice, it reads as the beautiful, elegant dream that every fangirl hides away in her heart, so deeply buried that even she doesn’t know it’s there until the words begin to unspool on the page before her. With Magic for Beginners, Link has shaped stories which unfold with wonder and concise wit, that while constantly surprising me, also felt familiar, as if she had seen into my dreams, and translated them onto paper, making them funnier, more precisely angled, and more interesting in the process.

She has also crafted perhaps the best three sentences about the potential evil of couches ever written. Well, okay. Maybe the only.

Laughter (not) included.

I have loved Brad Pitt with a deep and unshakable love ever since he dragged Geena Davis across a bed by her hips in Thelma & Louise. Angelina Jolie is stunning. I get that, as nominees in the Best Actor/Best Actress categories, not to mention as two of the most gorgeous specimens of personhood on the face of the planet right now, front row seats at the Oscars are not only assured, but make good business sense. Here’s my problem: they are perhaps the most humorless pair of beautiful people I have ever seen together. I’ve seen them both laugh, so it’s not as if they are incapable. Somehow, though, whenever I see them at a major awards ceremony, they appear stiff, with a frozen rictus of a smile stretched across their faces. I get that it may grow wearying to have to attend ceremonies where you know it’s likely some minor joke will be made at your expense, while you have to smile into the camera. But look at Robert Downey Jr; he’s adapted to it gracefully. It’s as if all that adopting of children from third world countries has had a deteriorating effect on the humor center of their brains, and they are no longer able to laugh at themselves. C’mon guys, the whole world knows that you got together under less-than-savory circumstances, and we know you know we know. The least you could do is look like you’re enjoying it.

I like to watch.

I love Movies, and by capitalizing the word, I mean the entire viewing experience. I love buying candy at the drugstore before I go in, because I can’t afford the inflated prices at the theater. I love sitting in the intimacy of the semi-dark, waiting for the movie to start, gossiping with my friends and catching up on what’s happening in their lives. I love the feeling of anticipation when the lights dim down all the way. I love to spend a couple of hours inside the story of someone else’s life; the same reason, incidentally, that I became an actor.

But I also love movies; that is the individual films, themselves. I have several friends who seem to have placed me, on a continuum of how much I like a movie, somewhere in the vicinity of Amy Adams character in Enchanted, or Liking Everything. A Lot. I think it’s just a matter of perspective: even the crappiest movie out there usually has some redeeming quality to it—whether it’s a performance, the script, or even just the way the heroine wears her hair—and that is what I choose to focus on. I am willing, for instance, to overlook the sentimental schmaltz that is Message in a Bottle, because it was filmed at the cottage next door to the one my family always rents in Maine. I mean, the money has been spent, the time has been committed. So I’d rather spend my energy on finding something worth the twelve dollars and two hours of my life, because I’m not going to get them back. Revolutionary Road, despite fundamentally angering me with the premise that suburbia and family MUST equal stagnation of intellect and creative death—not to mention some of the worst dialogue I’ve heard in years—still had a remarkable performance by Kate Winslet, and so although there were times while I was watching the movie that I seriously considered turning it off, I’d like to give credit where credit is due. (Note: Leo, this does not include you.)

So, as part of my usual run-up to the Oscars, I’ve been trying to watch as many of the Oscar-nominated movies as I can. I’d seen Encounters at the End of the World, Rachel Getting Married, Iron Man and Slumdog Millionaire before the nominations came out, and over the last several weeks I’ve watched The Dark Knight, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Visitor, In Bruges, Tropic Thunder, WALL-E, Doubt and Kung-fu Panda, and I still desperately want to see Frost/Nixon, Milk and The Wrestler. But last Tuesday, when Frozen River arrived in the mail, I realized…I just couldn’t face it any more. I’ve heard remarkable things about Melissa Leo’s performance. The plot of the film interests me. And yet, the disc has sat on top of my TV for the entire week, and I just cannot bring myself to pop it in the DVD player. Or motivate myself out of the apartment and over to a theater some night to see Mickey Rourke, who captivated me just watching the trailers two months ago. Suffocating under my own Must Watch list, and pressured by the increasingly brief period between the announcement of the nominations and the ceremony itself, it’s as if my eyes and brain are still willing, but my heart has finally given up.

What, then, to do? The answer, counter-intuitively, was to go back to the movies. Only last night, instead of something on my list, a group of my friends and I went to see Confessions of a Shopaholic. If you’ll remember my post about Bachelor Boys, you’ll have a pretty good idea of how excited I was about this movie. Which is to say, not at all. (And the reviews I’d seen didn’t help.) What I was excited about was the chance to get together with a group of friends, to laugh and make fun, and for a couple of hours to share the delight and horror and disgust of watching a movie—just for fun—with them. What I was missing, with all my movie watching, was the communal experience of sitting in the dark with a bunch of other people, laughing and crying with a group of others brought together for the same reason, even if only for two hours. The movie was terrible, and it was completely worth it.

In the eye of the beholder.

I grew up with ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. Ok, yes, for several years at the very beginning of my life there was another well-known anchorman, of which all I really remember is the day in kindergarten when a teacher asked us for whom our parents were going to be voting, to which I (confusing the two most commonly heard “c” names on the television, evenings in my house) responded with supreme confidence, “Walter Cronkite.” But after 1983, when he became sole anchor and I started to actually pay attention to the background noise that was the constant undercurrent of our family dinners, it was Peter Jennings. He was charming, handsome, and witty, as well as being incredibly intelligent, and persistent with—and unafraid to ask—the hard questions. He was the news, for me—and I took it for granted that he would always be there, keeping me company through dinner, wherever I went, for the rest of my life. With several moves across the country, Peter Jennings was a constant, a familiar face to rely on, so it was heartbreaking during early 2005 to watch his decline from lung cancer.

As a presence at our dinner table every night growing up, he seemed almost to become part of our family in a way that wasn’t really clear to me until the day we broke a long-standing family tradition. On our annual family vacation in Maine, one of the first things we do upon arrival at the cottage that my parents have rented every year of my life except one, is hide the single, small, rabbit-eared television, so that for two weeks, aside from the radio in the morning (and in more recent years, the internet via laptops and a USB-cell connection, which we tell ourselves is something entirely different), we are on not just a family, but a media, vacation. This persisted, even through years with summer Olympics, until 2005. On the evening of August 8th, one day after his death, ABC broadcast an hour-long tribute to Peter Jennings, for which we broke out the television, and my parents and I watched, and wept.

ABC went through several permutations of hosts after Jennings died, including the short-lived shared anchorship of Bob Woodruff and Elizabeth Vargas, which ended with Woodruff hospitalized for serious injuries suffered when his convoy in Iraq was hit by an IED, and Vargas stepping down to spend more time with her family. Eventually, Charles Gibson took over, and has been hosting since May 2006. Gibson is good: friendly and reassuring and authoritative, but somehow lacking the panache of Peter Jennings, the implicit confidence and utter imperturbability that comes from years spent reporting from the frontlines of the civil rights movements in the US and South Africa, from the killing fields of Vietnam and Cambodia, and from the all-too-frequent chaos of the Middle East.

I have seen Peter Jennings, and you, Charlie Gibson—while pleasant—are no Peter Jennings. But although I still miss him every evening at 6:30 when I turn on my TV, for the most part, I have come to terms with reality.

For the last several nights, however, ABC World News Tonight has had a new anchor: Diane Sawyer. (And on a side note, it used to be that when someone different was sitting in the usual seat, there would be an explanation like, “so-and-so filling in while Peter Jennings is on vacation,” or “reporting live from Jerusalem.” It was around the time that Jennings started getting sick that I noticed these explanations had disappeared. Probably, it was a policy change by the network. But now, every time a new host sits in, I get a sinking feeling. I hope you’re ok, Mr. Gibson.) (And on a side, side note, for those of you playing along at home, tonight the chair was filled by George Stephanopoulos.)

Oh, Diane Sawyer. You have been in the news world for 42 years. You co-host Good Morning America (admittedly, not necessarily the most bulldog of news organizations, but still reputable) and Primetime Live. You’ve done numerous remarkable interviews with incredible newsmakers. You are 63 years old.

You are entitled to a few wrinkles.

Instead, we are treated to soft-focus shots of Sawyer. She is a beautiful woman who—it’s plain to see even through the Vaseline-slicked lens they’re using to shoot her—looks remarkably young for her age. Is she really that concerned about well-earned crow’s feet and laugh lines that she cannot bear the thought of exposing them to a viewing audience? It can’t be a Network Policy about Women of a Certain Age, because immediately following Sawyer’s glowing, radiant visage, we were treated to harshly-lit, remarkably unflattering shots of Hilary Clinton with what appeared to be vast canyons carved into her cheeks and black abysses under her eyes, being interviewed by Martha Raddatz. Neither of them were smoothed into agelessness, and instead of being lit by, in Sawyer’s case, glowing candles, were exposed to the indignities of interrogation-intensity, down-lit fluorescents. I realize that youth and beauty are not necessarily seen as being incompatible with intelligence in the world of television journalism—just look at Maria Bartiromo, Lara Logan and Anne Curry—and I am thankful for that. But are they, instead, considered prerequisites? Youth and beauty, for women, have traditionally been equated in the world of entertainment, with power (or at least increased viewership) whereas signs of age, such as wrinkles and grey hair, have equated with authority for men. As anchorwoman of an evening news show, does Sawyer believe that showing her age would reduce her gravitas? Does she think that the viewers at home will associate a few lines not with hard-won experience, but with weakness or senility? Is she right?

Or is she just that vain?

Just one of those things.

Although I was not an English major in school, as both an insatiable reader and an actress, I am a person to whom language has always mattered. Which means that, when left with no other basis on which to form an opinion, I will totally judge you based on proper use of grammar, whether or not you can spell words correctly, and your choice of punctuation. Did I forget to mention in my profile that I’m a big nerd?

Thus, the Manhattan Mini Storage ad campaign currently littering the New York City subway system (among other places) is causing me great amounts of pain. It’s not fair, when you’re on your way to work at 8:00 in the morning, to be confronted with this:



My head has started hurting, and I haven’t even gotten three blocks from home yet.

And that’s only the latest one I’ve seen; this one has been haunting my commute for the last month or so:



Do you see where I’m going with this? Because I’d like to just lay it out there: adding a circumflex to “Storanomical” doesn’t make the word fun and exciting, like the o is wearing a party hat. Throwing tildes around doesn’t make Manhattan Mini Storage lively and exotic; the kind of place that gives you a free rum punch when you cram your overstuffed cardboard boxes into the 4’x4’ unit and snap your padlock onto the door. Adding accents and umlauts where they are not intended to signal a change in pronunciation of the vowel they are over, but are seemingly only for decoration—like so much diacritical confetti—makes these ads look both pretentious and, frankly, rather dumb. And I most certainly don’t want my out of season clothes and the couch that wouldn’t fit into my studio left in a place that wants me to think that at any moment a liquor-soaked conga line is likely to break out among a tribe of, apparently, half-wits.

This is only the latest skirmish in a battle for the proper use of punctuation that is being waged in storefronts all over this city on a daily basis. For instance, just so we’re all clear, quotes are not intended to add emphasis. Quotes are used to identify a person’s written or spoken text, or to imply some room for doubt as to the accuracy of those words. Seeing “Fresh Fruit,” quotes and all, on a sign at your grocery store does not inspire confidence.

Punctuation is the indoor plumbing of the English language; overlooked most of the time, it’s when it gets taken away, or improperly used, that you realize just how much you’ve come to rely on it. Used correctly, however, one small punctuation mark can organize thoughts, signal a shift in emotion, or completely change the meaning of an entire sentence. Wouldn’t using them well make both them, and us, look better in the end?

Books. Covers. Judging.

I don’t like Chick Lit—neither the genre, nor the name itself—for the same reason that I don’t like “chick flicks.” These are books and movies that, even by the people consuming them, are generally considered not serious. Not serious in tone or topic; they are airy, full of sparkly surfaces and even more sparkly people. Not serious in subject; Killing People and The Government—either separately or in some combination—being two prime examples of “serious” subject matter. Rather, they are focused almost exclusively on love, and the corollary that marriage to the Right Man is the ultimate expression of this love. And because of this lack of seriousness, these books cannot claim the title of Literature or Movie alone, but must take on a modifier, rendering them only suitable for, or interesting to, those without a Y chromosome.

Which is not to say that I never read these books (or watch these movies), but that idea of them makes me feel vaguely uncomfortable, like riding in a hot car for too long as a kid, and so I try to avoid them for the most part.

I am also, however, a believer in lists, which is how I found myself, this last week, carting around Bachelor Boys by Kate Saunders. Whenever I read a review, or get a recommendation for a book that sounds interesting, it gets torn out of the magazine or newspaper, or scribbled onto a little piece of paper. Eventually all this effluvia gets piled onto my coffee table, and when the pile gets big enough, it all gets entered into an Excel spreadsheet to which I have given the rather over-inflated name, “Culture Lists.” Such is the power of titling files: as if by naming it, I can make it so.

But it’s not just a list of books. I also have a sheet for movies, one for albums, and a separate one for individual songs. The list has proven invaluable, since—due to the special combination of the high cost of living in New York City, part-time employment, and the fact that I know it makes my mother very, very happy—my addiction to bookstores has, of late, been diverted into frequent use of the greater New York Public Library system. (It doesn’t hurt that there’s a branch right around the corner from me, either.) And when I’m standing in front of those shelves of books, I get to do the thing that, second to creating and organizing them, is what makes list-making so utterly worthwhile: finding items on that list, so that I can read them, so that I can cross them off. Oh, the simple joys of list-making.

This list has been under construction for about four years now, though, so by the time I’m actually checking out and taking home one of the books, I often have no memory of why it got onto the list in the first place, or even, frequently, what the plot of the book might be. It makes for an eclectic pile on my nightstand. But as soon as I picked up Bachelor Boys, I knew what I was in for. Artfully-crumpled blue-dotted and stripy-red ties mingled (as if carelessly discarded by a handsome young men either a) tired of being contained by the strictures of working life, or b) mid-seduction of a glamorous yet sarcastic career woman who thought she would never find a guy who could make her laugh AND find that spot with his tongue) over looping, curvaceous script; what I held in my hand was most decidedly going to be chick lit.

I almost put the book back on the shelf. But I thought to myself, “Self, you know the old saying about books and covers. Inside, it might be good! It might be a hilarious, brilliantly written satire of male-female relationships that is suffering from the branding efforts of small-minded publishing houses! Plus—and this part is crucial—if you don’t read it, you’ll never be able to cross it off the list!” So I brought it home, and I began to read. And what do you think happened?

I hated it. Well, ok, I didn’t hate it, but it often made me angry. The main character was self-involved, often mean, and frequently quite stupid. Which all would have been fine—I vastly prefer to read about flawed people; it makes me feel better about myself—except that she was these things while being, for large stretches of the book, unlikeable, or at least uninteresting. The “Bachelor Boys” of the title are vastly more charming and interesting characters, but suffer from poorly explained changes in behavior that render them pretty paper dolls, shuffled around to further the plot, without ever being allowed to become full flesh-and-blood humans. And it is apparent, from page one, just what is going to happen at the end of the book. Bachelor Boys was exactly, exactly, as I had feared.

And yet, I kept reading. In fact, there were times that I couldn’t put it down. What, I kept thinking, is wrong with me? I didn’t like it, I didn’t have any question as to what was going to happen, and yet I couldn’t tear myself away. What strange spell had the book cast over me, that it could do this?

The answer, I believe, is that I kept reading for the same reason that, when I’m at home at the two o’clock in the afternoon during the week, I will usually turn on As the World Turns: I want to know what’s going to happen next. Please note: this is a different thing altogether from “how it’s going to end.” When you watch a show (or read a book) like this, you know that it will start at Point A, with two people who do not love each other (for whatever reason: they’re mortal enemies, they’re opposites, they’re “like brother and sister,” or, if you’re reading V.C. Andrews, they are brother and sister), and will end at Point B, with the same two people madly in love. The question is never whether they will end up at Point B, but how much and what type of drama they will have to put up with before they get there. (And in the case of a soap, how long it will be before they ping-pong back to Point A. And then Point B. And then Point A. Ad infinitum.)

There is something reassuring about these kinds of stories precisely because the ending is never in doubt; no matter how bad it gets, you know that it will all work out in the end. So by allowing yourself to be caught up in these stories, you get to imagine that despite all of the shit that you’re going through in your daily life—losing a job, and crashing your computer, and coping with the aging of your parents, and trying to deal with the fact that you are never, ever going to hear from him again—somehow, in the end, it will all be wrapped up in a tidy bow, and you will be happy, and successful, and, most importantly, not alone. It’s a particularly comforting vision now, with the inescapable chorus of Financial!Disaster! sounding in our ears. It will be interesting to see whether, over the next few years, romantic comedies become Hollywood’s new cash cow. I’d like to believe that despite my misgivings about style and subject matter, and my essentially realistic view of my place in the world, Bachelor Boys sucked me in with the hope that I, too, am on a journey: past Point A, with Point B still somewhere up ahead. If I am, it’ll make all the daily crap I’m dealing with in the meantime worthwhile.

Either that, or deep in my cynical, feminist heart of hearts, I am a completely hopeless romantic. That, however, is a post for another day.