the lawyer writer

MOVED!

2006-09-14T19:44:00.000-04:00

The lawyerwriter has moved to Sirens Magazine! Click here to be linked to the latest post.

Some Sepia Mutiny Blog Posts

2006-06-03T13:54:00.000-04:00

Hello all...

Here are some of my more recent posts for Sepia Mutiny...

Greetings and Salutations

Mahabaratha Reloaded

Desi Goth Manifesto

Silencing the "Code"

Big Changes For This Blog!

2006-05-22T23:41:00.000-04:00

First:

the lawyerwriter is guest blogging at Sepia Mutiny for the next month, so check out my posts there. There might be occasional entries on this blog, but probably not often--just the occasional musing on the evils of the publishing industry.

Second:

the lawyerwriter is moving house! Soon (though not sure when) the lawyerwriter is going to find a new, permanent blogging home at Sirens Magazine. Those of you linked to the lawyerwriter will be sent to my new, gorgeous home, and, hopefully, regular, reliable blogging posts.

So definitely check out Sepia Mutiny for my latest posts...

Nerd v. Geek

2006-05-04T23:08:00.000-04:00

The source of my pop culture fixation, E! Entertainment Television (sorry VH1--you are dead to me, expect for America's Top Model marathons) is already promoting its Mother's Day show Rise of the Geeks, and while the link is incredibly unhelpful, the commercial flashes an unusual array faces: familiar ones, like Adam Brody, Zach Braff and Bill Gates, and the more radical choices like Adam Sandler (please. a total jock, not a nerd or a geek). The ladies are probably represented by the likes of Lisa Loeb and Allison Hannigan (of Buffy fame), who have their own brand of geek chic, usually involving glasses or band camp.

Now, it is important to get the terms straight, for a variety of reasons, but the most important of which is that I am both nerd and geek, and I like to have the various parts of my personality neatly labeled. I use the phrenology head in my living room as my example. To bolster my defintions, I bring in our guest consultant, Wikipedia, the largest growing encyclopedia (who would probably get a lot more writers and accurate information if they gave authorial credit, but are awesome anyway).

"Nerd" is a derogatory term for someone of high I.Q., academic standing, and either adequate or dubious social skills, depending on your definition. For example, in the 1980's, skinny underage Indian girls who spent all their time in the library were known as nerds, or, in a particular case, "Nerdja."

"Geek" is a derogatory term for someone whose passions/obsessions are outside the mainstream, making them oddballs. Many geeks are technology/science geeks, but regardless of the field, geeks are obsessive in their devotion. For example, in the 1980's, skinny underage Indian girls who stared endless into the San Jose night with an old-fashioned telescope, trying vainly to find the rings of Uranus, were known as geeks.

Therefore, please do not throw those terms around. Admittedly, I am not a geek/nerd on the outside. I do not embrace geek chic; I strive more for "corporate goth bombshell." That said, I am still a nerd and geek on the inside, which is why when the hot dog vendor on my dog walk flirts with me, I get embarassed and think he's making fun of me. Okay, briefly. As with rap, I'm old-school--if you were a geek or nerd before it became trendy, then you have felt my pain.

The following criteria will help you distinguish whether you are truly a nerd and/or geek, or simply posing as such because it is fashionable.

The criteria:

1. Own, or still own, some of the original Dungeons and Dragons game books. Don't waste my time if you just "played the game" or "watched the (crappy) cartoon or (even crappier) movie." Unless you know the difference between comeliness and charisma, know how to calculate the hit dice of a mature green dragon (breath weapon: noxious gas), why Dragonlance books rock and who the dark lord of Ravenloft is, you don't qualify. However--if you still have one of the multiple-sided dice, you have a shot. Bonus points for sides over twenty.

For the record, I own a few books, my most prized possession being The Oriental Ad&D Handbook. I was always the Wu Jen-Kensai--magic and katana power.

2. Was addicted, in a serious, disturbing way, to at least one video game in your youth. It doesn't matter if it's Castle Wolfenstein on your brother's Playstation or Tetris at work, or 3-D Tetris at work or Tekken on your cousin's X-Box. We're talking: visual impairment when not playing, blisters on thumbs, nervous twitch that causes you to stack and unstack boxes, or charge into street fights with large panda bears.

3. Love anime. I mean serious, old school, Voltron, Robotech, Starblazers, Captain Harlock and the Queen of a Thousand Thieves, G-Force/Battle of the Planets--not-just-porn anime. Anime is the true sign of the discerning nerd, before it got overly uplifted in Spirited Away and bludgeoned into hyperactive stupidity with Pokemon. Please note: the following do not count as anime: G.I. Joe (though I loved it), He- Man (go She-Ra!),Thundercats, Transformers (surprisingly!). Some argue for Inspector Gadget; I find this assertion dubious.

4. Took the SAT at least three times. I took it six. I was the only twelve-year old at the testing center. AND: took at least two (2) of the following standardized tests: PSAT, AP (at least 2), ACT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT. Extra points for GRE Subject Science. GMAT takers are neither nerds nor geeks; they were playing baseball and nominating themselves for Vice President of the student body in order to have stuff to put on their b-school resume.

5. Was continually, steadily picked last for every sport except for badminton, and that's only because the racket wasn't so heavy to lift. (Alternatively: unable to catch, throw, hit or even spot the ball during softball). Bonus points: consistently failing the state-required physical fitness requirements (fifty situps? who's in charge, Patton?)

6. Was consistently, steadily bullied by at least two (2) different individuals at two (2) different stages of childhood/adolescence/teen years. Bonus points are awarded for the higher in the social ladder your bully was--for example, a grabby stoner is far less significant than, say, The Girl Voted Most Attractive her senior year of high school.

7. Had at least two of the following at an inappropriate time: braces (say, during senior year around the prom), glasses (since kindergarten), bad skin (ah, puberty), untamed facial hair (I really should have taken a razor to myself), sudden changes in voice (singing lessons were not a good idea), cuticle chewing, an undershirt instead of a bra, nail biting, hair-chewing, unfortunate makeup choices (blue eyeshadow and big earrings), unshaven legs (learning the hard way in the locker room) and, worst of all, unfortunately ignored armpits (ditto).

8. An unusual (or unhealthy) interest (or aptitude) in technology (or pure science) to the point that when that kid from the 'Nsync tried to buy his way into space, you thought about dating him just so he'd take you along, even though you have a strict no-boy-band policy. Oh yes, and a tendency to read chaos theory or The Dancing Wu Li Masters or Brief History of Time when drunk, making for strange falling dreams. (Please: let's keep the threshold for this high. Science fair ribbons, yes. Ipod critic for Vanity Fair, not so much).

9. Knows why it's very, very important for X3: The Last Stand, to get everything about Dark Phoenix/Jean Grey/Madeline Pryor right, and if they muck it up with too much romance with Wolverine or bad special effects, they really won't get the full impact of the whole Dark Phoenix story. Plus they're already in the doghouse for the Rogue/Ice Man romance, which is so boring and not worth passing up an opportunity to introduce her Cajun, card-throwing, French-mangling lover Gambit, aka Remy LeBeau, to be played by Dennis Quaid as he was in The Big Easy, preferably with his shirt off. (I will accept Josh Lucas if he can do the accent). Which, may, MAY make up for the fact that the X-Men cartoon is off the air, even if it wasn't very good, and Jubilee was incredibly annoying and they kept fighting robots. But it doesn't make up for the fact that all the X-Men videogames SUCKED.

Sorry about that. Number (9) is an unhealthy obsession with at least one series of comic books to the point that you start drawing your own secret comic book where you have the power to fly and manage a complex, superhero-oriented lovelife.

And finally...

10. Could never really fall for someone who doesn't find it cute that, at your core, you are still a nerd and/or geek.

The Last Word on Opal Mehta

2006-05-02T23:55:00.000-04:00

Look, it's bad enough that I've got to walk my dogs past a water-logged David Blaine five times today, but are we still beating up on that 17 year old with the unfortunately large book deal? All the browbeating is extraneous. Let the numbers tell the tale, simply:

Age of Kaavya Viswanathan when deal was made: 17

Age of person old enough to sign a legally binding contract: 18

Percentage of book completed at the time of the deal: 34, approximately

Dollars in advance: almost 500,000

Average dollars in first-time fiction advance: 15,000, maybe.

Number of William Morris agents involved: at least 4

Figures in Dreamworks deal: 6, at least

People involved in "packaging" book at 17th Street/Alloy Entertainment: uncounted.

Alloy Entertainment average percentage of advance: 30-50

Agent's percentage: 15-20

Kaavya's actual advance in dollars: 150,000 to 275,000

Date of deal: February 2005

Print run (number of books printed): 100,000

Copies shipped to bookstores: 55,000

Copies sold: 15,000 or less

Date of scandal: April 2006

Number of passages that are reportedly plagarized: 40 (some say 50)

Number of sources of plagiarism: at least 4

Publisher's loss, in dollars: 485,000 + publicity outlay, recall costs, productions costs, value of publishing reputation, smear on publishing as a whole)

Alloy's gain, in dollars: 150,000 to 250,000 (minus value of souls sold to Lucifer & Co.,)

Book deal Kaavya has now: 0

Film deal Kaavya has now: 0

Years of school she has left at Harvard: 3

Kaavya's current age: 19

Years left to live with this: 60-70, approximately.

Ebay average price for hardcover copy of discontinued book: $30.00

Number of people who have asked my dad about his daughter, Kaavya: 4

Number of people who have said to him that "She looks just like you": 2

Number of times my father wanted to say "My daughter, who goes to Harvard...": innumerable

Amount of money that I would have to be paid to make up for never be taken seriously as a writer: 7 figures, at least, and the promise that I could write privately.

Privilege of having a future as an author: priceless.

Our Very Own Rico Suave

2006-04-26T21:30:00.000-04:00

Many thanks to mediabistro and tiffinbox for linking the yesterday's Kaavya Viswanathan post to their sites. My readers will be satisfied to know that, despite urging from some quarters, I do not intend to see my ridiculous connection to a teenage plagiarist to the logical pr conclusion: that is, mention from gawker.com, article in trendy 'zine, artful pose in fashion magazine, book deal, high-profile boyfriend, Page Six mention, major network tv appearance, catfight, diva attitude, lawsuit, reality show, talk show, hell. Unless, of course, Kaavya starts doing any more of that shit, in which case we'll have to just throw down. She may be rich and overachieving but I'm older and ornery and I fight dirty.

Meanwhile, does anyone else feel that we are just not paying enough attention to Vikram Chatwal. Who is he, you ask? This 30-something Sikh billionaire graduated from Wharton and is ostensibly an executive in his father's empire and some sort of creative consultant (don't ask celebrity photographer Dave LaChappelle about it), but what he's mostly known as is the "turban cowboy," known for partying with Gisele and Leo (he has a "G" on his arm), crisscrossing through every velvet rope between here and Kolkata and Mumbai, but not Chennai, baby, that's a little too lower east side for him. This character has been nightclubbing his way into my party-going unconsciousness; he travels in a pack, usually all indian guys, and is supposed to be the messiah of the new Cool Indian American Party Animal. Think Paris Hilton with facial hair and a turban. And a shirt open to the hairy navel.

Well, I say, let's keep him around. Wherever he goes, unintentional comedy ensues. For example, I urge you to check out the hilarious New York magazine article about his wedding. (Yes, it happened over a month ago, but what do you want from me? I've been in a publishing-induced coma). It's hard to point out the particularly fine moments of mirth--Vikram's Svengali father pushing a "nice" Indian socialite (with flat abs, natch) at his still-partying son, or a reference to the aimless Dustin Hoffman, lost in his own rites of passage, in The Graduate. The wedding apparently out Bollywood's Bollywood, which means there wasn't an elephant or dance choreographer in all of India that wasn't involved in the preparations. So all of you who get your jollies reading about exotic Indian marathon--er, weddings--will like that as well.

I was hooked up for a "job" for Vikram Chatwal back in 1996--to do a "treatment" for a movie about a Sikh hero. I use quotes because that's what he told me--even though he had no idea what those words meant. What the turban cowboy wanted from me was a full screenplay, for under a thousand dollars. I delivered a treatment, as promised.

Six months of phone calls later, he still hadn't paid me. So, naturally, not knowing his father's supernatural powers or Vikram's own innate star quality, I fired up my relic fax machine and faxed his father a letter threatening to sue. As my attorney, I put Nolan Ryan. I had meant to put Nolan Jackson, my father's boss, but for some reason, no one at Chatwal HQ seemed to recognize the famous baseball pitcher's name. Apparently he wasn't going to the right clubs.

This resulted in a phone call from Vikram in ten minutes. After much legal threatening both ways, I realized that the idiot truly expected me to write a full screenplay around the legend of Guru Gobind Singh (a screenplay-for-hire, with battle scenes, is rarely under $20,000. Rarely) and, instead of dealing with it, just hoped I'd go away. But the man clearly knew that hell hath no fury like some impoverished Indian girl, so he finally relented, saying that a driver would come over with a payment within the week. But he didn't. I called. Vikram blamed the driver. I gave him my address again, and waited. Nothing. I arranged to pick it up at one of the many glorious Chatwal restaurants. No check.

About two weeks after that phone call, I walked over to the lobby of some hotel and got my check. Apparently, all the FOB drivers (his term, not mine) were getting lost on the way to the West Village. The check was made out from a checking account by the name of Sant Chatwal. His dad.

I was angry then, but I'm elated to have him around now. Now Indians can celebrate their very own celebutante, watching him party around and try to be taken seriously as an entrepreneur and artist while his wife pursues her "acting" career, decorates the houses, pops the kids (keep those abs, honey!) and pretends not to notice. My verdict of the guy? I found him boring. Couldn't finish a sentence. None of that "deep spiritual calm" that Deepak Chopra claimed was in his soul. Maybe hungover, but still, no excuse.

But the restaurant served a mean salmon, and the Dream Hotel has a great bar. And Vikram? I predict big things for him. I predict...coverage in non-New York publications. Coverage in non-Indian publications. Coverage in national media...perhaps, dare we say it, US Weekly? In Touch? People? Maybe...now I'm just grasping here...a reality show? Other than MTV Cribs??

One can only hope. I rejoice in the stupidity of all people, but I celebrate it most when it comes in the form of a flashy, cheap Sikh guy who tried to stiff me.

A Viswanathan By Any Other Name

2006-04-25T13:17:00.000-04:00

It's been a month since my last post--I've been treating writing very gingerly, saving it all up for revisions of The Devil Inside Her. (What? Not done, you ask? I'll save that for another post).

What has gotten me motivated to write is yet another publishing scandal, a teen-chick-lit Indian-American coming of age thing. God knows it's a hot market, but does any unknown first time Indian-American author deserve half a million dollars for two books?

That's what Kaavya Viswanathan got from Little, Brown & Company almost exactly one year ago. Her $500,000 advance for two teen novels got the national media's attention for many reasons. First, it's unheard of that a first-time novelist get that kind of advance. It happens, rarely, spectacularly, and the publisher almost never earns it back.

Second, Kaavya Viswanathan, at the time of her deal, was a 17-year old Indian-American girl from New Jersey, about to go to Harvard to become (god help us) an investment banker. Big money for young novelists rarely pays off--and by young, I mean teenage. Even if they go slutty and make Page Six, like Bad Girl by Abigail Vona, they rarely make back a big advance, mostly because very few 17-year olds know anything about the craft of putting a novel together, and the writing usually sucks. But Kaavya Viswanathan's first book, with its unwieldy cutesy title of "How How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got In, was different. It supposedly was well-written, well-plotted, and just tailor-made for the millions of Indian-American teenage girls looking for someone to identify with. A...role model, perhaps? This was all big news, a nation-wide story, but it got my attention a different reason.

You see, the twit has my last name.

Yes, the first Viswanathan with a ridiculous fiction book advance is not a struggling lawyerwriter, but an Ivy League overachiever who got her book published through an Ivy League admissions consultant who knew the right people. Viswanathan is actually a common South Indian name--I know at least six Viswanathans myself--but this is the first Viswanathan who has made an ass out of herself in my profession.

And not through hard work, either I'm not against college consulting--I do it myself--but when a respected, flashy, high profile agent like Suzanne Gluck gets involved, you know the big bucks are about clout, not manuscript. The actual agent is someone else, but the mere fact that William Morris took on a 17-year old author put this deal on another level. This was a handshake-behind closed doors deal, with everybody's eye on the almighty, oh-so-literary, South Asian teen market. Nobody was talking about the writing.

(Anyway, folks, this is the way to get a literary agent. Connections. Stop sending slush out now and start inviting people out to drinks. I'm not kidding).

So little Kaavya gets all sorts of attention, from the Harvard Crimson, to Dreamworks pictures, already envisioning another Bend It Like Beckham, only more American. The book is published, gets decent reviews, is put on a co-op tables--the tables in front of the bookstore--and does fine. For the record, I found the story familiar, to the point of cliche. But then again, I hate teen lit.

Since young Kaavya and I write for very different markets, I wish her no ill will, except she says the most ridiculous post-adolesence nonsense, and they keep quoting her as Ms. Viswanathan: (Example: "Opal Mehta has no sense of fashion. But I love shopping. I take pride in my collection of high heels and short skirts." Listen, you my lightheaded auteuress, I was Ms. Viswanathan before you learned your cursive lettering, and I will be a Viswanathan long after your arranged marriage takes place).

And then writer--an adult--named Mega McCafferty reads the book and realizes that it has HUGE similarities to two of her books (the unfortunately titled Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings). Estimates are that 30-40 passages from Kaavya's book are virtually identical to McCafferty's work. She, in the all-American tradition of a legal suit, alleges that Kaavya, in the all-Bollywood tradition of lifting plots off of American movies, neglected to write her own work and instead ripped off an existing Western novel. In fact, she just colored the characters brown. That's the part that annoys me the most--the sheer lazy cliche of it all.

So today she has admitted the following carefully public-relationed statement:

"Recently, I was very surprised and upset to learn that there are similarities between some passages in my novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, and passages in these books. While the central stories of my book and hers are completely different, I wasn't aware of how much I may have internalized Ms. McCafferty's words. I am a huge fan of her work and can honestly say that any phrasing similarities between her works and mine were completely unintentional and unconscious. My publisher and I plan to revise my novel for future printings to eliminate any inappropriate similarities." More here.

Lovely, darling. All this is code for "you got caught." But before we gather the lynch mob, let's not lose our heads.

A teenage writer of any color, gender or nationality is a sponge. I remember absorbing Jackie Collins and Jack Kerouac, Nabokov and Katherine Chopin, Raymond Chandler and John Grisham indiscriminately, along regular doses J.D. Salinger, Isak Dinesen and Agatha Christie. That's what you're supposed to do in your teenage years--write like all your idols until suddenly it changes, becomes your own voice. These writings are meant for private notebooks, self-indulgent book clubs, and girl-bonding sleepovers. These are NOT meant for publication in trade paperback. Those who walk around saying "this girl has no conscience" should probably take a deep look at what they would have done for half a million dollars when they were 17. This girl was told she was a great writer, worth more than twenty put together, better than all the adults she knew. She was given a ridiculous sum of money for her private scribblings, cobbled from fantasies created from her favorite books. If they were unknown books--so much the better. Is it wrong? Of course. Should she have known it? Absolutely. Do teens like to cheat? Without a doubt.

By the time I graduated college, I had indulged, at least once in all sorts of vices, from minor league drug abuse to dating bad boys to smoking a pack of cigarettes a day to cheating on pop quizzes. It was easy. More importantly, it was fun. There wasn't material enough to hold my attention, and I liked to see what I got away with. No adults encouraged me. No one told me to go further. No one gave me money. Eventually, all my efforts at bad behavior--the rebelling, the conning, the living-by-the-skin-of-my-teeth--seemed pointless. So, like every other rebellious teen, I grew up.

And that's when I became a writer. Because in between the smoking and the hangovers, I learned the craft of writing. I had to read authors I hated, and learned to enjoy their quirkiness. I fell in love with literary criticism. I had a lot of poorly formed opinions that I was forced to back up. I had to write, and rewrite, and be judged, constantly. For my senior thesis I wrote an unfinished gothic novel. My grading professor said it was more like Jane Austen than anything he'd ever seen. That went to my head pretty quickly, but that wasn't enough for me to send it to publishers. I knew better. I knew what really good, really publishable, really classic writing was supposed to be, and I didn't want my words to be judged any less.

So this is How Kaavya Got Published, and Got Caught. But who cares? The only child of two doctors, with access to private Ivy League consultants and a Harvard business degree awaiting, she can put the money in the bank and toddle off. Because she's underage when she wrote the book, it'll be pretty hard to sue her for libel or slander. Only the truly vengeful--or, alternatively, Ms. McCafferty--should care enough to do so. As for the editors/agents/adults? Indian journalist Nilanja (yes, that sounds like my name too) S. Roy notes in The Business Standard that "Kaavya’s editors were comfortable admitting that Opal Mehta needed more work and more “inputs” than most manuscripts, though they gave her credit for an “original” idea" and that the public "did have a fair idea of the many processes that went into the manufacture of this book, complete with the advance, the hype, the deal."

The truth is, this is solely at the feet of the publishing industry, thinking that writing is some sort of game that anyone can play, if they get enough high-powered advance press on their side. Writing, even in this age of publishing, should be for writers--trained, experienced, accomplished writers who understand the business of publishing. (I hope to be one). Throwing a half million dollars at a kid with only her own judgement to guide her is irresponsible, offensive to those who work at our craft, and just plain dumb in terms of business. Kaavya's agent agrees with me 100% arguing--in her defense no less, that "teenagers tend to adopt each other's language" and "as a former teenager myself, I recall that spongelike ability to take popular culture and incorporate it into your own lexicon." Great. I applaud your emphathy, baby, but why are you paying a book packager to "massage" the plot? Why encourage a clever, ambitious, apparent highly absorbent teenager to work with a company, only to come out with a ripoff she could have done herself in her sleep? She's seventeen--you can't even sue her! You don't trust her to walk into a bar to drink or vote for the President--but a six figure advance for a fiction novel when you know that "teenagers adopt each other's language?" Sure. And you'll get exactly what you deserve.

Maybe Kaavya will write another book in a decade or so, but I can't see how she would dare. Still, a good book is a good book, so if she can grow and evolve enough to write one, more power to her. I don't hold grudges when it comes to good writing. We (fellow authors) were all jealous of her advance--admit it, you phonies--and now she has some schadenfraude to deal with.

Just one word of caution to the young authoress: if you do write another book, change your last name. Viswanathan is taken.

The "Hole of Kolkata" Just Doesn't Sound Right

2006-03-19T15:38:00.000-05:00

I have been corresponding with one of my favorite artists, Madame Talbot, about our mutual interest in Victoriana. I have always been fascinated with Victorian culture beyond the usual Indian tendency towards anglophilia. Now, of course, the tide has turned, and as Bombay becomes Mumbai and Madras becomes Chennai, I find myself out of the mainstream once again.

It started with stories of Sherlock Holmes, mixed with a steady dose of Louisa May Alcott and the wonderful Maud Hart Louvelace, whose Betsy-Tacy series forever solidified my view of what the world was like. Betsy and Tacy were two small girls growing up in turn-of-century Minnesota. Because the town was heavily German, the girls' third friend, Tib, said things like "Ach" and "liebchein." Theodore Roosevelt was the best president; the pompadour was in style; everyone was just converting from gas to electricity. Living in my own head as always, I was sure that this was how things still were, somewhere. Over the years, it continued with the stories of Edgar Allen Poe and the plays of Oscar Wilde, with their sardonic dark wit. When I was nine I cherished our library's copy of the 1901 Sears Catalog; I dreamed of getting a brand new gramaphone for only $2. Over the years, my interest spread: Rudyard Kipling, accounts of Egyptology expeditions, opium dens, the British Raj era, gothic novels, Harry Houdini, courtesans and dance halls and steamship trunks plastered with labels from the Golden Age of travel. I hated the writing style of Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, but I have never forgotten their stories--the Moonstone, and an India that was still revered by my grandfather a century later.

I don't deny the British oppression of India, and that we are still recovering from our injustices. But I still find the era fascinating. Much has been written about how the British affected India in the 19th century, but little has been written about how India affected the British. As I studied the era, the casual racism and its implications became unavoidable. This was not an era that I would have been happier in. I would have been in the third class compartment, if I was lucky enough to get on the train at all.

And yet, I am interested. The Indian, the coolie, as the Other--the exotic, dark other, bringing a whole new face to the Victorian underground. Myths of Kali cults and thugees litter Victorian novels. Darker Victorian literature references the Kama Sutra in lurid terms. Bombay was considered the most gothic city in the world, with exquisite Victorian architecture. While the Indian people themselves were oppressed, the culture infected the British and seduced them. It was dark, yes, and unfair, but it was beautiful. By the time I was reading of Madame Blavatsky and her spiritualist movement in India and Europe, writing about Mata Hari's claim of being raised as a Hindu temple dancer and discovering what an Anglo-Indian was, I was hooked. The dark side of the British Raj was inescapably...goth.

Again. Not mainstream. I'm having a hard time finding out any information on India's effect on the popular culture of the Victorian era that's not excruciatingly scholarly. If anyone has any thoughts, they would be greatly appreciated...

They'll Never Invite Me To A Party Again

2006-03-10T19:09:00.000-05:00

I think it's time I confessed: I'm an Indian girl who doesn't get along with other other Indian girls.

Okay, that should be qualified. I happen to like and love a very select group of Indian girls, the ones I grew up with. To a certain extent, I'm still the oddball of the group--not just for leaving Northern California for so long, but because it was inevitable that I would be the expatriat, always feeling like a little bit of an outsider. I'm a compulsive writer, and all compulsive writers become expatriates, to a certain extent. We have to step outside to look in.

But however much I'm out of touch with these girls, I don't really question their loyalty. They're not catty or competitive. There's not a mean bone among them. I've never experienced such loyalty, such solidarity in the face of the worst life deals out: death, heartbreak, scandal. I really don't care if we don't listen to the same music (although their allegiance to J.Lo is really getting out of hand) these girls, along with a few select boys, are family.

So those Indian girls, naturally, don't count. But outside of them, I can honestly say, I don't really seem to get along with Indian girls as a awhole. I get thrown out of their parties or snubbed at the door or accused of flirting with their boyfriends. And admittedly, I am the one who shows up with six people or bottles of cheap vodka, but I am NOT flirting with their boyfriends, who tend to be preppie investment banker types with a permanent leer in their eyes. Around most Indian girls, I always end up feeling that I'm talking too loudly, laughing too much, viewed as an ungainly combination of tomboy and slut. I have felt like this at Indian social mixers and bhangra clubs and weddings and Wall Street networking events, a sense of slow unease as I realize that, except for the person who brought me here, I would once again be standing the corner, leaning on a while and trying to look cool while no one talks to me. Or, alternatively three or four suave types circling like sharks, asking me what caste I am. Smooth, fellas, real smooth.

Because, I can say without a doubt, that Indian girls are exclusionary. Even my girls, God bless them, can't always be counted on to make an effort to a newcomer (explaining inside jokes, asking questions, including in conversation), but at least I can count on seeing new faces and no judgments. In other areas, I've gotten the cold shoulder and the murderous stare, and everything in between. And while they all brag about how much they like sex, they seem to have colossally bad taste in men, and while they claim to party all the time, the buzz seems to begin and end with a few beers. Nobody walks the walk, but they sure can talk.

The Indian girls I have liked and known, I have usually met individually, not in packs. There was V. who I lived with, with the 30's pencil thin eyebrows and 0% body fat, her friend T. jolly, openly, happily slutty. Both dated only black men. N. who I met recently, is the first in a long time to radiate smartness without snobbery, something that always leaves me cold. Another thing I like: experience. An Indian girl with a taste for adventure experiences as much as she can, something an acting teacher told me, in a private meeting. She could tell that I had lived my life in a bubble. It's been thirteen years, and I've done everything I can to step out of the bubble, to experience the good and bad things life offers to an Indian girl. I'm not interested in meeting people with too many rules and hypocrisies, whether they're Indian girls or not. But they usually are.

Midnight Ramblings

2006-03-07T01:36:00.000-05:00

Yes, I watched the Oscars, mostly to see my man George win. But what was with all those neutral colored dresses? blond hair, blond dress, blond lipstick--ladies please. Kudos to Michelle Williams, Salma Hayek and Keira Knightley for looking, well, hot. As for Crash over Brokeback, I have no opinion, having seen neither, but now that "It's Ain't Easy To Be A Pimp" is now an Oscar winner, I can forgive the oversight of Coolio's Gangsta's paradise in 1995.

Laren S. read from The Bohemian Manifesto tonight, always a pleasure to see her read, as she looks both glamourous and demure. She and her husband recently adopted a ferret, who I love more than words can say. When I was a lawyer I dreamed of spending my nights at literary readings; now it seems I go to one every other night. Rooms of tipsy, drunken writers and stressed out editors--I think I need a vacation.

Toying with article ideas...Lessons from agorophobic lawyerwriters? Haunted houses in the bayou? An article for the chronicle of higher education about why law schools fail their students? why rock music should be taught in high schools?

Too sleepy to deconstruct my brainstorms...

Rock On

2006-02-28T21:04:00.000-05:00

Everybody drills into you the importance of watching the news, reading the newspaper, scouring blogs, being informed, aware, blah blah blah. I've grown up thinking this is important, and am always baffled by people who avoid the news because it's "too depressing." Of course it's depressing, we live in depressing times, but it's a matter of responsibility. If you don't know what's going on, you don't get to complain about it. And right now, complaining is very important. Everything in the news sucks, especially politics. I've found that I get my news online and can't stand to watch it on television--except for the Daily Show. My information sources are blogs and Comedy Central, but that's fine, since you can't really understand current culture without watching comedy, particularly television comedy--if you don't know Dave Chapelle or Ego Trip, you don't know race relations, if you don't watch the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, you don't see the full picture of American politics or broadcast journalism. Eddie Izzard has his own special class of relevance--he's relevant because he's said so, and it works. Nothing is real until it becomes a Simpsons reference; the South Park paper dolls are still dirty, still sensible. Every joke is taken to its logical extreme on American Dad and Family Guy; Bernie Mac is as close as you can get to an heir to Bill Cosby. And, if he gets the movie he deserves, Chris Rock will win an Oscar in the next decade. Everything I learned about feminism and female friendship I learned from I Love Lucy and Absolutely Fabulous. Everything about New York I learned from Seinfeld. No other comedy dissected our foibles quite so neatly, putting them all on hilarious display. And for those who like gross-out and the extreme, the vomit gags and masturbation jokes, there's Drawn Together. I feel really bad for having seen more than one episode of those show, but not as bad as I should. At least there are always people out there pushing the boundaries of good taste. I would worry if there weren't any.

Television comedy is what rock music used to be, the only remaining ource of rebellion and refuge for the otherwise thoroughly defeated American leftie. And even it is not invulnerable--I really think the neocons conspired to get Arrested Development canceled. It was the only show with consistently incisive, consistently, corrosively funny running jokes about Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi War, American "peacekeeping" and Abu Gahraib. Stop laughing at me for a minute and just think about it. There is no other way to explain why that show is no longer on the air.

So sue me if I read the news and the only newstory on Yahoo news I follow up on is about the giant squid going up on display in London's Natural History Museum. I've been fascinated with the giant squid forever, although they've found a colossal squid that's even bigger, since I saw it wrestling with the sperm whatle in the Submarine Ride at Disneyland. Twenty-five feet long is scary enough, I mistakenly thought the eyeball was three feet in diameter, and spent my adolescence having surreal dream-mares about a giant eye floating outside my window. This is either Freudian, Hitchcockian or Dali-nese, I'm not sure which. But it does make me want to go see the exhibit, even though I don't like dead animals and it will probably give me more day-mares.

Lots of Literati

2006-02-27T19:02:00.000-05:00

Having finally finished the rewrite of Wicked Women, I have been going out a lot. And it's all been very literary--lots of writers, would be writers, former writers. Friday was spent in the company of Opium Magazine, headed by one T. Zuniga, offering literary humor for the deliriously captivated. Don't ask Todd what this means; he'll just tell you it looks good on the sign. The writers of Opium are rowdy and delirious, and generally captivating, so maybe that's a clue. We ended up where First meets First, the true center of the universe, where I had yet another uncomfortable encounter with someone I always have uncomfortable encounters with. I really, don't know why this happens; it's based on nothing and is very Seinfeld. Does he hate me? Does he think I hate him? Why can't we just do small talk, like normal acquaintances?

Saturday was spent in plummeting temperatures with the pop culture savants of Entertainment Weekly, where I learned much about the various parts of the magazine. Though they offered apologies for that later, I actually found it all very interesting.

Upcoming literati events include another of George Whipple's literary salons, as well as a lively debate between Norman Mailer and his son John Buffalo Mailer at the New York Center of Ethical Culture. This is highly recommended as they have just written a book together entitled The Big Empty: A Dialogue on Politics,Sex, God, Boxing, Morality, Myth, Poker and Bad Conscience in America. Mailer Pere is known for his bluntness, and I can vouch that Buffalo is likewise not shy about his opinions, so it should be a fun event...for those of you in NYC this Thursday, click for details here.

Can Indians be Goths?

2006-02-22T17:27:00.000-05:00

This is a question that I have pondered since high school. I didn't go for the seriously Goth-y music--nothing crazier than Nine Inch Nails and no thanks to Manson--but everything else (books, movies, stories, fashion) I loved. Of course, being brown, it's hard to go fair and I was never one for white makeup or anything that would ruin my skin. I consider myself more of a fashionable goth--perhaps even a corporate goth, if you will.

Think I'm the only one? Think again. At CorporateGoth.com, goths who work in the corporate world discuss how they individualize their outfits in even the most fascistly fashion-less world. I would love to see the fashion tips get more attention, so all you corporate or Indian goths out there, check out the site and post.

Goth culture is so endlessly fascinating...it's no wonder that teenagers love it...

Great Moments in Movie Sex

2006-02-20T18:57:00.000-05:00

A very pleasant day spent wandering around the city. I am days away from finishing Wicked Women, and I have no other book idea in sight. Can I take a break from publishing? It's so...addictive.

Prowling around in the Columbus Circle Mall made me want to shoplift badly. Street Law taught me to look for holes in security and it's not too hard to figure out. But if I were to shoplift, it would have to be something big, a la Winona Ryder. Only I'd plan it much better. And wear a better outfit--something between Audrey Hepburn in How to Steal a Million and Angelina Jolie in Gone in 60 Seconds.

Have been walking around with stringy goth hair. Blue hair, okay, but stringy blue hair--I can't make it work. I've seen at least five men in the last weekend who have better hair cuts than I do.

What does all this mean? I am still trying to unravel it. In the meantime, go read my article on Great Movie Sex . My valentine to my one true love: le cinema.

Comfort Zone

2006-02-09T19:51:00.001-05:00

Looking around my room now, it's clear that an agorophobic lives here. But for me, agorophobia is more a form of laziness; I have never outgrown dorm years where everything circled outside my door. I love Brooklyn, but go there barely twice a month; these days just leaving Hell's Kitchen is a challenge. I've gone through periods like this before, and I think they're inherently part of being a writer--and inherently responsible for some very over decorated bedroooms. Seriously, it's starting to resemble a teenager's room, with posters and scribblings and Christmas lights. Even I'm starting to feel it's becoming a little...theatrical...

Because that's all I seem to be doing now--nesting, redecorating, rearranging. The challenge is to do it without spending any money, a challenge that I'm finding incredibly irritating in my thirties and as my tastes get more expensive. In between nesting, I write articles I've promised people, I edit Wicked Women, I go to the gym and I walk dogs. The gym is in my building; the dogs are on my block. I leave only on weekends, and am starting to feel like those old ladies with small dogs. In fact, I think I'm starting to overdress just like them, only instead of wearing a head-to-toe lavender Chanel and walking a King Charles Spaniel, I'm in head-to-toe black H&M and walking a finicky Daschund. It's all a little terrifying.

I do have a life on weekends, when I get blind drunk with my girlfriends at literary readings and flirt with shamefully with very talented authors. But for the most part, the internet and the phone and television connect me to the world outside my high-rise. And within the high-rise there are friendly, gossipy doormen and a fair number of good-looking yuppies for me to have half-hearted crushes on. There's neighbor's mail to be collected and bonding to be done in the gym, cats to feed, and endless, endless, endless laundry, and lots of dogs and babies to fuss over. I have created a miniature Manhattan, all at one address, 52 stories high.

I'm not sure that's particularly healthy, but what writer is?

Frey Sadism

2006-02-01T02:05:00.000-05:00

I admit it. I never watch Oprah, but I TiVo'd the episode with her and James Frey. And watch it repeatedly. A Million Little Pieces was a self-indulgent grab-bag of macho posturing and misinformation, with breathtakingly bad grammar. The guy posed like a badass all over town, bragging about how he managed to quick his multi-narcotic and alcohol addiction through sheer will rather than wussy self-help programs. And now, well, he's just caught.

I like watching a braggart go down, but let's get real, here. This guy went on publicity tours and was almost always well-rehearsed. Publishers don't let you breathe if they invest any money in you. And watching Nan Talese chomping smile on Oprah made me wonder--as slate.com did--how much Doubleday knew. I mean, who was going to find out? What were the odds that this little book with the cool cover was going to go anywhere? Who knew that Oprah would get involved?

They sank him, and maybe they should have, but he's probably laughing all the way to the bank. Even I picked up his book again, to re-read that ludicrous paragraph where he's semi-conscious and covered in vomit and can't figure out what plane he's on. Oprah is "protecting her brand," as homespun, generic and powerful as it is. Who's losing here? Just us. The slowly disappearing discriminating reader.

I think they--the publishers, the publicists, the journalists--knew, each on some level, and knew not to ask too many questions. My book has been repackaged as the publishers see fit, and will be marketing accordingly. But women's history and pop culture are both non-fiction. I'm not making shit up. "It was doing so much good" they cry--for god's sake then, file it in self-help. Don't tell me that it's true. Maybe that should be its own genre: Fiction, Nonfiction, Truth.

With all that said, I almost wish he got away with it--pulled the wool over the eyes of the whole industry, the world, the Oprah-ness of it all. And then, like the character in the book, or like the man himself, running off to the Bahamas stroking his royalties and whispering "My precious, my precious..."

Wish I thought of it first...without getting caught.

To #1 Single from #2 Single

2006-01-30T21:19:00.000-05:00

It was inevitable, and it has happened. Reality television has infected my life.

It probably has before. I'm sure I stumbled upon one of the cast members of the San Francisco Real World and I have a hazy memory of seeing Lisa Loeb in concert. Lisa Loeb? Reality television? Surely you jest...sold out, si? But no, there she is, the sta of E! Entertainment Television's #1 Single, in which the icon of cute girly geek chic has her a show about her dating life, or lack thereof. Of course, the show hits on every stereotype imaginable (chastisement by a rabbi's family for being 37, advise from a very Jewish mom, half-naked Mizrahi moment). I still like Loeb, who looks really hot and really clever for her age. Finally, it's a reality show that you don't feel utterly stupid watching. After all, I can relate to a thirty-something Jewish girl's dating problems in New York.

On the second episode, Lisa goes on a blind date on an airplane ride from Los Angeles to New York. That is true commitment to finding a mate. I want to sit next to no one on my plane rides, and then no one again, so I can have three seats to stretch out in, a pharmaceutically or spiritually induced slumber until we land. However, Lisa sits next to Allen S., a writer and author of Festivus: A Holiday for the Rest of Us. Allen S. was also my writing teacher back in 2002; we have kept in intermittent touch over the years. I was surprised to see him on a reality dating show--not entirely surprised, since he's very good at self-promotion and Lisa Loeb seems like his type.

So, on last night's episode Lisa and Allen seem to be getting along until she sees a Page Six gossip excerpt about Alan's book party and the fact that Allen and Lisa are an "item" after what looks like two dates. Allen says he had nothing to do with it, and then admits he gave a quote about the book signing because the gossip was a done deal. Lisa looks wounded and a song about broken promises plays. Allen looks like a shameless parasite hoping to capitalize on poor Ms. Loeb's celebrity for his book.

Now, I am dying of curiosity about how Allen feels about his portrayal--and, how much of it is editing, or even scripted. The mind boggles with theories. I remember a writing class when the mysterious girlfriend stayed in the downstairs bedroom the whole time. Allen wrote for the New York Post for years, which could enable him to plant the gossip, or ask that it be planted. Was Lisa really mad, which is surprising for a woman going on a reality show about her lovelife. The Festivus book signing was a zoo--my roommate and I went and I distinctly remember seeing reality television-worthy lights there. Allen sold all his books--not in part thanks to the presence of Frank and Esther Costanza--or, as they are more commonly known, Jerry Stiller and his wife Anne Meara. It is very hard to sell all your books and get that much press for a book signing--how much of it was due to the Page Six gossip which Ms. Loeb seemed so betrayed by? Or was it all a massive publicity stunt? Tell us, Allen, please.

Fascinating. We'll see if Allen is in the next episode.

Can We Trust Lawyerwriter?

2006-01-26T19:05:00.000-05:00

This is a legitimate question. Can lawyerwriter be trusted to continue as a blog?

When I first started to blog, it really wasn't about building an audience. I just liked writing and instantly publishing.

For the last few months I have loathed writing and publishing. But I'm coming out of that now. So maybe this blog can be trusted.

Here are some answers to some of your other questions, as I imagine them.

1. Why did you hate writing and publishing?

Alas, some things are personal.

2. What the hell is this blog about?

No one knows. It just appeared on the internet like a funky smell, and refuses to go away. The comment section now attracts spam like flies. And yet, I run into people all the time who tell me "I read your blog every day." So the topics must be touching some audience--other people like me.

3. Who the hell are you?

I am a lawyer who does not practice but thinks of practicing (part-time, anyway) and a writer is loves writing, but doesn't want to do it for a living. Essentially, I am a very poor person with a vivid imagination.

4. Can't we have some idea of what to expect if we, say, want to be distracted for that last five minutes before we go home?

These are the topics I'm interested in: being a writer, the whole law school/lawyer phenomenon, the mythic quality of celebrity gossip (particularly anything about Brangelina), being a dog walker, being a freelancer, what band I saw last night, angry ventings of real-life situations that are hopefully readable, being Indian-American, being from Northern California, living in New York City, sketching out chapters of upcoming books, the worlds of publishing, journalism and, oddly, anything about management techniques, poverty of the artistic, and, embarassingly, reality television. Seriously.

Dpes this make sense? (No.) Will this get me a regular audience? (No.) Shouldn't I have advertisements on the side of the screen somewhere? (Yes). Isn't the lack of topic and consistency just a part of your total self-absorption? (Yes.) Can you even justify this blog at all? (Yes. It gets me writing everyday). How accurate are your descriptions of your night out? (I have been known to omit details, like stuff about my lovelife. Don't worry, you're not missing much.)

5. Can't you spellcheck?

You know, I really am THAT lazy. So, no.

6. How about some more images on the blog?

Again, really--that lazy. If you see any pictures, it will probably involve Angelina Jolie. I'm obsessed with her--but, you know, in a spiritual, personal way.

7. How old is that picture?
Last year. My hair is longer now.

8. Isn't the fact that you were recently published in Cat Fancy magazine the first sign that you are not normal about your cats?

Well, technically, I am not normal about animals. I love them wholeheartedly, without reservation, which is the only reason I can forgoe chicken tikka masala, grilled salmon and Big Macs to be a vegetarian. But the article was easy, paid decently, and I liked the fact that I could do something for cat-kind, as they have done plenty for me. (I do recognize that this is still more extreme than some people, and no, it really doesn't make a difference to me if the rest of human-kind is vegetarian or not. I just which we were smarter and more considerate about it).

9. How's freelancing?

It bites. That's why I'm looking for a part-time job. As a writer, I charge $50 an hour. That rate goes up or down depending on the level of my desperation, but I have to at least make half that. Keep me posted if you hear anything.

10. Can we count on a new lawyerwriter entry every day?

I'm aiming for daily. Bear with me while I get my groove back. It's really nice to know that people out there like the blog and my writing. It is back, I promise.

I'll leave the rest of the questions for you. Fire away!

Does Brangelina Matter?

2005-12-26T13:48:00.000-05:00

It's an interesting topic, and Brangelina is a good example of how celebrities do matter, but not in the way you think. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are just actors and celebrities; they only matter to film fans and whoever buys In Touch magazine. But, Brangelina, the phenomenon, does matter.

Perusing the blogs for an article I'm writing for a friend's magazine, it's amazing how violently Jen and Angelina fans clash. There are derogatory nicknames--Whorelina, Maniston, Jennifug--but very little about Brad. Indeed, who cares about Brad? He's just the prize. There are Team Aniston and Team Jolie shirts, polls of who looked prettier as a teenager, and some unbelievably catty and cruel remarks directed at Jennifer for being high-maintenance, attention-seeking and bitchy and Angelina for being dark, a man-stealer, a fake-U.N. worker.

Other celebrity gossip--Tom-and-Katie, Jude and Sienna, who's the next Bond girl--pales in comparison to Brangelina. Why? Because celebrity gossip has replaced our civilizations age-old storytelling tradition. Not novels or books, but the popular folk tales and stories we tell each other. I don't know any of these people, and I'm not sure I care too--actors are a little too self-involved for my taste. And experience has taught me that even close friends often have no clues as to what breaks a couple up or keeps them together. So how on earth can US Weekly, The Superficial Blog or assorted posters have a clue? We don't, and frankly, we don't care about the truth of Hollywood. We use these characters in the Brangelina triangle to work out our own feelings about women, and which we prefer--good girls who make poor wives, or bad girls who take whatever they want.

In the early 1990's, Camille Paglia wrote an essay that had a huge influence on me. She wrote about being a high schooler and avidly following the Elizabeth Taylor-Eddie Fisher-Debbie Reynolds break up. For those of you not schooled in Hollywood lore, it went something like this: Widowed Liz Taylor was being taken care of by her good friend Debbie, who had just given birth and was featured in magazines as the good little wife and mother. Unfortunately, her husband, crooner Eddie, fell for Liz, and they ran off together to get married. Liz was villified as a whore and even condemned by the Pope for her poor morals. Eventually, Liz and the rest of civilization dumped Eddie into the sidelines when Richard Burton came along. Decades later, Liz and Debbie starred in a TV movie that made fun of the whole incident. Even Eddie's daughter, Carrie Fisher, doesn't speak to him.

Paglia writes about her obsession with Liz Taylor in typical grandiose terms, but essentially, her fascination with Liz is the fascination with uncontrolled sexuality, a woman of unbelievable exotic beauty and grand liquid passions who could not play by anyone else's rules. For Paglia, she was an unrestrained force, and an antidote to the cotton-candy heroines of the 1950's--not just Debbie Reynolds, but Shirley Maclaine and Doris Days, the manufactured domesticated blond actresses of the late 50's and early 60's. To root for Liz was to root for a force of pure beauty.

Paglia briefly noted how she roots for Angelina in the same way, but she hasn't really grasped the importance of Brangelina. While Eddie Fisher was just some teen idol, Brad Pitt is Mr. Hollywood. You don't have to have the hots for him to know that. He is a well-respected actor who has been the top of his game for a long time, and generally considered the Apollo of the movie industry. If he never works again, or keeps dying his hair black, he will still be Hollywood's Golden Boy. In short, he is the Grand Prize for any woman, and while good girl Aniston had him for years, bad girl Jolie took him away. And for anyone who has felt outside the norm, the mainstream, ignored by normal folks, classified as bad or unruly, generally considered a troublemaker--this is good news. Thank God for Jolie.

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Do I care about the details? No. I only know the stories spun for me by the tabloids and entertainment media. Brangelina's story is becoming universal--you can go to any country and it still matters, because as much as I have nothing against Jennifer Aniston (how can I? I don't even know her), I like seeing good girls thrown for a loop--especially if they are the products of sitcom, massive public relations machinations, and overwhelming overexposure. In the spirit of folk tales and storytelling, Brangelina does matter. We, as a society, can no longer gather around the campfire and talk about the gods in the constellations, but we can talk about celebrities on the screen, and that instinct is as old as time.

Or, in fact, do celebrities matter?

Do I have a favorite? Of course. I have been as passionate about Angelina Jolie--or what I see of her--as Paglia was about Liz Taylor. Did Paglia ever meet Liz, or want to? I don't know, but I doubt it. Similarly, the real Angelina is probably far different than I imagine. But she has made female sexuality matter to the public--she does not pretend to be celibate or virginal until the public approves of her mate. She can talk about having lovers and cutting and being insane, and while this may make her a handful in a relationship, she has opened up whole avenues of dialogue that were previously closed to women in the spotlight. Plus, I'm sorry Jen, but Angelina is simply smoldering hot. She has an occult beauty and too much sexual heat to be classified normally. I don't think Brad matches her entirely, but if she wanted the king of Hollywood for herself, I doubt anything could stand in her way. As an ordinary woman, I respect that willpower, even if I would have qualms myself about acting the same way. (Or would I? I have no idea what happened). I would have felt worse for Jen if it wasn't for her blitzkrieg of interviews where she emphatically stated, many, many, many times that she is tired, oh so tired, of discussing it. Nicole Kidman, a woman with many secrets in her marriage to Tom Cruise, took the high road of silence and grace; Jennifer looks for populist pity. It's easy to feel manipulated by that.

Does Brangelina matter? To those interested in our common stories about mythical figures, yes. Does it make us shallow to care about people who will never impact us, or our families? I don't know. But I know that the instinct to dissect the stories of the famous is not an instinct new to the 21st century. We are still gathered around the campfire, trading rumors and opinions and theories about relationships that say something about ourselves. It seems foolish to get worked up about who's wrong or right, but it is fascinating to see how strongly we feel about the Brad-Jen-Angelina triangle. For those seriously obsessed with who did what to whom and why, the question is simply why is it so important to you? And the answer will vary from person to person.

One thing is clear--Angelina and Brad and Jen spend far less time thinking about us. Who do they discuss when they are gathered around a collective campfire? What constellations catch their eye? One day we will find out. Until then, I hope that the story of Brangelina continues and continues to surprise. It keeps my mind off of TomKat, anyway....

Southern Gothic

2005-12-14T17:45:00.000-05:00

The lawyerwriter's trials and tribulations with wicked, wicked women are not yet over. More editing needs to be done on the book. Unfortunately, the whole experience has left me completely drained and broke. I am starting to emerge into the normal world again, and looking for work--copywriting, corporate communications, you name it. Going back to the book is not something I'm looking forward to. Even lawyerwriters need a break.

To distract myself, I went to see C.Gibbs play at the Galleria in the Gershwin Hotel--the only hotel in New York with stained-glass horns growing from the front of the building. The galleria is bright, then dark, and C.Gibbs played in a gothic little room in the back. Whatever wasn't covered in dark mahagony paneling was covered in red velvet, and though there were a few gold chandeliers, the light was all red. C.Gibbs is hard to describe--he's honky-tonk, bluegrass, with piano and steel guitars, all played fast and loose . When I last saw C.Gibbs, his music was lost and Faulknerian--lots of songs about haunted highways and loneliness at the bottom of a glass. His latest CD Parade of Horses, though, has a lot more fire in it. He's a journeyman musician who spins both heartbreak and admiration into spooky, Southern Gothic lyrics and hell-raising tunes. I don't like country and I don't like sensitive guitar balladeers, but C.Gibbs plays like a man who's lost a bet with the devil, who drives to Vegas in a Chevy convertible with a bottle of bourbon in his lap, who's contemplated russian roulette on dark Saturday nights. Live, C.Gibbs rocks with good old-boy rowdiness. When he sang of never holding a woman sacred again, the dark room pulsed with the beats, like a red velvet heart. He reminded me that even the worst of troubles can make the best of stories.

Obsessions

2005-12-03T13:06:00.000-05:00

having finished with wicked women, the lawyer writer has many obsessions...

Talk Soup Host Joel McHale (he loves animals, sigh)...the Villain's Guide to Better Living (bedtime reading)...My Madame Talbot Fortune Teller poster...holiday parties despite my abject poverty...the Sarah Bernhardt exhibit at the Jewish Museum...Ryan Reynolds (he can SO act!)...Shadow in the Wind (also bedtime reading)...bubble baths with sandalwood bath oil...loving Angelina...hating Jennifer...watching too much Golden Girls...Camille Paglia (again)...the seven deadly sins...British rappers Ddubble Impact (you've heard them on the Verizon commercial when everyone is a the rap concert)...hunting down my favorite, no-longer made honey bronze powder...The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and The Chappelle Show (my only sources for current affairs--I can't stand the mainstream news)...thinking up cool story ideas...detoxing (within reason)...the War of Art by Steven Pressfield...thinking about cleaning my apartment...wanting more Kate Moss, more more...gothic fashion....

Devil Inside Her--Finished!

2005-11-29T23:39:00.000-05:00

Well, it's finally done--the Devil Inside Her has been delivered. And so have I.

It was grueling. The publishers reclassified it as a pop culture book, which was fine, except they had something very specific in mind. The book is now called The Devil Inside Her: The Fascinating World of History's Wicked Women. It's about how ten infamous women of history are portrayed in our pop culture, and why we still talk about them. I wanted it to be more, but there wasn't any time. But I'm really excited about this new direction--as much as I like reading history, writing it wasn't my favorite part. But contemplating wicked women like Mata Hari, Bloody Mary, and Bonnie Parker was fun. Why are we still fascinated with them? I have no idea. But I think it's directly linked to my fascination with Angelina Jolie.

So...I retraced my goth roots and have gotten a lot more into the culture, thanks to my discovery of artist Madame Talbot (www.madametalbot.com). Her posters are gorgeous; you'll see me linking them often. I still want to work on a project with her...I discovered voodoo in New Orleans, a proud, sexy, matriarchal culture that is celebrated with a good party and a stiff drink...I researched the Dragon Lady in 19th century China and the Tudor dynasty in 16th century England, and learned WAY too much about both...I reread Camille Paglia, whose energy I love even when I'm rolling my eyes at her...I found connections betweenLizzie Borden and both Marilyn Monroe and Sex and the City...I watched way too much Jon Stewart and VH1...I got a great cover, but I won't be on any bookstore tables...I researched courtesans and bohemians in Belle Epoque europe, and gangsters during the Depression...I need a haircut, a facial, a stiff drink and a break.

And I have an idea for another book.

Where Have I Been?

2005-11-19T00:00:00.000-05:00

Writing. The Devil Inside Her is due in...well, I won't say how many days, but rest assured that while you are carving Thanksgiving turkey I will be finishing up the last copy of this really interesting book which I am now sick to death of. I will try to get back in the habit of blogging (thanks to those who have reminded me), but bear with me as I type like a crazy person to get this thing DONE.

Pop Culture Might Pay My Bills

2005-10-14T18:26:00.000-04:00

So today I auditioned for a role on a new Bravo series called Dishing. David, my boss at my essay job called me and told me he'd recommended me for the part. The casting director is a good friend of his, and he recommended Ted Allen, who is on Queer Eye For the Straight Guy. So she took him pretty seriously and voila! I am auditioning to be a talk show host. I don't know anything about the show, other than it's a multi-host, gay-friendly show about entertainment, pop culture, media, etc, described as The View meets Real Time With Bill Maher meets Talk Soup. I like the last two shows, so I guess that's something.

The audition went thusly. I chatted with a very nice man about Tom and Katie ( called it the Manchurian Pregnancy, which they liked, but fumbled a joke about the fetus getting a two-picture movie deal), Daniel Craig becoming Bond (Yes! Quoted earlier post on Steve McQueen reference), chatted about the evil that is Star Jones, my embarassing addiction to my DVR, etc. Most importantly, I talked about my embarassing reality television addiction (The Surreal Life, Filthy Rich Cattle Drive, any monstrosity that cable will throw my way)...All that background noise while I'm typing might actually get me a job and pay my bills!

The audition seemed to go very quickly. Perhaps I shouldn't have worn the fishnets. Or perhaps it went quickly because time flies when I yak my head off about this stuff. But callbacks are next week.

Interestingly, this also coincides with the pop culture themes in Wicked Women. My editor and I both agree that it should be both contemporary and very pop culture-y, which is really exciting, because I was afraid she wouldn't like the pop culture part. So if I do this show and then the book comes out....(I am rubbing my hands with glee. I so rarely feel glee.) Of course, this is problematic because callbacks are next week and I'm supposed to go to California then, but we'll see....

As I've always said, television can be good for you...

Television Says My Cabdriver Can't Get Laid

2005-10-09T15:04:00.000-04:00

A word to the entertainment community: Enough already, with cowardly, dorky, sex-starved Indian men. Seriously.

I grew up with some pretty cool Indian guys--investment bankers who could discuss Moby Dick and play guitar, doctors who worked with AIDS patients, artists, musicians and dj's. I do not see these men on television. I do see cabdrivers and doctors and newstand owners and computer programmers and convenience store managers. Unlike many Indians, I do not find this inherently insulting. A lot of us ARE doctors and cabdrivers, etc. etc., and after having grown up with no Indian role models in the media (even my beloved Apu, alas, cannot be seen as a role model), I am just happy to see us represented. That's the first step in assimilating into a culture, after all. The media, always with an eye on the trend, is always the first to acknowledge and legitimize the existence of a minority; political systems are much farther behind.

Invariably, early portrayals are negative, or, at least limiting. Hence the fact that almost all Indians portrayed in the media are Indians Fresh off the Boat. This, too, is fine with me, although, thank God for that the Bend-It-Like-Beckham chick on ER. They all have accents, and most often the accent gets the laughs. Okay. I can be big about this and overlook that too.

But do they always have to be horny, frustrated, chickenshit dorks? Ajay Nadu in Office Space--funny as hell, couldn't get laid. I endured the dorky Indian sidekick in the otherwise excellent Van Wilder because I was sure he had real talent. He did. Kal Penn later played Kumar in Harold and Kumar White Castle, a brilliant stoner with enough passion to imagine making out with a giant bag of weed, and enough game to get himself laid. With Kumar, I thought we were done with the Indian nerd stereotype.

And now this new guy on my beloved show Weeds, Maulik Pancholy, playing Sanjay a....dorky science major who's goofily in love with Mary Louise Parker but runs away, yelling "Forgive me" every time she's in trouble. Weeds is such a good show because in its skewed universe, nobody--not cancer patients, ten-year olds, deaf girls, drug dealers, stoners--is predictable; nobody acts the way you'd expect them to act. Except the sexless Indian guy.

Once upon a time the drunk Mexican in the poncho was de rigueur if you were talking about Latinos. Once upon a time all laundrymen were Chinese and wore pointy hats, or talked like Charlie Chan. Once upon a time, black matrons were supposed to be plump and wear kerchiefs and raised their employer's white kids. All that is Not Acceptable in the mainstream media of today. Let's send the impotent, skinny, FOB-y Indian-American sidekick there as well.

As for the real life impotent, skinny FOB-y Indian-American sidekicks...they need some decent role models in the media so they can class up their act. More Kumars, less dorks. Then we can start give the Indian-American women some representation....

But one step at a time.

Consider This

2005-10-06T18:53:00.000-04:00

The following are well-known facts.

When considering applicants, law schools look at precisely two things: your undergraduate grades and your LSAT score. That is it. Don't fool yourself about recommendations or the essay. They just don't care. They also don't care that, oh, you did a thousand times better in your graduate school than your undergraduate college because they simply don't care that you have a graduate degree. Your LSAT score, on the other hand, better be well about 99.9% to get into a top law school.

However, when considering applicants, business schools really don't care much about your GMAT scores or undergraduate grades. The thresholds are pretty low and many, many qualified applicants pass easily. However, Harvard has a total of seven 400 word essays about your goals, leadership skills, personal life, extracurricular activities, work experience and accomplishments. No listing. You'd better tell some interesting stories. In other words, it is extremely hard to get into a top business school straight out of undergrad. They want people with work, extracurricular, and charity organization experience.

Now, what does this mean?

Clearly, the students going to business school are more adult, simply because they're older, have more work and life experience, and need to be able to prove their managerial and leadership abilities outside a school setting. In fact, they must all have some business experience as well as specific goals for their future. These people have the ability to think in complex situations, deal with people, be adults, live in the real world.

The law students, however, are uniformly unformed. Most come straight out of college. They have varied undergraduate experience which may encompass no business, government or law experience--despite the fact that the majority will work in the private sector or the government. They are required to be good at taking tests, specifically the SAT, which the LSAT strongly resembles. They are also required to have been organized and focused enough to have done academically well from the age of 18, even if that means skipping interesting courses or jobs during a time traditionally held for self-exploration. Think--tunnel vision, good at interpreting data, able to take orders and respect larger systems, no experience dealing with people. Surprisingly, however, despite the law schools' emphasis on analysis, (or, because law school does not require business, government or pre-law courses) many of these students are creative or artistic as well. This is what is known as a weakness.

Why is it this way? MBA is for leaders and entrepreneurs. Law is for traditionalists and analysts. An MBA is expansive, ambitious, big picture. Law is restrictive and drowns in minutiae. An MBA seeks to connect with others. The legal profession is essentially isolationist.

And why is this bad? Because law firms are still companies, and lawyers are managing other lawyers. Very, very badly. The ridiculous morale and dissension in law firms is because a) some creative types have been sold a book of goods on a profession that doesn't exist and find their creativity is suddenly a handicap b) lawyers have no training and no required experience managing people in a non-adversarial way, so they end up hazing, manipulating and cannibalizing each other c) the absurd amount of money thrown at 25 year "lawyers" doing intern work is to essentially buy labor rather than create cohesive community d) the lack of business and government requirements to get into law school, and the lack of law school offerings in these courses, means that a lot of untrained associates end up staring blankly at your financial documents.

Just think about it.

Rates

2005-10-05T13:37:00.000-04:00

I raised my rates a few months ago, which was an interesting choice because I actually had no work. But it was an important step in my career.

It seems counterintuitive that raising my rates would result in an overload of work, but that's exactly what happened. I'm not sure why, but deciding that my time and my work was worth more than the X dollars I had been getting for a year or so has made my writing better, and attracted better clients. Science resists this logic; it makes no sense that people would be attracted to the concept of spending more money for writing, but I think the reality is that people always get what they pay for. Now, roughly making 3x as much money as I had in the spring, I allow myself to spend more time on writing, get more creative, take more risks, deliver a better product. I feel appreciated, and therefore am a better employee.

What's funny is that none of this happened until I said "I deserve more." Oh, how Hallmark, I know, but there you have it. I come from a family of scientists; I hesitate to belief in auras or energy or luck, but something has changed in my life. I know the work I'm doing is far more interesting and intellectual, and helping people with their graduate school essays seems, well, important. To them and to me.

In the end, I think it really matters who you work for. My current employers have a high regard for my opinion, and don't constrain me. That is nice. I had figured since I was making zero dollars at X dollars an hour, nothing would change if I suddenly started charging X+Y dollars an hour. But things did change. I think people are willing to pay your rate if you really believe in what you're charging--that your time is worth X+Y dollars even if you do all your writing in a blue kimino with a cat on your lap and the E! True Hollywood Story in the background.

Ask for what you deserve, but first, find out if what you deserve is the going rate. My rates were well under what other writers charged, because I still felt guilty about getting up at 10:30 and having a glass of wine while I edited. In the end, those things don't matter; the work product did.

I can't escape the feeling that it was my attitude, rather than external factors, that kept me broke all this time. It goes against what I know about the world, but hell, I learn new things every day.

Waiting...

2005-09-28T13:12:00.000-04:00

The worst part about a new book submission is the waiting. This should come as no surprise, but what is surprising is that there is no way around the anxiety and the obsessive feeling. Each time I think I can handle it better--I'll stay busy, I'll leave my agent alone, I'll plan alternative book projects. I'll expect it this time, the anxiety and the fear and the ridiculous feeling that your whole career hangs on whether this book would be accepted.

Now, I've done a bunch of book proposals, some of which (like the one sexy films, or notorious new york hangouts) haven't sold. You always try to salvage them, send them to a new agent or a new publishing house, but the truth is that the best shot of them getting published is when you become famous for something else. I'm not sure if there are any other writers who want to write about everything, from street law to wicked women to leaving the rate race to sexy films to speakeasies--and I'm not sure what the diversity of titles says about us as writers. It's sort of a weird thing to have such varied interests.

I'm not sure I'll write about law again. I liked writing about social issues, like why drugs or prostitution should be legalized, and I liked writing about pop culture and current affairs. And I really liked the idea of distilling legalease into something that made sense to non-lawyers, because the pedastal that lawyers are put on really irritates me. Lawyers provide a service, a vital service, but there's nothing class or status or intellect-wise that's superior to the profession than any other.

Okay, none of this is any distraction from the fact that I'm probably going to have to wait a couple weeks before I get a final word on my proposal. It's a good sign when it takes a week or two, because if they get back to you fast, it means it was probably rejected before it goes before an editorial meeting. Getting a book published means the whole house or at least imprint is behind it--and that includes editorial, bookstore sales, advertising and publicity, to start. Each editor only has a certain amount of money to spend each year or each season and ou've got to prove that your book proposal is worth a percentage of that budget.

That's why writing a book proposal is such hard work. Each agent I've had has helped me refine my style, and this last proposal is probably the best, because it's not too long and I did some minor graphic design to make it look pretty. These things matter. It isn't enough to have an idea, or even good writing, anymore--you have to have a vision of how you want the final book to turn out. And you have to start conveying that vision in the book proposal--marketing, publicity, graphics, cover, everything.

I'm not much of a saleswoman in most circumstances, but selling a book idea is fun, in a tough way. You really put yourself on the line for it, and the reward is, well, being published. At first. Then dollar signs grow in your eyeballs. But unlike screenwriting, the purchase of a book means the publisher is almost definitely going to publish it. Almost. Unless your publisher is a hack who advertises on craigslist. But even then, the odds are good.

Weeks. Weeks, not days left. Ugh.

An Artist For Rat Race Rebels?

2005-09-18T18:08:00.000-04:00

This is the work of an illustrator I've always liked...as an illustrator for Rat Race Rebels? His name is Jullian Williams, and it's kind of a rebellious Wind and the Willows things...

The last one, of course, is my favorite.

Loft Party

2005-09-18T14:05:00.000-04:00

I'm not sure when the de rigueur decoration for a loft party became Fellini's Satyricon, but last night it worked. We were at a loft party in South Williamsburg, and I'm assuming the place was live/work as I did see a kitchen (near one of the stages) and a couple bathrooms (covering in tin foil). The roof was mobbed by people watching Blaxploitation flicks on the brick wall or making out near the potted plants or getting burgers from the grill. One room had a ska band; the other had latin hip hop, and still another had a dj spinning drum and bass. Once we walked into a room only to see what appeared to be cavemen (in Flintstones' type attire) doing a Jewish polka. From getting the word out (which they clearly did successfully) to the Surrealistic Kitsch decor, the whole experience was very well organized, down to the Brownies (Yes They Are...) and Chocoloate Chip Cookies (No, They're Not...) and Absinthe (disappointingly homemade rather than Czech). In every dark corner was a cave or a tent or a papier mache staircase where people disappeared into, probably to manage their acid flashbacks or chill out before taking another hit. Those corners always looked a bit sketchy to me.

The most difficult part was climbing up and down the ladders and staircases to get to the roof, which always brought to mind Jimmy Stewart staring down into an alley in Vertigo. But other than the looming threat of my clumsiness, the moon was full, the space was gorgeous and the company was perfect. There's something to be said in this day and age for an "anything goes" kind of party; if you squint or drink enough you can pretend you see Andy Warhol and Nico sitting on the couches, doing something terribly mindless and therefore terribly important. The only time it seemed forced was when a group of folks, apparently rediscovering Urban Primitivism, tried to get a Burning Man-type howl going--with an accordian. I think it worked--or, rather, I think they think it worked. It's hard to go tribal with an accordian.

You go to Rubulad to get wasted, to dance, or to hook up. It's a capital-S Scene, and you really supposed to spend your night wandering from room to room, looking for a white rabbit, or at least a chesire cat with a hookah. It's fun that way, because it feels like a good alternative to the Dimly Lit Lounge or Mega-Disco, which seem to be our only real choices sometimes. Of course, but it helps to have good friends to walk around with, spending the night trying to figure out the performance art and exactly how many of us had dated Moby (not me) and why there are so few people in book publishing who really want or even know how to party. Or maybe it's just nightcrawlers like me who feel sense of pride waking up at noon the next day, with a blue smudge on the back of our hands to indicate that we've successfully returned from the underworld.

No question, a good night--thanks, Penn, for inviting us!

Saturdays

2005-09-17T17:33:00.000-04:00

I never do any work on Saturday, even though I always plan to. It's just too lovely outside and god knows how long that will last. I've just started my new job with an educational consultant company that helps international students with their grad school applications. The guys who run it are fun and fabulous and former journalists, and all I do is try to make someone's experience as a drum majorette into an entertaining essay. Or something like that. And I really need to be cracking down on that, but instead I'm planning for this ridiculously unproductive loft party in Brooklyn that is going to lay waste to my whole weekend. Is this the behavior of a useful individual? I think not.

But I did finish my new book proposal, and have picked a title: Rat Race Rebels: Following Your Dream in a Corporate World. It's basically an excuse for me to ruminate in print about my oddball career choices while I work on my fiction. But I'm looking forward to writing it--after I finish Wicked Women, which is a whole other story.

I've always had mixed feelings about the post-Labor Day season. I love summer, the long days and hot evenings spent drinking at some sidewalk cafe, but I run out of money so quickly and end up hungover and not getting any work. And then I feel guilty all the time. It's nice to be working again on a book and feeling calm and creative....

Left Turn Titles

2005-09-11T16:20:00.000-04:00

I've spent the last few weeks working on my new book proposal, which has a lot in common with this website. It's a book about trading in a safe, traditional job for an unconventional career. In it, I hope to answer some of the questions that people have thrown at me over the years--is it hard? how do you make money? was it scary? how do you become successful? is it worth it?

The book is tentatively called Left Turn Careers. I envisioned unconventional careers as being the "left turn" on the traditional career path, one that you were educated or trained for. But I'm not crazy about the title. It's not so much a career book as it is an insider's guide to the life and times of unconventional people--not just writers and artists, but entrepreneurs, freelancers, visionaries, you name it. The book has examples ranging from Martha Stewart (former stockbroker) to Angela Davis (professor turned activist) to Gray Davis (former governor) to Harry Houdini (magician, hoax revealer).

I think it's a particularly timely book, mostly because there don't seem to be any rules about careers anymore. I know so many law grads who can't find jobs--so much for law schoo as the "safe" alternative. Still others aren't willing to pay the price (i.e. no life) for working on Wall Street. And now, with the internet and increased specialization, you can literally carve out a brand-new career out of virtually anything. Kite-flying? Animal wrangling? Baby wrangling? You name it.

So if anyone has any ideas for titles, I'm all ears....

Vacation Over...

2005-09-10T00:26:00.000-04:00

Even the lawyerwriter goes on vacation. But she will return.

Big Bad Bosses

2005-08-28T23:11:00.000-04:00

This weekend, I went to a party for a book editor who had formerly been an assistant to an agent I once worked for. Let's just say that she was the Abel to my Cain. She'd been there for three years and the Agent I worked for was over the moon about her. When I wondered why she wasn't working for him presently, or was a co-agent, he shrugged and said he didn't know either. This is before Agent and I had our famous falling out, resulting in my firing and him making a spectacle of himself to New York State Unemployment officials. For more information, here's an old post.

Anyway, Abel Assistant was a mutual friend and another assistant to Agent was there as well. And overall, it was very cathartic to be there. We reminisced about under-the-radar creepiness and vague feelings of being sexually harassed, the piles of manuscripts and unending letters to be typed, the curtness and shouting and rudeness and all the other fun stuff that bonded us like boot camp. I was glad to hear that while the nominal clockout time was 5:30 (something that Agent liked to brag about), Abel Assistant had routinely stayed after midnight to get anything done. Other assistant told me that he had no idea of expanding the agency, as he told me in the interview. I even had the satisfaction of hearing that a so-called close friend calling him a dick. It is immensely gratifying to know that something as humiliating as being fired from a minimum wage job can have nothing to do with you.

But, of course, it had everything to do with me. My friend, another who had interned for him, had been questioned on "what kind of men she liked to date." He never got that far with me. I was nervous about him from the start, as was he, only for different reasons. The one really great thing about actually practicing law is that you get used to being treated with respect. It's hard to give up, even in the name of paying your dues. I like to think that he sense that I wasn't his ideal assistant, some kind of sex-kitten girl friday who worked ceaselessly behind the scenes and provided stroking of the, er, ego. The poor girls who came before me had been subjected to the same weirdness and had put up with it for a lot longer.

If I hadn't been fired, I wouldn't have started writing. If I hadn't started writing...

I don't know how to end that sentence.

Ah, Timing

2005-08-24T11:31:00.000-04:00

sometimes timing is wonderful. just as I was pondering as to whether I had offended karma or if it was indeed sour grapes that motivated my anger against Evil CoAuthor, I get the sales figures from The Street Law Handbook. They are actually quite good, better than I thought, which is nice to hear from a first book.

perhaps it's the effect of morning yoga, but I feel all stretched out and relaxed now...maybe a break before I tell you why Bonnie Parker is a Betty.

Dog Days of Summer

2005-08-24T00:27:00.000-04:00

August is a bad month for freelancers--or good, if you don't mind not being busy. I like being busy. I also like being paid properly. Sometimes that just doesn't happen.

Found an article worth checking out about the life less travelled...I like to think it applies to me, but only to a certain extent. I find it funny that the author assumes that the people in cafes in midday are not working hard. I work so much harder than I did as a lawyer, because I care about being a writer much more. It just takes more forms, and I can move around, but it's really preferable to sitting in an office all day, becoming a drone. And a lot of the time I end up working late at night, when others are off carousing and gallivanting without me. So unfair.

Click here for the article.

But August is made for carousing, because everyone who can give you work is on vacation. What to do with lots of time and no money? Besides reality television, I mean. That's one dangerous hobby...

My agent represents The Washingtonienne, a sexually active, moderately amoral character whose blog (here) inspired her book. I find it fascinating that after two weeks of blogging she managed to be become infamous enough for a book and a huge advance. Then again, she was sleeping with low-level politicos for rent money, usually on her lunch break. Another girl who likes to work hard, just in her own way...hope that's where the comparison ends between me and her...

Still, will work harder to make material more salacious.

The Street Law Ripoff

2005-08-14T23:41:00.000-04:00

A few years ago, when I decided to write The Street Law Handbook, I thought I could use a consultant, someone who was still practicing law and could do some research for me. I put an ad in the legal job section of craigslist, got about twenty responses, weeded it down to about five. The guy I chose was a criminal defense lawyer with lots of enthusiasm for the project--someone who definitely wanted to be co-author more than consultant. Or...well, just author, actually. Unfortunately CoAuthor couldn't string words into decent sentences to save his life. And he didn't like to be edited or anyone "interfering." In fact, he didn't want me to do anything, and when I complained, he sent a long letter to our agent to take his side. That's when I blew my now trademark cool and, well, we had words. Nasty words, mostly on email, all of which I still have archived, by the way.

Once equilibrium--as I saw it, anyway--was restored, we went back to work. Then suddenly, he disappeared. The whole partnership lasted about two months. I wrote The Street Law proposal from scratch, sold it, researched it, wrote it, edited it, published it. About a year after the end of our partnership, CoAuthor turned up, friendly and complimentary, wanting to sign the Termination Agreement I had sent him--or, actually, his own version, which had no non-compete clause. You see, CoAuthor and I, both being lawyers, had signed a partnership agreement that stating that he could not publish anything to directly compete with Street Law, should he leave the project.

Ah, lawyers. Once again, we had words--mostly his this time, again, most of them nasty. I agreed to limit the non-compete clause to six months, mostly to get him and his negative energy out of my life.

Well, his competing project is out. You knew there was one, right? So did I. I wasn't surprised that it got published (dey vil publish aaaaanything, baby) but I was surprised to see how thoroughly and how unashamedly, he had ripped off my idea. It has the original title I had proposed before "The Street Law Handbook" and is a survival guide to the drug law. Like The Street Law Handbook, it has stories of celebrity busts, silly crooks, tips to the legal system and dealing with the police and going to trial. In short, it looks really, really familiar. CoAuthor will modestly note on his website how he came up with the idea on his own. I see that the phrase "answered a craigslist ad" is not in the explanation.

I will say this. His writing has gotten better. The early drafts I have of his writing were shit. (Are shit. I still have them, of course). Anyway, some editor has earned his money on this one.

Some friends have suggested legal action. I'm not sure it's worth it the aggravation, or the surge of negative energy, or the distraction from Wicked Woman and Unnamed Book Three. My agent says it happens all the time in publishing and it's really hard to prove these things. And I believe in karma, and that cream always rises to the top. I think venting here was enough.

Besides, it's all over for him anyway. Without me around, where's he going to get his second book idea?

The Critic as an Artist as a Lady

2005-08-11T12:43:00.000-04:00

Last night I continued my quest to save money by being as still as possible. I calculated that since it cost me about $50 for the mere act of leaving the apartment, then it would cost about $20 for me to go into the living room from the bedroom and about $10 every time I got up from the computer. Note that these figures are highly suspect as I didn't pay a lot of attention in my college economics classes (which makes the fact that I minored in economics even more mystifying). At any rate, staying seated at my computer with the television on seemed to cost me the least amount of money for existing, so I threw in a cheap bottle of wine and spent a rocking evening browsing the internet. What you folks take for granted during your workday has become my most cost-effective form of entertainment.

All was not lost, however, as I quickly discovered Television Without Pity, a website devoted to, well, television, that features some of the most interesting writing I've seen in a while. These are clearly people who like to write. I've always rejected the notion that a critic is simply a useless-hanger-on of people who actually make art. The first challenge to this notion was when I read Oscar Wilde's essay The Critic as an Artist, which, rather jokingly, suggested that the critic was indeed at a higher level than the artist, or, at least as creative as the artist herself.

Nowhere is this more apparent than Television Without Pity. I, of course, went to the forum for the show Kept, which I had been quite interested in until it got really repetitive after the sixth episode. Even Madame Jerry lost her luster; her faux British-Texas twang began to grate, and it became apparent that this was simply another dating show, rather than the grand swayamvara that I had imagined.

That said, the boards are witty, alarmingly accurate and entertaining in a cynical way. A particularly fey contestant is presumed to be gay, or, at least "has some sugar in his tank." Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne "inhabit their own land of awesome." Merciless as the website promised, these are people who have no compunction about mocking the aspirations of "famewhores" even as they compulsively watch them. The writing about the show, in fact, was far superior to the show itself. If we buy into the antiquated notion that an artist is intrinsically superior to his critic, simply because he does something, then that means that the bobble-headed contestants of Kept and the manipulative, snarky producers of the show are intrinsically superior to the cultural critics who dissect them. Such is clearly not the case. What could be better reading than one poster's request that Elton John and his boyfriend do a similar search for a houseboy, and call their show "Two Queens and a Knave?" Brilliant. You can't find better writing anywhere. That these people are clear-eyed about the "Cinderella-storyline" (i.e. the scruffiest boy cleans up good to win the game) and the magic of editing to create hugely artificial story arcs makes the reading even better. They're willing to play the game, but they're not going to be fooled by it.

It was a much better evening than my sedentary self could have envisioned. What's equally fascinating is the dirt dug up on the contestants--four or five of whom rather coincidentally starting up blogs just as the show started airing. Absolutely hilarious. Reality television may be exactly what George Orwell envisioned as our entertainment in 1984 (complete with wall-high screens), but it doesn't mean that its viewers are stupid. Wit and perception can produce good writing out of virtually any subject matter.

As for me, I'm going to spend the $20 and go to my kitchen for some lunch.

Panic

2005-08-08T16:08:00.000-04:00

I always speak pretty highly of the freelancing life--the late nights and late mornings, the independence, the avoidance of working with idiots, etc. But there is a serious downside to it, and I think I'm experiencing it now. August is a pretty slow time in New York in general--everybody goes out to the Hamptons or some similarly over-hyped beach area. What I usually plan to do is have enough money to get me through August into September, but alas, this year, that simply is not the case.

My level of poverty is so low that I've simply stopped leaving the house, except for dogwalks and general constitutionals (so I won't become one of those Addams-family type recluses). Anything else involves the spending of money, of which I have none. It's an interesting idea, to slow down and stop moving as much as possible so as to maximize resources and efficiently spend the pennies I find in my couch. But it's actually a terrible way to live. It's moments like these that I imagine people in their windowless offices, slaves to the wage clock, yet comforted by the knowledge that however bad their day is, they're going to get paid nonetheless, and the workday won't bleed into a worknight.

Hopefully things will change soon. I've got some small projects to nibble on, but the big ones that I am waiting on--the real estate blog, some PR work, a new book proposal--are not coming in yet and certainly won't be paying my bills for a couple weeks yet. It's a terrible feeling to come to a complete standstill, hoping that if you don't move, you won't be hemorraging money as usual. Yet another reason that us self-employed freelance types are in the minority--lots of wear and tear on the nerves, and we sometimes don't know why we do it either.

Birthday Bash

2005-08-05T17:40:00.000-04:00

I actually don't like weekends very much, partly because I pretty much work every day, and it's much harder to work when everyone else is having fun. This is what made weekends at the firm particularly grueling; not only were you working, but most of the time you were doing pointless, mindless tasks like document review (where you review boring litigation documents) or due diligence (where you review boring corporate documents) At least now when I'm working, I can do it in my sunny bedroom with the Kept marathon in the background. (As predicted, my interest in this show lasted as long as my interest in any show--six episodes. I don't even know who she picked. I'm sure they're quite happy). Office politics are limited to which cat is currently thrashing the other, and whether I can take an extra dog walk in the evening.

Still, I get considerably little work done from Friday afternoon through Saturday. Sunday, being the day of repentence, is a very productive day. I pretty much wake up a bad employee on Friday--hungover, behind schedule, procrastinating here, there and everywhere. I suppose it evens out in the end because of Sunday, but still. Freelancing is feast or famine; last week it promised feast, but this weekend is famine. Which means I will worry about spending too much money, usually followed by my actually spending too much money.

However, the plans for Saturday night are particularly good--The Horse and I are throwing a joint birthday party at the Horse's apartment. He has purchased tiki torches, which I envisioned as those big Hawaiian flaming suckers, but now sound only like rather tall candle holders. My contribution will be introducing random groups of people, none of have really met each other, into a crowd of his more mellow friends. We will do some mighty fine repenting on Sunday, but hey, your 21st birthday only comes around six or seven times in your lifetime.

Thank God for the tradition of the houseparty, by the way. For the price of a medium-bodied cabernet, you can buy your way into someone's house, be supplied with a drink, lots of munchies and a comfortable place to sit down when necessary. Which makes me wonder why we even go to bars anymore. Well, other than the fact that I don't think I could get the memebers of Satanicide to do a private show in my apartment. (Or could I....? That would certainly teach Evil Cat Woman.....) Relying on being supplied with booze simply because of the charm of your company--another necessary to be a freelancer.

The Long Arm of the Law

2005-08-05T00:34:00.000-04:00

Actually, the last post got me thinking about something rather strange. Mention that you're a lawyer, and there is roughly a 92.5% chance that the person you're talking to will mention how they seriously considered law school. Seriously, most of the population has thought about it. Is it the last refuge of all college grads when they run out of ideas? True, would-be lawyers and law school students are everywhere. For example, I just learned that Phil, the lead guitarist of Satanicide (actually, I think he goes by Alistair, or something like that) is a real estate attorney. If you're out there, Phil, are you still practicing? Just curious. And another member of the group, who shall remain nameless for his own protection, was also telling me how he thinks about going to law school. No, Baron, no!

But while it is interesting how many cool and creative people consider law school, it is even more interesting that I never met any. I mean, where were the spandex-wearing heavy-metal rockers at my law school? I don't recall any. Instead I was stuck with people who agreed with judges who made female lawyers wear skirts in court, because pantsuits were generally unfeminine. I mean...help! "Your honor, I actually have a very feminine butterfly tattoo on my left ankle and this nasty pantsuit is just covering it up...oh, wait, you don't like tattoos either? I'll just put on another layer of pantyhose then."

I will tell you what I told Nameless Member: if you are a creative person--not just creative, but if who you are is mostly driven by the creative impulse--then law school is not for you. Creativity is not a treasured asset in law school. The two do not mix in the wild, and cannot survive in the same environment.

If you are mostly creative, and still want to law school, then you must have another trait to succeed: marathons. A 10K will do, but really you must be able to run the full 26-or-whatever-K. Only those creative types who have the capability and persistence to train for a marathon should consider law school and/or a legal career. It's for the long haul.

As for me, I don't even break into a jog unless someone is chasing me. And, depending on the circumstances, sometimes not even then.

That should tell you something, though I'm not sure what.

Fame By Any Other Name

2005-08-04T17:26:00.000-04:00

During my research for new book proposal, I stumbled across the following list. All were trained as lawyers but found fame in other fields. Some in particular give us hope...

Franz Kafka (writer)
Rene Descartes (philospher)
Francis Scott Key (composer)
Scott Turow (author)
Terry Louise Fisher (co-creator of LA Law)
Paul Robeson (actor/singer/civil rights activist)
Geraldo Rivera (broadcast journalist)
Richard Thalheimer (president/The Sharper Image)
Noah Webster (lexicographer)
John Wesley Hardin (outlaw)
Mahatma Gandhi (political/spiritual leader)
Tony LaRussa (former Oakland A’s manager)
Henry Fielding (author)
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (political leader)
Mortimer Zuckerman (owner of U.S. News & World Report)
Erle Stanley Gardner (creator of Perry Mason)
Sir Thomas More (statesman/saint)
Pat Haden (former LA Rams quarterback)
Charlie Rose (broadcast journalist)
Rossano Brazzi (actor)
Washington Irving (author)
Howard Cosell (sportscaster)
Hoagy Carmichael (songwriter)
Edgar Lee Masters (poet/novelist)
Wassily Kandinsky (painter)
Peter Tchaikovsky (composer)
Fred Graham (CBS TV reporter)
Fidel Castro (politician)
Otto Preminger (film director)
Madalyn Murray O’Hair (reformer)
Ralph Nader (consumer advocate/politician)
Jules Verne (author)
Archibald MacLeish (poet)
Studs Terkel (oral historian)

Satanicide Rules!

2005-08-01T19:49:00.000-04:00

Having heard three out of the four bands that my friend Griff plays drums in, I think that Satanicide is my favorite. The others, made up of virtually the same people, are very, very good. This was not an easy decision. Hair Supply, as you know, is the heavy metal/Air Supply band, all spandex and, well, hair. Heather has a sound that's like hearing your boyfriend's band playing in his garage on a summer evening. But Satanicide was the whole package. A little Spinal Tap, a little glam rock, a little punk, a lot of metal, they even supplied their own scantily clad video vixens and tottering gothic pillars. Any band where the lead singer not only stage dives successfully, but gets the crowd to carry him back to the bar for a shot of Jack Daniels is alright by me.

Special kudos to Phil because I promised him, and because he made me feel like a celebrity introducing me to friends who read my blog. And for those of you who are into live music, bassist D. is playing Saturday night with Jamie Rattner. I know nothing about this, but Drew is a great bassist. Or maybe I would say that of anyone who plays Duff in a Guns and Roses tribute band.

I am one hour away from my birthday. I don't like birthdays. Actually, that's not true. I like birthdays, I just don't like the numbers that go along with it. Is there any way to get them to slow down, or even in reverse for a few years? But now that the day is almost here, it doesn't feel half bad. In New York, you always feel young. I only feel ancient out in the suburbs, where my former high school friends are wheeling their four children around in SUV's. Actually, I don't exactly feel ancient; more like...baffled. Am I the one who missed the boat, or are they?

Primary Birthday Wish: Gorgeous New Book Deal, with Matching Publicity.
Secondary Birthday Wish: Private, But Clive Owen-Related.
Tertiary Birthday Wish: Really Good Absinthe, Imported Only.

Or at least a nice massage. Shiatsu.

True Realty

2005-07-27T18:31:00.000-04:00

During a recent dry spell--work, not love--I applied for a couple difference freelance positions on craigslist. The choicest one was writing a real estate blog for The Learning Annex. Me--blog? And get paid? Why, thank you!

Naturally, the longtime blog reader now asks the obvious question--exactly what real estate experience do I have? And of course, I have no professional experience, but I am a New Yorker, and that automatically puts me in the category of semi-obsessed hobbyist.

The two major categories of elevator conversation in Manhattan are weather and real estate. You could be trapped in the elevator with either Justin Timberlake or Justice Scalia and easily slip into the conversation about today's weather, or your apartment or neighborhood. Bear in mind that "real estate" in New York can include everything from rent-per-square-foot to the views from the fourth floor to which building Gwyneth Paltrow now lives in to what's happening with The Rent Control Board is doing. In New York, but especially Manhattan, real estate matters. It counts.

Most people from New York aren't born here (though it seems that most of those who were, never leave). So these shoebox-sized apartments aren't ridiculous to us. Sure, my entire apartment could fit into the biggest room in my parents' old house. But for nesters like me, who hates moving and feels traumatized even thinking about it, these unbelievably tiny apartments are our home. We decorate and paint and care for every teeny-weeny square foot, because this place is going to be our home.

I hadn't actually lived in an apartment before, except when I lived in London as a student. Five girls in two bedrooms at Earl's Court was horrendous, and made worse by the fact that we had no phone. My first New York apartment was a second floor studio provided by NYU Grad. This would have been fine, except I was sharing it, and I never got a night's sleep. (To those who live on the second floor, I salute you). My roommate was J. Big and blond, had the mother of all nasal New Jersey accents--despite having been raised in Weschester--which I found both grating and colorful. She was appalled that I did not know that The Notorious B.I.G and Biggie Smalls where the same person. I was appalled when, I told her my firm thesis was in was about period piece dramas, she asked me what my menstrual cycle had to do with anything.

And surprisingly, we got along, and moved into an apartment two blocks down. Here is where I learned about the mystery of key money (it's illegal) and landlords (ours was the American Legion) and earplugs on weekend nights. My new roommate was V. who was Indian but said her name in tongue-twisting way I'd never heard of. Jobless and supported by her father for over a year, she quickly had a harem of guys (all black) who kept her busy when her boyfriend wasn't around. But yet again, we all got along, and stayed in that apartment until they doubled our rent. (Unless a building is specified as rent stabilized, they can raise it however much they want. This I learned the hard way.

I've been ensconced in my current place for a while now, and over the years, I've acquired a fascination with New York real estate. Do you know I could buy an island in Italy for the price of a two-bedroom in the West Village? This is slightly appalling. But in a town where living rooms are converted into bedrooms by removable walls or curtains, where there's a difference between "light" and "view," where many bedrooms can't fit any more furniture than a queen-size bed, where tipping rates are constantly changing...in New York, you have to be addicted to real estate, just to survive.

Now, the Learning Annex blog will be a national one, and I'm sure it has a particular theme and tone that's different than this one. And while there are many New York real estate blogs, there are few national ones. And I welcome the knowledge. One day, when my books have sold a million copies or when I marry rich, I aspire to actually own property rather than temporarily squatted on it. Where, I don't know. I may not be in New York, so writing about national real estate sounds pretty helpful in the long run. And there's lots I want to learn. I hope to unravel the mystery that is a co-op board, the difference between assumed and balloon mortgages, how to deal with surveyors, where the good realtors go. I'll probably try to look everything up online, but I don't mind taking buying some books or even take a course or two. To be honest, I think I'll pick it up quickly, and have fun writing about it, getting wise about it.

The best part? Getting paid to browse listings. Before, I only did this during the Lottery Fantasy. Actually, the lottery fantasy consists almost entirely of real estate and vintage clothing. So if anyone needs a vintage clothing blog out there, just let me know).

And if the Learning Annex doesn't pick me for the gig--well, I'll still have this blog. A blog in a hand is worth two in the bush.

Hmmm...that always sounds so dirty...

Fame and Fortune

2005-07-22T11:46:00.000-04:00

Hi, remember me? I used to blog here. lawyerwriter is the name. I have been dogsitting with a very weak internet connection, which meant the dog got a lot of attention but the blog did not. Now, like Lady Lazarus, Ophelia and Sleeping Beauty rolled into one, I have returned to let you know that I have been Discovered.

This is very exciting for me. The closest I have been to being Discovered up until now was when some Indian lady (officially known as an "Auntie") stopped me in the park while I was walking a dog to ask for my name and biodata. That is, she did not actually ask for my biodata, but she was particularly interested to know if I walked the dog at the same time every day, presumably so she could drive by with her eligible nephew to point me out to him. She was very disappointed that I gave her the generic dogwalking business card rather than my home phone number, particularly because I do not think she owns a dog.

That said, I am now playing Kentucky Fried Chicken Girl in Bath Party, which is a multimedia play that is going to go on for four weeks at the Howl Festival, which is a pretty cool festival in the East Village. This is an original one-person show starring the very beautiful and talented Meital Dohan, and it covers issues about the American Dream and globalization, but in a very funny way. My blog audience (and audiences in general) will be relieved to know that I do not actually have to act on stage, but that my part will be filmed and then shown on a screen behind Meital.

One of the great disappointments of my life is my utter lack of acting ability, which I try to hide by being as dramatic and often drunken as possible. The last time I acted was as Goody Crazy Woman in my college's three-and-a-half hour production of The Crucible, where my hair was spraypainted silver (I will do hairpainting if it is integral to the part). Anyway, it was my job to rant in a Puritan kind of way until I was burnt at the stake. I thought I did a fine job, but the rest of the cast seemed a little to eager to use real fire on me.

This did not seem to dissuade Meital or her director, Karen Shefler, at all. I have less chance of screwing up on film rather than theater, so I am grateful not to appear on stage for four weeks in a row. And I hope it will not cause stampedes of people to run when I say that I have to sport an Indian accent. I accept that an Indian accent is intrinsically funny, and I also accept that I cannot do one very well (I look to Apu on The Simpsons as my muse). Again, this did not seem to dissuade Karen or Meital, who rather touchingly believe I am perfect for the part. If only everyone had such faith me!

But this is what I anticipate: a Hollywood Bigshot will be in the audience. My face appears on the screen--just for a minute--but he stands up and says "Who is that girl?" His assistant tries to argue with him: "But sir, she's a nobody." "I don't care," Hollywood Bigshot says. "Get me that girl! I want to make her a Star!" And the rest is Hollywood history.

If anyone can name the show where I ripped off that whole scenario from, I will give them a cookie. It will probably be a dog cookie, but a cookie is a cookie.

Outlawyered!

2005-07-15T00:15:00.000-04:00

I very rarely have Friendly Professional Relations with Real Lawyers. I will explain the terms thusly: "Friendly Professional Relations" are relations that I have with people who I deal with mostly for work, rather than social, reasons. "Real Lawyers" are lawyers who are not lawyers by trade or vocation, but people who have lawyering in their blood. (Notice I did not say "law in their blood"). Allow me to illustrate with the following story, which I will call "Outlawyered!"

I recently got an offer for The Project from Company B. Wanting to make sure that I did not violate the Confidentiality Agreement I had with Company A, I contacted my supervisor at Company A and suggested a workable compromise. I was surprised to receive a warning to immediately abandon The Project and warnings that Company A would vigorously litigate any breach of the Confidentiality Agreement. I was surprised mostly because Project B was pretty innocuous and could easily be done exclusively through common and public information, and because my supervisor and I have Friendly Professional Relations (supervisor is not a lawyer). This made threats of litigation in response to a friendly email a little...well, surprising. Especially since Company A and Company B are not competitors. A call between me and supervisor quickly ironed things out, (FPR were restored) and it became clear that The Project might be more trouble than it was worth. My supervisor suggested I talk to Company A's legal Counsel for better guidelines so that I would not have to clear every project with Company A.

Now, the phone call between me and Counsel went somewhat disastrously. Bear in mind that I had already decided to give up the Project, but I decided to find out exactly what Counsel felt the Confidentiality Agreement covered, and what it didn't. I suggested my plan of doing the Project with completely public information, and perhaps not even mentioning Company A.

Unsurprisingly, Counsel felt that the Confidentiality Agreement covered a broad range of projects, not just this project. And this is where Real Lawyering comes in. Counsel was cool, collected and calm as he completely outlawyered me. Before we could even talk about a compromise, words such as "unethical" and "misrepresentation"(not to mention phrases such as "blinded for money" and "trading on Company A's name for personal gain") were thrown at me. I, of course, began to get very angry. This is what humans do when they are accused of being sneaky when in fact they have gone out of their way to be honest. This is not, however, what lawyers are supposed to do.

Counsel and I continued on the phone for some time, one of us calm and the other one angry. Now, this is not a "take my side" story, because even I, knowing the extraneous details, would take Counsel's side. Not because he was right--far from it. It's virtually impossible, even accidentally, to disclose confidential information when all the information in your work product is already accessible to the public at large. And frankly, I'm not even sure I have the information he thinks I'm going to use.

But what's interesting is that I only realized it after I got off the phone, after I called a couple litigators I knew back from the firm days. What's interesting is that I didn't figure it out for myself. Counsel outlawyered me not because he had better facts and better logic, but because he knew how to keep me off balance and he knew how to spin as many arguments as he needed to back his version of the facts. As I got more and more aggravated, I couldn't even figure out why I was still on the phone with this guy. After all, I'd already decided to forego the project, (though not Company B altogether). And yet, there I was, arguing philosophy, ignoring my instincts that Counsel was just wrong. I think he could have gone on for hours. But I couldn't. I gave in.

The question is why? And the answer is this: for me, lawyering is a job. It's a suit I put on and take off. I generally enter relationships--professional, social, romantic--with my lawyer suit off. (You could say I enter into them in my birthday suit, actually). For others, lawyering is second nature. They will lawyer over a friend's excessive tip or how fast their taxi is going or whether their table in the restaurant should have multiple candles. It's in their blood, an instinct, and they're always ready to go. And boy, have they practiced.

As for me...my strained relations with these types makes it clear I made the right choice in choosing not to practice. Counsel and his ilk are made for the profession; they're who you want in the courtroom, representing you in tough, hard-nosed, take-no-prisoners litigations. As for me and the other lawyer hybrids out there (lawyerwriter, lawyerbanker, lawyeractivist)--we're here for other reasons. I may not know them yet, but I suspect they're more...human.

Writing Jobs for Ex-Lawyers

2005-07-09T22:14:00.000-04:00

Sorry about the false promise of the title--I'm looking for them myself. But I can offer some general advice if you're a lawyer, and you want to be a writer:

1. Have money saved. Period

2. Learn about the trade. Talk to a career counselor or coach and see what kind of writing you want to do. There's consumer and trade magazine journalism, copyediting, advertising and public relations copywriting, marketing, work-for-hire, ghostwriting, legal-test-related writing, career-related writing, consumer and trade book publishing, internal corporate writing, lawfirm writing...and I have done all of these. That might be the only way that you will figure out what kind of writer you will be. If you want to be all of the above, go for it. Just know what you're getting into.

3. Use the Law Degree. The newly learned lesson: do not try to run from being identified as a lawyer. It won't work. If you want to get away from your law degree, you are going to have to do it in stages. So, while you get your writing career going, stay as close to the law as you can stand. If this means practice, practice. If this means temping, fine. A year ago, I was determined to never write about law again. Now I'm almost looking forward to it. The time I spent as an agent's assistant or ghostwriter for cookbooks or doing study guides was fine, but I wasn't making as much money as my law degree could get me. And I have never gone through the phase of wanting to be starving writer living in a garret. I have cats to feed.

4. Network. This is something that you'll have to do the rest of your writing life. Allot some time and money to get to know people in the writing world, mostly for information rather than jobs. The simplest way to get started is this: make a list of everyone you know, everywhere. Go through the list and see who you can contact about your new career goal. Ask everyone if they know anyone who may work in writing/editing/publishing, and if you can use their name to make a connection to go for an informational interview. Do it in person; failing that, choose the phone, then email. You will meet some people who are not useful, but you will eventually meet people who will help you or at least remember your name when they do have work. Ask lots of questions, and at the end, ask if they can recommend more people for you to talk to.

5. Lose the Resume. Rework your resume to highlight any writing experience you have. Nonetheless, show your resume only as a last resort. Once people see the law degree, they won't see anything else. The resume actually limits you.

6. Give it time. I mean years. You will fail at least once. The important thing is to be persistent and pick yourself back up and plan for the long run.

7. Get used to explaining yourself. Everyone will want to know why you are not a lawyer. Many will be complimentary, but more will be incredulous. Don't take it personally. They just won't get it.

8. Downsize your life. You will have less money than you will budget for. People will not pay you on time. Sometimes not at all. Be prepared to go without on specific things.

9. Write and read frequently. Write about what you'd ideally like to write about. Read any publication you'd like to write for. Read books that will inspire your writing. Think about your writing ability like a muscle--it must be exercised regularly.

10. Don't burn any bridges. You may want to run from your fellow colleagues, your firm, your cases, etc. Don't. You may want to go back one day. Or, ask them for work. If you leave, leave on good terms, whenever possible.

So...this is just a preliminary list, based on my experience in the last three years. Any other lawyer-writers out there, feel free to add your thoughts...

The Lawyerwriter

2005-07-05T21:23:00.000-04:00

This blog is called the lawyer writer. I'm not quite sure why I chose the name, because I rarely talk about law and only sometimes about being a lawyer.

I came upon the interesting realization that I've spent the last three trying to have as little to do with law as possible. If had my way, I would have left the firm, started writing novels, and never looked back. Instead, it's been a slow hard progression away from law, towards writing, but, in a Godfather-like way, law keeps pulling me back in.

Okay, so maybe the mob analogy is a little melodramatic. But I remember feeling like law was the wrong idea for me about three years before I actually left. And when I left, I wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. This elicits many responses from inside and outside my head:

The Mob: "You can't really leave the law, can you? After you put so much in?"

The Army: "You just couldn't hack it, could you? Weren't tough enough."

The Cult: "But everyone wants you to be a lawyer."

The Parents: "You'll go back. You will. Really."

Now, the most obvious question is--why? What exactly am I running from? I spent three years studying, two years practicing and I wrote a book about it. I did okay. I didn't hate all of it. So why am I hell-bent on carving on being writer rather than lawyerwriter?

I don't want to write a courtroom drama or expose of law firms. I looked into true crime. They specifically asked for "stories of middle class men with double lives that explode in murder." I am not making this up. But I don't read about the law. I can't stand Grisham, and I really dislike Linda Fairstein. Intensely. Basically, television does this much better now, if you like the courtroom stuff. Most episodes of Law and Order (the original, and Criminal Intent) are much better than anything I've found in the bookstore. They have finer legal points, more newsworthy scenarios, and better courtroom surprises. There are some great legal movies, but Law and Order really broke the mold. So I could go work in television, writing Law and Order shows, which might be fun.

I could be a paralegal just to earn some cash, instead of writing full time. Or, preferably, I could set my hair on fire.

I did write The Street Law Handbook. I hadn't planned on it. I'd planned on agenting it, but I didn't know if I had enough of a background in criminal law to write it. But then I started getting so many ideas of how I wanted it to be, and what I wanted it to cover, that I starting outlining it. And, except for a very brief, extraordinarily unfortunate few months where I had a partner (a real criminal lawyer long on ego but very short on ability), I enjoyed writing it very much. I learned more about criminal law than I'd known as a lawyer.

And that, actually, was all I planned on doing in terms of legal writing. No blog, no sequel, no legal writing to pay the bills, or anything like that. I figured that once you get published, you'd sort of entered the elite club of authors, and that was that. And I would go as far as my talent would take me. And then I would quit and write my memoirs. Preferably in my eighties, in Paris with a 20-year old lover. Who cooks.

Anyway, back to the point. Why did I want to ditch the law thing entirely, without making use of it to pay the bills?

There's the faux-rebellious reason: I reject law and the corporate world. I want no part of office life. I hate suits, and really hate pantyhose.

There's the logical reason: I'm a writer. I was only a lawyer for five years, but I've been writing since I was ten. All I studied, besides law, was literature. But the law degree seems to what I'm defined by--branded by, in a way--because it's a profession.

There's the insecurity reason: I'm not sure exactly what having a law degree has taught me. I liked studying it, but the practice is just awful. And I don't even know if I'm any good at it.

There's the honest reason: The law degree, and everything that went along with it, isn't nearly as interesting as writing and publishing.

There's the defensive reason: I'm afraid that if I'm lawyerwriter today, that's all I'll be writing tomorrow. Courtrooms and corporate boardrooms--that's all they'll want from me.

But lately I've started to think--what if I really could find a way to use the law degree without practicing, and without having all my books be about law? Someone suggested legal marketing, or writing for public relation firms that specialize in law firms and legal entities. Of course, I haven't done much public relations writing, but it might be fun. It might even pay the bills.

So I'm doing some investigation into this. If anyone knows anything--or has any thoughts on why some ex-lawyers run screaming from their law degrees, instead of using them, I'd like to hear them.

Cats, Neighbors and Public Relations

2005-06-30T17:50:00.000-04:00

I have a nasty neighbor. This may not be news to you, who have had many a nasty neighbor, but this is actually the first time for me. Though I live in a generic apartment building in a non-descript part of town, I am quite fanatical about my floor. A., the woman at the end of the hall, is our alpha-neighbor. You can tell immediately she's lived here the longest, knows everyone, will speak her mind and is pretty much in charge of the floor. She's a lovely person and, luckily, she likes me. Actually, she liked my cats first, because they used run down the hall to visit her. Across from her are D., who's an Italian guy who works in glassware, and I., his girlfriend, a Kazhakstani (sp?) lawyer. They throw these parties overflowing with Italians. We don't always go, but the cats go to every one. Next to them are J. and C., two rather fashionable gentlmen who also only started liking me after they met the cats. Across from them is a Brazillian couple, very friendly. Their daughter, G. likes to chase the cats down the hall. D., on the other side of me, has two tiny dogs that love my cats. (My cats stand the doggy attention with stoic disgust). There's a corporate apartment across from me that gets regular visits from a family in Westchester. Their children knock on the door to play with my cats.

Get the picture? No, this is not a "how cute are Bootsie and Footsie" email and their pictures will not be posted. I am going somewhere with this: namely, my cats are more popular than I am. But now I have a new neighbor. She has a name, but lets just call her Wicked Woman Number Twelve. (WW12 for short)(this is a joke for those who have read earlier posts). On the second day WW12 moved in, she noticed the cats sitting outside my door during a party. She told the doorman about it. I found this irritating because my door was wide open and I was in the kitchen, and she could easily just asked me in a neighborly fashion. I told the doorman that I was very sorry, and to have her come talk to me so we could work something out. Second time, she went to the doorman again. Then a series of notes were exchange. Then some nasty notes. Then she went to management.

Because WW12 is allergic, she does not want to be near the cats. Naturally, I offer to keep them inside when she is around, and to minimize the frequency and the length of their hallways visits. But no, this is insufficient. She does not want them to leave my apartment at all. Never mind that our hallway is practically the length of a football field, and she's only got one corner of it. Never mind that my cats have been doing this since they were kittens three years ago. She will actually get the porter to vacuum the area around my door, because the allergens from my cats will still be there, even when the cats are not. And these little allergens will apparently send her to the hospital.

Now, I know what you're thinking. Lawyerwriter is being insensitive. Doesn't lawyerwriter have allergies? They suck.

Lawyerwriter does have allergies. See earlier posts. But Lawyerwriter is irritated nonetheless. And this is why.

I am allergic to bees stings. I swell up. This is lamentable, and should I accidentally move next door to a beekeeper, I would be nervous and ask the beekeeper to cooperate. However, I do not--and this is key--knowingly move into a beehive. If WW12 knows she is that allergic to pets, why does she move into a 52 story building overflowing with dogs and cats? There's a girl who takes her cats on walks, for god's sake.

And I know what you're thinking now. Am I one of those crazy cat ladies? No. This is different. I have lived in this apartment for ages, carefully cultivating a really cool set of neighbors who make working from home a little more manageable. I have actually achieved a New York miracle of never, not once, having a problem with a neighbor. (That's not true. Once, J. accused me of not holding the elevator when he was running towards it. But then he met the cats).

We're talking white-picket-fence, people. Neighbors have each other's keys, take care of each other's pets, lend each other chairs for dinner parties, give both pets and babies presents on holidays. We're extremely friendly but we have our own lives and it doesn't get complicated. Although, when A2. and E. across the hall had a baby, they invited me to his bris. At 6:30 in the morning. (Yes, I went. No, I didn't look).

And now we have been invaded by WW12. Or, mostly, I have. Now management has told me that door needs to stay closed even if I am at home, and that if the cats need to leave the apartment, they need to be on leashes. And the point is, it's not a cat thing at all. I mean, I love my boys, but I'm perfectly aware that they're little animals, for god's sake, and will survive just fine without excursions down the hall, fancy toys, or fireman-and-policeman Halloween costumes.

It's a territorial thing. It's like our floor is Lumberton and she's the severed ear in the field. I'm afraid I'm afraid that I'm going to be lying awake at night, forced to listen to her vacuuming outside my door. Who is this nutjob? She's so scared of dealing face to face that she runs every time she sees me coming out of the elevator. (Once, the lock wouldn't work and she started yanking at the door like I was a mugger coming at her). Earlier today, my roommate was heading out as she was heading in. The nutjob leaned against the door, smirked and tried to stare down my roommate. Now I have to keep my door closed more, wrestle my cats inside (and you try wrestling two cats--or for that matter, putting them on leashes), see less of my neighbors and worry about running into the witch whenever I have to go out.

No. She must leave. I want my picket fence back. But how? Blog audience, I invite your thoughts.

Bandit Queens

2005-06-26T00:52:00.000-04:00

One of my now-patented hiatuses (haitui? what exactly is the plural of hiatus? discuss). Apologies to those who have been irritated by the lack of posts (usually at lunch-time, over a sandwich, I know who you are).

Well, I am happy to say that my Lizzie writings have resulted in a somewhat decent first draft. Why, exactly, was it excruciating? Is that always how writing is going to be? I'm amazed by people who think this is an easy profession. I do anything--clean, dust, my taxes--to keep from writing sometimes.

Next on the list is Phoolan Devi, Bandit Queen of India. I will not go into the details of Phoolan Devi here. But I will say this here (and not in the actual book): I picked her because I wanted at least one of my Wicked Women to be Indian. I admit it. I wanted at least one Indian woman who was considered by many to be just plain bad. And among the queens and the martyrs and the asparas and dutiful wives, I did find one.

I first heard of Phoolan Devi through my parents--that she was a gangster who roamed the mountains of North India, and that she had once butchered two dozen innocent brahmins. This at least, was what she went to prison for. I pictured her like the goddess Kali--all fire and brimstone and skull necklaces. In my research, however, I haven't seen a goddess of destruction. I have, however, seen a woman who knew how to play up that image--especially to Brahmin caste men, who she loathed. To Brahmins like my father, she was a butcher and a bandit. To lower caste Indians and untouchables, she was a hero. Many also considered her a feminist. At any rate, she was popular enough to be elected Minister of Parliament in India, a position she held until she was killed in 2000.

That, any rate, will be how I'm spending my Sunday. Okay, maybe I'll also catch a repeat of the last episode of Kept, where Jerry finally got rid of oily, nasty pretty boy Ricardo. That was sweet.

Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n Roll

2005-06-19T23:27:00.000-04:00

Now, many of you have been accustomed to hearing about my many oddball obsessions--among them cheese, the Kama Sutra, Jerry Hall, purple hair (yes, yes, I know it used to be blue, but for some odd reason it's gone purple now. I bow to its whims), Henry Miller, hating Sex and the City, etc. I'd like to add another one to the list: local bands.

I think when you live in New York, you have to be crazy not to go and see the local bands. You can hear virtually any kind of music, and though you hear a lot of crap, you also hear some bands that are really amazing. I've gone three bands in three nights, and though I do feel a little wobbly, it was well worth it.

Last night, as many of you know, was the Heather concert. I took Miss Julie to Arlene's Grocery to see them. Several members of Heather are in the bands Hair Supply (a hair band tribute to Air Supply) and Satanicide (a mock heavy-metal band). Specifically, my friend Griff--one half of the Mad Brits--plays drums in all three bands. (For those of you new to our little chat, the Mad Brits are Griff and Allie, the hard-partying, most crazy, married rockers who are much, much cooler than me. They consistently tell me that they lead very boring lives, but every time I go out with them, I slink woozily back in at the crack of dawn like Bertie Wooster, usually while they're deciding where to go next).

Well, Heather was just amazing. For one thing, they're all hot. Now I know that being a musician always makes a man hot, but it's particularly hot when you're a talented musician. Heather made me feel like I was sitting in someone's garage in a shredded concert T with a beer in my hand, listening to someone's band. A very 70's vibe. Miss Julie and I were just saying how we wanted to be in the back, away from the speakers, when they started. By the end, we were way up close to the stage, rocking out (which, in this case, means jumping around waving our arms in the air and shouting. It just sounds cooler if I say rocking out)

Aftewards, we partied with the band. Actually, we just hung out and had some drinks, but, again, it sounds cooler to say we partied with the band. Griff and Ali were as fun and generous as ever, and I kept promising to put them in the next blog entry. At the end of the night, Griff was saying, "We still have to do something cool for the blog entry" and all I could think was, "Are you kidding?"

Because the whole night was like some Jefferson Airplane documentary, complete with me following a snowy white rabbit into another world. We were joined by bassist Drew, singer Dale and guitarist Gerard. (Other guitarist Phil I never met, but allow me to say that I finally have proof that a guy can look cool in a porn star mustache). The rumor was that Rufus Wainright, who I saw at the show, wanted Drew to be his bassist, but he knows that if he leaves Heather I'll never forgive him. Drew, by the way, had a big cut on the side of his noise from where the mike hit him. He was actually bleeding on stage, but I think he was so busy playing that he didn't notice. Miss Julie and I liked that--it seemed very rock and roll. Gerard is a fellow dogwalker, as is Ali, and the three of us meeting made me think of a perfect nerve.com article called "Sex Advice From Dogwalkers" ("Sex Advice From (Insert Profession Here)" is a nerve.com regular feature) (Remind self to pitch article). Dale left first, and I think it's generally not a good idea to tell him that his hair reminds you of the mane of the lead singer of Quiet Riot--mostly because I think he's going for a more 70's look. (Sideburns, maybe?) The rest of us non-performing groupies blearily and dutifully followed the band members as they progressively partied down the Lower East Side. I managed to outlast Gerard and his-friend-whose-name-I-can't-remember, although perhaps that wasn't a good idea. Towards the end of the night, they were assuming the politely pained and vaguely amused expression that I see so often when I'm thoroughly fucked up (forgive the less than precise description, but I really can't think of a better way to describe the condition I was in).

After we were reluctantly ejected from a bar on the edge of Chinatown by an irritate bouncer who wanted to go home (it was 4:45, after all) I was started to crash in a way that can only be compared to a fiery zeppelin. But, with increasing disbelief, I found that I was still willing to follow the Mad Brit party train as we walked over to John's house. John, who was the big, shaggy, blond haired, amiable fellow I met earlier in the night, is apparently the son of one of the Mamas and the Papas, though I never figured out which one. We arrived at his apartment, past an irate doorman who clearly considered us riffraff, to find that all surfaces in John's apartment were covered with sleeping people who John apparently did not know. It appeared that we were going to be forced to party on the roof, but since it was cold, we had to go on an expedition for sweaters for everyone. Now at this point I was only drifting in and out of consciousness, but as far as I can tell, four other people showed up with lots of drugs and since the waking people outnumbered the sleeping people, the party moved inside and the sweater issue was moot.

I think Griff and Ali (and co.) were genuinely disappointed and puzzled by my decision to go home to sleep, but since the sun was rising, I decided to bow to convention and embark on the drunken sunrise journey home. Actually, the usual convention is a drunken sunrise journey to the nearest 24-hour greasy spoon, but nobody seemed hungry and I was starting to think I needed a cane or some stick to keep me propped up.

Anyway, I woke up this morning feeling only vaguely human, but the point of this sordid tale of the city is that it's fun to go see local bands. You hear great music, and later you can party like a rock star. True, I can only do this once in a while, but it's nice to know people who are completely faithful to the sex, drugs and rock n' roll lifestyle.

Luckily, if you live in New York, there are plenty of options for live music. Satanicide is playing a reunion concert at Bowery Ballroom on June 28, and there's a Hair Supply show coming up soon. Gerard, who's apparently in a half-dozen bands when not walking dogs, has a show in one of them coming up at the Knitting Factory on June 8. (Gerard, write a comment and tell me your band's name again). We still eagerly await hearing Puracane, Ali's triphop band, and Griff tells me that Heather plays with my beloved Les Sans Culottes all the time. Put that show together folks and I will do your publicity! (consisting mainly of cute rocker t-shirts and constant haranguing of my blog audience).

If you don't support your local bands, they'll be extinct. Look what they're trying to do to CBGB's here. That place should have historic landmark status.

As for me, as good as they were, I think I need a break from bands. I plan on lying here with my feet up and a bag of frozen vegetables on my head*, eating cheese and watching Golden Girls reruns. I'll leave you with that appealing image.

*I bought this bag of frozen vegetables when I first moved in, planning to make stir fry. However, it is far more handy for icing twisted ankles and cooling hungover heads, as the bag molds nicely around the offending body part.

Real Live Girl

2005-06-18T16:37:00.000-04:00

Whether you were born in New York, or came for school, work or love, (or as my new roommate impressively decided, to just come because "you felt like it."), you start your partying in one particular Manhattan neighborhood. This may not be true if you're not a regular partier, or married with kids, but it is true if you came here single and excited about the New York experience. The neighborhood is colloquially known as "The Village" but in reality, we must be very specific. I am talking about the stretch of Houston, Bleecker, West 3rd, West 4th, between Sixth Avenue and Broadway. Mostly South of Washington Square Park. NYU Area.

This is when you were a tourist. Or when you came here as a student. Or maybe even a high school student, hitching a ride with older friends on a Friday night with fake i.d. This is before you moved here. Or before you before you stopped drinking cheap vodka, before you realized further East and the South, the culture got weirder, cooler, hipper, more punk, and so that was the neighborhood to party in. This is before you started refusing to pay cover for anything (except your friend's band), and using phrase "Bridge-and-Tunnel-Crowd" WAY too frequently. Before you became a New York snob, and now you only go there...well, because a friend's band is playing.

I think every city has this neighborhood. Like Bourbon Street in New Orleans, or Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, or Leicester Square in London. You go to this street on the weekend because you think it's hip and happening, until you go often enough and realize that it's actually cheesy and touristy and that real New Yorkers are elsewhere, laughing at your delusions of hipness.

Like everybody who used to live in the neighborhood--I lived on Sullivan and Bleecker--I swear it has gone completely downhill because I left. Or, more specifically, because of the tattoo parlours and fast food chains that have moved in. Everytime I go down there I thank God those little chess stores, used record stores and vintage clothing stores are still in operation, and that even though the four-cafe intersection of MacDougal and Bleecker isn't the same, Cafe Figaro remains. And God bless Kim's Video. The rest feels totally different though, flashy and shallow and kind of lame. I'm waiting for them to tear those nice townhouses down and put up another high rise. That I would probably move into, given half the chance (and twice the salary).

Anyway, though I'm always happy to hang out in Washington Square Park or visit my cousin Siva, I rarely go down there to party. But when my friend Arun told me that his band, Real Live Girl, was playing at Kenny's Castaways, I had round up some people for support. This is the first time that I have heard Arun play onstage--except at Tamil Mandram religious festivals, plays or recitals. Because, you see, Arun and I grew up together in San Jose, our parents getting together every weekend to get drunk and find an excuse to show off their kids' talents. He was always musical--I think he played the clarinet and trumpet--but he was definitely a rocker from the start. As I like to embarass him by telling everyone, he wrote the music column in high school "In Tune with Arun" and was the only one who experimented with his hair as much as I did. Now, of course, he's an investment banker, but he doesn't seem to have sold his entire soul to the devil, as he's plays in rock bands and quite sincerely refers to his guitar as his "axe."

So when he told me about the show, I called some friends and we all decided to go down and pretend we're still 19-year NYU rock groupies who are "with the band." This week, actually, I've been doing a lot of that, but the bands vary in quality. I know tonight's Heather show at Arlene's Grocery is going to rock, because it's my Mad Brit friends Ali and Griff from mock-metal band Satanicde, and I've already seen them play. Some other bands, alas, I can't say as much for. But Arun's band was really good--the best songs had that loud guitar-based garage sound, the sound that kind of wants to make you mosh around, if someone would just start an adult version of a mosh. I thanked God they weren't yet another pretty lead singer/acoustic guitar/sensitive soul-searching lyric band singing about mean ex-girlfriends and moments of solitude. I mean, I was hanging out in the NYU area again, I wanted to rock out a little. And the band was just perfect for that, for remembering when you used to by tickets from Ticketmaster to go see some band (Billy Idol, Lollapalooza, INXS, U2) live in a stadium of hundreds of teenagers, high as a kite, waving lighters in the air.

Now, the sad truth is that I can't be the rocker girl I once was. I can't go out every night, and even if I could, I coudn't go see bands every night. Most of the time I go out, it's just and excuse to catch up the week's events with a friend, and get a little tipsy together. For that, I need to be able to sit down, hear my friend over the music (and it should be good music, btw) and not have to deal with a 2-drink minimum or a cover charge. But you still have to go rock out with the band once in a while. It keeps you young.

And if you do it in the NYU area, it keeps you twice as young, because you remember that time when you first moved here, and were convinced that no one, ever or since, was as cool as you were, seeing a Real New York Band, at a Real New York Bar.

More about Lizzie

2005-06-16T15:06:00.000-04:00

I rather liked my last post, the move from Lifetime Movies to Lizzie Borden. While it might have seemed random (no less random than half of my other flights of fancy) it was actually because I'm trying to sketch out the Lizzie Borden chapter of my Wicked Women book. That is, I've got it sketched out, by I need to practice the actual writing of it. I don't really have a tone yet for the book.

At any rate, we left off at the Hatchet. On August 4, 1892, Andrew Borden, a prosperous banker and commercial landloard, was found dead in his living room, his skull crushed in by numerous blows from heavy, sharp instrument. Upstairs, his wife Abby was lying on the floor of the guestroom, her neck and head bleeding from nineteen blows by the same weapon. Andrew's daughter (and Abby's stepdaughter) Lizzie Borden found her father's body and had the maidservant Bridget call for the police. On August 11, after an inquest, Lizzie Borden was charged with the murder of Andrew and Abby Borden. The authorities knew almost immediately that the murder weapons was an ax or a hatchet.

This was in Fall River, Massachusetts--Small Town, USA--over a century ago. Since then we have seen some of the worse serial killers in the world--Dahmer, Gacy, even that BTK guy--not to mention numerous genocides at the hands of dictators and those two world wars. Why then, does everyone nod with at least some recognition when I mention the name Lizzie Borden? Especially--and this is a significant, but often overlooked detail--she was tried and acquitted of her crime?

The answer is two-fold. Number one, so little was known or remembered of Lizzie before the crimes that she had to become iconic. A 36-year old woman who still lived with her father and older sister, who had few or no suitors, who didn't cry or fall apart or scream or faint upon the murders, but instead remained preternaturally composed, who had very little that was girly or feminine in her--at least by Victorian standards--Lizzie Borden never became a real person. She never fed the public's fascination with her, never tried to clear her name, never became human. She just inherited her father's money, partied with theater folk, and let everyone continue to believe that she was a murderess.

And that leads to the second reason. We, as a public, love people like that--people who invite our curiosity, and then shut us out. We project our fantasies and nightmares onto them, simply because they are so unreadable. Lizzie Borden was acquitted not because the case against her was weak, or because she was necessarily innocent. She was acquitted because she wasn't a person, but a category. And that category is Respectable, Well-Bred Spinster.

Spinster. What a lousy word. But that word is the key to Lizzie Borden, and the reason the tempting idea of Lizzie-the-Pre-Feminist is really just a lot of hot air. Lizzie Borden wasn't a feminist; she was a spinster. And as our attitudes towards Spinsters changed, so did our view of her guilt or innocence.

Because, yes, there is a cottage industry about Lizzie Borden, a whole subculture of people obsessed with this case, just like it happened yesterday. Just like OJ or Michael Jackson's molestation trial or even the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. The murders of the Bordens remained unsolved, but not for the lack of trying. There are dozens of books, dating back to the time of the crime, written by legal scholars, conspiracy theorists, descendents of witnesses and neighbors. Unsurprisingly, they vary in quality. There is the Lizzie Borden Society, which has forums on anything pertaining to Lizzie (Fall River, Lizzie memorabilia, writings about Lizzie). The Hatchet Online is the online journal of Lizzie Borden studies; the Lizzie Borden Quarterly is the hard copy periodical. The Lizzie Boren Newzletter is distinct from these. All publications extensively discuss every bit of trivia, every minute detail, about the case. You will find articles on how hot it really was the day of the murder; whether Lizzie tried to poison her parents earlier in the week; whether Lizzie was sexually molested by her father; whether Lizzie was a lesbian; reviews of books, movies and documentaries about Lizzie; psychology studies of Lizzie's mental state...well, the list goes on. There have been plays and operettas and works of fiction and essays. A visit to the Lizzie Andrew Borden Virtual Museum and Library reveals poems, jokes, press reports and court documents.

I've read through a lot of these. The tricky thing about the law is that it really is only as good as the evidence presented. We don't know what wasn't at the trial, how someone looked or sounded. Most of the Lizzie Borden writings rely on the same evidence and interviews and books and other sources. The question remains, however--did she do it?

And the answer to that, and how that answer changes over the years, says a a lot about who we think she was--the Respectable Spinster--and how we feel about what that represents. Once again, our views of female violence and female sexuality are linked, and you can follow how the views of the connection between the two changed in the changing views of Lizzie Borden's guilt.

Lifetimes of Lizzie

2005-06-14T21:07:00.000-04:00

I have the television on while I write. It's usually on pretty low, so I can't quite hear what's going on. The best shows are reruns of sitcoms I like--they have this comforting sense of familiarity that's like being in the room while friends are talking. The voices of people, after all, are why I need the television--the radio is just voices, and I become completely entranced by NPR, so that's out.

Apart from sitcom reruns, my television is most often tuned to Lifetime television--or the Oxygen channel, or WE, the Women's Entertainment Network. This is not because I am trying to catch reruns of The Nanny, but because I am hoping to catch a particularly good Lifetime Movie.

Generally speaking, they are in two categories. The first is the children/disease/family category. This includes abused children, terminal diseases, mental illnesses, rape, and a wide variety of Danielle Steele adaptations, usually starring Jaclyn Smith. These are crap. I am not one of those people who finds catharsis in crying buckets of tears, and anything with "sisterhood" in the title makes me want to gag. My sisterhood is much too cool to watch that tripe. That said, there is a second category of Lifetime movies that I like very much: namely, the murder/sex/betrayal movies. These can include "I Slept With My Mother's Best Friend" starring David Austin Greene or "I Slept With My Mother's Best Friend's Husband" starring Swoozie Kurtz and Meredith Baxter or "I Tried to Sleep with My Contractor, but He Turned Me Down For His Unattractive Wife" starring Susan Lucci. These are, to put it mildly, jolly good fun. Watching mildly realistic people do ridiculous things to each other until fall off the deep end is very entertaining, but not so entertaining that it interferes with my writing. (There is a third category, which is "My Teenager Has an Addiction to Gambling/Prostitution/Cyberporn/Cutting/Anorexia." These vary greatly in quality).

Lifetime movies are a repudiation that of the idea that women are not violent. Tune in day or night, and you will find some woman poisoning, stabbing, plotting, seducing and generally laying waste to society at large. A notable genre is the "Seductive Woman" movie, where boldly sexual women somehow convince able-bodied men to commit murder for them, usually of an inconvenient husband who controls the purse strings. The Seductive Teacher theme is a subgenre of this, featuring actresses as varied as Jennie Garth, Helen Hunt and Ann-Margaret in the title role. The Seductive Teacher preys on gullible, horny teenagers who have access to guns, and successfully convinces them to kill her husband. This was most efficiently done by Nicole Kidman in To Die For. Another notable subgenre is the "Scorned Woman" movie, featuring a one-night-stand gone bad, a la Fatal Attraction. These movies usually feature Virginia Madsen or, most impressively, Courteney Thorne Smith. We are usually provided with brief glimpse of the complicated psychology of the Scorned Woman, which usually consists of "My Daddy Didn't Love Me." These women usually approach their problems with a carving knife, a loaded gun, or a pitchfork.

Sex, in short, is apparently inextricably linked to the violence of women. The exception occurs with teenage girls, who are too busy trying to become cheerleaders or battling eating disorders to actually have sex. Or so Lifetime would have you believe. (Exception: Any one of the Devil in the Flesh movies, about an obsessive, lunatic high school student who gets a crush on her teacher who is Otherwise Engaged). Generally, the idea is that when a woman is oversexed, badly sexed, or using sex inappropriately, violence will follow.

I have watched many Lifetime Movies, and if a woman really does go off the deep end, she usually plots to have her prey arrested, humiliated, impoverished, separated from loved ones. On occasion, she will push him off a tall buliding. If she stabs him, it will be the heat of anger (or passion, according to Joe Esterhas). Most often, she goes after the offending wife or girlfriend first. These women she has no problem butchering--after all, she is motivated by the rage of obsessive jealousy. The man is generally given one last chance to repent, leave Wife/Girlfriend/Family and come away with her. He usually turns her down, and is about to meet his end until the Sheriff shows up and blows her away with a large, phallic-looking shotgun.

Which brings us to traditional weapons of feminine destruction. In order, they are poison, guns, and a carving knife (the domestic implications of which cannot be ignored). Rarely, however, does a woman get herself a hatchet. Even more rarely does she go after members of her family. And still more rarely does she do the dirty work herself.

This, to a certain extent, explains the allure of Lizzie Borden, one of my Wicked Women. She committed the ultimate crime against family and society: she killed her parents. Or many believe. Though she was acquitted of the crime at the time of her trial, Lizzie Borden is forever attached to her hatchet, a weapon that few men, let alone women, would choose. It lacks the immediacy of the knife, which is at least at hand in most kitchen. It lacks the distance, the cleanliness, the impersonality of a gun. And it certainly lacks the femininity, the guile, and the subtlety of poison, long considered the woman's weapon.

Miss Lizzie

No, whoever killed Andrew and Libby Borden chose a hatchet, a weapon you have to go out to the shed for, a weapon that's heavy and messy and difficult to clean. It's hard to think of a spur-of-the-moment crime with the hatchet--I think it would require a great deal of anger and hatred to kill with it. And yet it's also hard to think of a premeditated crime with a hatchet, especially with numerous other killing devices around in a Victorian household.

If the Bordens had been killed in any other way--arsenic, slit throats, the proverbial blunt object--then the Fall River murders might not have been particularly notable. But the hatchet (a lumberjack's tool, for God's sake) coupled with the chief suspect (the proper, church-going, youngest daughter) practically guaranteed that the crime would stand out.

And did it ever. Even acquitted, Lizzie Borden lived under the shadow of guilt. After her death, speculations continued as to whether "Lizzie Did It" or "Lizzie Didn't Do It," (the latter a title of a popular book that claims to prove Lizzie's innocence). But the hatchet, in addition to providing both notoriety and continued mystery, did double duty. In the latter part of the 20th century, the hatchet that killed the Bordens became more than a weapon of destruction. Unwieldy and powerful, taking great strength and anger to use, Lizzie's hatchet made her a feminist icon, and every blow to her overbearing father's head was soon viewed as a collective strike against patriarchy, traditional family, and all those Victorian values that kept women in societal straitjackets. Here, at last, was one woman who wasn't going to settle down and be a slave to her husband, father, sons. Here was a woman who wasn't using sex as a weapon (there is, in fact, little doubt that Lizzie Borden died a virgin) or being rejected after giving in. Here was a woman who wanted OUT of the whole marriage-family-church death trap that sucked up so many women around her. Here, in the end, was a feminist icon angry enough to do what other women wouldn't.

If only it were true.

(Part II tomorrow. If I don't get distracted by another topic).

Back from the Vineyard

2005-06-13T14:06:00.000-04:00

Well, back from Martha's Vineyard. Had a lovely time, even though I still haven't been able to figure out why it's called Martha's Vineyard. Any idea?

The Kennedys were very nice hosts. Of course, we had to get away, since we couldn't hang out with them the WHOLE time, that would just become dull. Especially because the Vanderbilts were calling for tea and getting a bit jealous that we weren't going out on their yacht. And I really wanted to see the Carnegie-Mellons, but the Kennedys were rather possessive of our time. I mean, really-- how many Jackie O stories can you listen to? But they were such lovely people and we'd be happy to summer with them again--if they can fix that tennis court. Up at the Vineyard without tennis? Never!

Actually, it was more of a chair-breaking, screen-door falling, bug-zapping, cartwheeling, poker-playing, poker-losing, excessive-drinking, somewhat-smoking, corn-grilling, beach-laying, sea-breezing kind of weekend. I brought work, which stayed in my suitcase the whole time. Furthermore, I have to face the fact that I have become Very New York, since I jumped every time a bug flew by or crawled on the porch. And I think Nature gives me allergies, though it really could have been a host of other things. But I really am a city girl, which is fine by me. It does go against my self-advertisement as an easygoing girl who can rough it if necessary, but I think I'm still that girl, as long as there are no more inchworms.

Martha's Vineyard can indeed boast a high level of quaintness--especially our house, if by "quaint" you mean "decrepit, with accompanying faux-Victorian details." It was, however, an awesome deal, and the perfect vacation--lying on the beach, hanging out at the beach bars, eating spray cheese from a can (surprisingly, not my idea, but I took to it rather quickly), playing cutthroat poker until the wee hours. I am now what my mother would call a "kari kooti" which means "little black dirty animal" which is my mother's rather endearing way of noting that I have a tan. All I expect to see in the pictures is my teeth and the whites of my eyes.

And as for that four-ace hand that beat my to-the-jack straight--well, you know who you are, and I hope you're feeling lousy about taking this poor writer's money.

Off to the Vineyard

2005-06-09T23:45:00.000-04:00

Well, for once I have a good reason for skipping out on the blog--I'm off to Martha's Vineyard for the weekend. I know nothing of this place except that a) it's an island and b) it's quaint. What quaint means, I can only guess, but I can tell you that it's very strange, as a Californian, to have to drive 4 hours to go to the beach. So, without computer access, I can give the old blog a break while I lie on the beach desperately wishing that I'd splurged more on some beach basics. Like that leopard print bikini I saw the other day. How very Dr. No it was....

Swayamvara (Keep Reading)

2005-06-08T00:29:00.000-04:00

When I was young I learned about ancient Indian myths through a very important method--comic books. I will elaborate more on Amar Chitra Katha at later date, when I am more competent. But that is where I learned about the practice in ancient India of swayamvara--an excellent practice that should be revived. It goes something like this:

A king decides that it is time for his daughter to choose a husband. He invites all the most eligible princes and kings in the neighborhood to come over to his palace and compete for the princess's hand in marriage. Sometimes there were feats of strength or wit or military prowess. Sometimes they just hung out and schmoozed, and the princess never even saw them. Eventually, they were all lined up in the long grand hall (all palaces have at least one Grand Hall) and the princess entered with a garland. She would throw the garland around the neck of the king she would marry.

Now, while this may not be logical in this day and age, there is something rather delicious in getting a group of men to compete for you. I think this is every woman's secret fantasy on some level, and it transcends culture. The ancient Greeks competed for Helen of Troy, for example, and men have dueled for ladies (and ladies have liked it) for centuries. But there's an intrinsic problem with the idea--it's still really a man's game. The father picks the men who get to come, all the tests are masculine ones (which may not be of any interest to a princess) and most of the time, it's resolved according to strength of army, size of coffers, political nicety and diplomacy, rather than love or attraction.

Enter Jerry Hall. Yes, another Jerry Hall blog entry. This, my friends is the reason that I am obsessed with this show. Apart from having great fun at humiliating a bunch of pretty boys, she is conducting her own little swayamvara, having a ball at waxing them down, dressing them up, parading them around until she gets them the way that she likes them. For Jerry Hall, an essential test is how a man looks in a Speedo--or, at least, as naked as possible. In every episode, she has managed to strip them to near-nudity, with virtually no logic behind it. Now the speedo nor the humilation would not be one of my tests. Maybe I'd have him fix a car or shoot some pool. Cook Indian food. Or something useful, like build the perfect litter box or help me balance my checkbook.

Anyway, I admire her insight into what she needs: a buff, hairless, Vivienne Westwood-wearing, 20-something man who photographs well and is groomed like a member of a boy band. Good for her. Her only problem seems to be the fact that she only gets to keep one.

But, hey, if she's bringing back the practice of swayamvara, I'm all for it.

A Plague Upon Thee, Hippocrates

2005-06-07T19:42:00.000-04:00

Woke up this morning to discover that I no longer had the ability to breathe, and could only wheeze in pain. This is always a bad sign. Either I was very sick or I was turning into Darth Vadar (and frankly, I think that I would have been a far better Darth Vadar that Hayden Christensen). It was a day of four dog walks in sweltering heat, and when I finally dragged my coughing and hacking self to the doctor's office, I felt sure that relief was at hand.

Relief, technically, was another hour and a half away. If I should have the good fortune of having some doctors in my audience, I implore you to please, please a) be on time, or knowing the inevitability of doctor lateness, b) get magazines other than Autoweek and Soap Opera Digest in your waiting room. Seriously. If you're going to make us wait, fill the place up with junk reading material

I was just starting to simmer with anger and frustration--when I wasn't hyperventilating or doubled over coughing--when the doctor finally saw me. In additional to the Hippocratic oath, all doctors must swear some kind of allegiance to the Ford Motor Company, because I have never seen such an efficent assembly line. I was stripped, stuffed into a gown, poked, prodded, re-dressed and sent on my way within 10 minutes. The whole thing was smooth as silk, except for the few minutes I spent waiting for the doctor to re-enter the room and laugh hysterically at the sight of me in the blue paper robe. To kill the time, I began reading about travel innoculations, particularly since I am still thinking about my Egyptian archaeological vacation. There were the usual warnings about typhoid and malaria and yellow fever, all of which I am on more than passing acquaintance with, having taken the usual truckload of pills every time I go to India. But then, disturbing in its simplicity, was the word "Plague."

Um...plague? I've got to worry about the Plague, on top of everything else? What kind of plague--black or Bubonic? Aren't they the same thing? Is this related to The Red Death? Didn't someone think to take care of this in the Middle Ages? I tried to read more about where the plague might be of concern to me, but it was remarkably unhelpful. Just 1 dose every 3 hours, or some nonsense like that. I decided to ask the doctor, but she was working that assembly line so fast that I didn't even get the question out. I just starting coughing away, which inspired her to give me a tuberculosis injection. Fabulous.

But, really, I'm not complaining. After an hour and a half wait, I was happy to bustled out of there, prescriptions in hand, into my local pharmacy. And let me tell you something--sure, they make you wait at the pharmacy (usually behind some guy with an expired insurance card), but they have good sense to locate it near the magazine rack. Reading about Angelina/Brad/Jen and Tom/Katie and Ben/Jen (the Sequel)...well, time just flew.

Dust Bunnies' Revenge

2005-06-06T23:08:00.000-04:00

There is nothing like a hacking cough to make you realize the importance of, er, breathing. I'm not sure where it came from, but I have a sneaking and embarassing suspicion that it came after I gave my living room a thorough cleaning--including the hefty dust bunnies that have set up a colony under the couches. This is in an effort to do some redecorating in a post-colonial-safari/parisian brothel theme, which requires many more plants, dark wood and red velvet. And a dust mask, apparently.

Vacations

2005-06-05T20:30:00.000-04:00

Daniel Craig, Colm Meaney and some other people in Layer Cake

Another little vacation from the blog, unintended, but perhaps necessary. After the last Jerry-Hall-Ovation Channel entry, I think I needed a break. I suspect my readers would prefer a continued series of short, pithy posts rather than my more longwinded er, flights of fancy.

So, let's experiment with brevity. Nice hot weekend spent wandering around the city, running into a craft fair or street fair every few blocks. Resisted the urge to invest in more socks, sheet sets or sunglasses--or to finally get a hand-knit ethnic sweater, a small-to-medium sized stone buddha or 10 minute neck massage. Drank with investment bankers at a effort-intensive Hawaii-themed party--(every body got lei'd at the door). Got dolled up and went to see Layer Cake with Julie at the old Sunshine theater. (I tried to convince Miss Julie to try the Gourmet Popcorn toppings--jalepeno in particular--but no dice).

Layer Cake, incidentally, is a fine movie. I admit that I have a weakness for the British gangster genre. (In particular, I was a Guy Ritchie fan in particular until Swept Away, which...well, it sadly exposed his deficiencies as a director away from South London). I like the whole British gangster genre (long live The Italian Job!) because it brings a much needed humor and irony to the gangster genre--which was shriveling up a few years ago--and I like it because I like British settings, humor and men. Daniel Craig in particular--they're calling him the next James Bond, but that would sort of be like calling Steve McQueen the next James Bond. (Then again, the James Bond series needs all the help it can get).

The Steve McQueen comparison is one of the highest I can make for a guy. The other top one is the Connery-as-Bond comparison (which I only really make for Clive Owen) and the Cary Grant comparison (which I only really make for George Clooney). If you could smoosh everyone into one guy, I'd be in love for a couple lifetimes, at least. But Steve McQueen is the most real--he has dirty mechanic's hands, that indestructible aura of cool, the ability to drive a car, shoot straight and woo a woman. And, in particular, the ability to wear tight jeans without looking like a particularly fussy gay model. (And, apparently, we share a love of cheese: not kidding)Daniel Craig has that same thing too, even when he's getting the shit kicked out of him.

Let's see, what else...am now fixated on the idea of going either on an archaeological dig, or a volunteer vacation. The volunteer vacation is particularly interesting as it's tax deductible. The archaeological dig may be because I came drunk last night and stayed up blearily watching The Mummy again. But I really do have an Egyptology fetish. Then again, I have a dinosaur fetish too, so the idea of going to China and working two weeks as volunteer on some prehistoric digging site sounds pretty good too. But I'm not sure how rustic I want to get. The real problem, of course, is that my altruistic motives don't count for much, and they both cost a ridiculous amount of money. Perhaps I can convince some foundation that my Indian chick-lit novel necessitates traveling to India to work on restoring some temple for two weeks. Any takers?

The volunteer vacations in America are pretty cool too and much less pricy. The best ones are in New Mexico, working on an Indian reservation, or rebuilding some Arizona community center. The problem is the idea of spending a couple weeks in the sweltering desert, in the middle of summer. I mean, I loved that it was hot and sunny this weekend, but I'm not sure that I want to be camping and working in it. And I like the idea of volunteering; I'm not into suffering.

If anyone knows of an Egyptian archaeological dig that needs a volunteer for one-to-two weeks at a reasonable price, write me. It would help if the dig came complete with some semblance of indoor plumbing and absolutely no snakes. It would also help if the other members of the dig are two older lesbian women who travel together, an overbearing dragon of a woman with mousy secretary, an unscrupulous, yet rouguishly handsome man, a tart flapper, a retired Army colonel, and a small Belgian detective.

Thanks!

(Okay, screw brevity. Next time.)

Why Television Is Good For You

2005-05-31T21:10:00.000-04:00

I was out in the Lower East Side Saturday night to meet friends for the tail-end of their all-day drinkfest. How some of my friends can start drinking in the afternoon and still outlast me is a complete mystery. I mean, I used to be one of them. At any rate, I drank very quickly to catch up to the buzz, and ended up overhearing an animated conversation between two very intellectual, carefully scruffy, rather cute young men. They were talking about books in that really excited animated way that you do when you're only a few years out of college. You know, where you still collect them, and don't yet know how much you're going to hate their combined lead weight when it's time to move. Since I have never grown out of this phase, I was really enjoying hearing them talk with such passion for reading, until one of them said "Yeah, I won't even get television. Television kills your mind."

I suppose we all go through this phase, but since I graduated, I am never without a television, full cable, in my bedroom. I can finally justify it as a business expense, sort of, because it's all part of my cable modem package, but I always feel like I should be a little embarassed to have two televisions in a storage cube of an apartment. But now--no more.

You know that NRA saying: "Guns don't kill people; people kill people?" My beloved Eddie Izzard had this immortal comment: "Yes, well. I think that the guns bloody well help." Same with television. TV doesn't make you stupid; people make themselves stupid. And yes, if you are stupid, then watching television can make you much, much stupider. However--if you're an intelligent person, interested in the world and people around you, then television can also make you much, much smarter.

The best channel on television in New York (Time Warner, at least) is the Ovation Channel. Bar none. The network calls itself "The Arts Network" and that's all it is: artists, musicians, actors. Sounds like a PBS knock off, doesn't it? (And what would be wrong with that anyway?) But there are two very cool things about this channel.

One, the programming is extremely unique. It does some things like A&E does--mini-documentaries about history, biographies of John Cleese, that sort of stuff. But Ovation does it in a very eclectic, hipster, sexy way. Last night, I watched an incredible documentary about Botticelli's drawings for Dante's Divine Comedy, and it was like MTV had taken over the Renaissance Wing at the Louvre. Yes, there were dry professors talking about what the Divine Comedy meant, and artists talking about brush strokes and they were all talking about what, in a museum, is just something to look at. But it was also cut in the MTV style, with contemporary shots of lovers and lots of sound effects and fast cutting and rather cool music. Allusions were made to cartoons, sexual depravity, demonology and Renaissance physics; to the artist's enjoyment of violence; to why we should care about any of this. By the time I was done, I realized I'd learned something, almost by accident, while being immensely entertained.

Second, Ovation is not just boring videos of some ballet or dance performance, or museum tours. Frankly, I don't like watching music on television (it's only good live), so I skip all the ballet or dance or even the opera. But the little documentaries about visual artists are addictive. The show "The Private Life of a Masterpiece" tracks the history of major works of art (Below, mostly to break up the acres of text)

Michelangelo's David, which many Victorians felt was just a big naked man, not art. (Hey, can't they be both)

Rodin's The Kiss. Did you know it's sculpted so that she's actually jumping him?

Eduard Munch's The Scream: The image obsessed Munch so much that he actually painted dozens of Screams.

In short, the stories behind those boring hunks in the museum are full of murder and sex and madness and weird interpretations of art and artist intent that you never though of. The best documentary was the first one I saw: "Matisse & Picasso," a French documentary about the friendship/rivalry between the two artists (they riffed off each other's work like jazz musicians). I've been hooked on the Ovation Channel ever since.

And yes, dammit, I am quite aware that I sound like some boring chick who'll drag you to some six hour Russian opera or an exhibit on Medieval wolf-whistles in some gallery in Queens. (I wouldn't, but I'd be excited if you would). Sometimes I just get that way, It makes me nervous. Where when I was a kid, I wanted to impress everyone with how much I knew, I now want to impress everyone with normal and un-snobby I am.

So...to aid in that, and further my argument that television is good for you, I will confess this: Tonight, I watched, for the second time, the Jerry Hall show on VH1 called Kept. This is the show where Jerry Hall, living happily and Mick-free in England, has decided to hold a contest to find a boy toy. She has picked 12 underwear model-looking guys to torture, tease and train into "the perfect kept man." I was appalled and abhorred when I heard about the show, and yet already rather bored by it. It was inevitable, wasn't it? Besides, I hate, hate, hate reality television. In fact, I hate most television, which is as it should be. And I should be hating this show, but I'm not.

For one thing, I like the idea. Now, don't get me wrong, I think Jerry Hall is one scary looking broad. Over the years, she's gone a little Morticia Addams--if Morticia were blond and Texan. But what else is she supposed to do with herself? She has money. She used to be famous. She would like to be famous again. (After all, it used to be Mick and Jerry on the cover of People and Rolling Stone; now it's Nick and Jessica). Most importantly, she would also like to humiliate a bunch of men on television, thereby announcing to the world that she's a dominatrix looking for action.

I mean, lets give the lady some credit. She greets them in a red, shoulder-padded power suit and elbow length black leather gloves. She makes them swim across the Thames--not the cleanest place in the world--in speedos withe Union Jack emblazoned on the behind. She parades them in front of her girlfriends at a local pub (and, amusingly it's sort of a Rock Dinosaur Wives Reunion; everbody's boyfriend is Bob Geldof or Bill Wyman or Charlie Watts or Pete Townsend). And, best of all, she has a tightly wound, icy blond, British schoolmistress-type Secretary named Katy to order them around and be very, very mean to them.

And, essentially that's what these dating reality shows are about: humiliation. The train-wreck fascination about a whole gender misbehaving and being punished for it. So it's rather nice for a show to be so overt about it, whith Dame Jerry in the middle acting like she's not a day over 20 and yet really seeming to enjoy herself in all her drag queen glory. Hell, when she tosses the first Mr. Wrong off the show, two armed security guards escort him off the premises. Very Duran Duran-meets-Third Reich.

There are many of you who will be appalled that I watched and liked this show--without irony, with genuine interest. There will be many more of you who are appalled that I think it means something. I can do nothing about that. I can only offer the following arguments to your possible criticisms:

1) Isn't it horrifying to see talentless people make millions of dollars and the cover of magazines for absolutely no fucking reason while people are dying in Africa?
Yes. Next question.

2) Well, shouldn't you be doing something about the people in Africa?
Yes. Next question. This one about the show, please.

3) Why do you support or find interest in these talentless celebrity hangers-on who are famous just because they fucked the right people?
I have no idea. That is why it is so fascinating. That is why the human brain is fascinating. That I--or anyone--can switch back and forth between a documentary about Vermeer and The Fab Life of Nelly is fascinating. And yet cannot sit through a single episode of Sex & the City or some godawful Civil War documentary without feeling ill. I just don't know why.

4) Isn't it just junk food for the brain?
Well, duh. But you can find meaning in anything if you choose to think about it, to be aware. For example, I find it a little tacky to advertise for a boy toy on television, and yet I understand it just the tiniest bit. After all, this blog entry began with thoughts of Saturday night, where I was hanging around with some adorable, just-post-college boys and having the time of my life. There's a little Jerry in all of us.

5) Don't you realize that the show has no meaning, it's just marketing and publicity? Something can be overtly about marketing and publicity and still be good. For example, the Botticelli/Dante documentary I saw last night was prepared by various museums who, incidentally, are preparing to exhibit those very illustrations. They are willing to put in rock music and sexy comments and contemporary movie clips to do it. Good marketing? Well, now I really want to see those illustrations, so...yes. And yet it makes you think critically. Kept also makes me think critically. For example, which idiot contestant is going to make a move on Jerry's ice-bitch hot assistant first?

6) Don't you know that it's all planned in advance?
Yes. I don't quite believe that any of these people are real people. I think they're all publicity hounds desperate for their 14:59 of fame, it does sicken me. But I'm enthralled by the obviously fake emotions and plot manipulations that keep intelligent, aware, critically thinking people hooked. Especially when it's in a "wow, I didn't see that coming" way.

7) Does this mean that you like Jerry Hall?
No, I think she's a publicity hound, and probably has an exaggerated faith of her looks and, well, kind of a high-maintenance dominatrix who's two steps away from Sunset Boulevard. But even if her line readings are robotic, at least she sounds like she's a littls self-aware of the ridiculousness. And she's still more interesting than J.Lo.

8) Does this mean you agree with her approach to men or sex?
No. I like men. I think the men on the show are gross, but that's another story. I still believe in chemistry rather than the purchasing power of the British pound. And I don't get off on humiliating people. (Unless it's their birthday and they ask for it nicely, of course.)

9) Are you addicted to this show?
For the next couple episodes, maybe. I'm faithless to television. I certainly won't set the VCR for it. Mostly because they'll play it enough so that I'll catch it again eventually.

10. Will you watch America's Top Model with me?
No. I draw the line at Janice Dickinson. Actually, I'd like to draw a line through her.

Anyway, you get the picture. Some television is good for you. It is good for you in obvious ways, and good for you when you stop and think about what you're watching.

The internet, on the other hand, is evil. Especially when your blog entry is about younger men, Jerry Hall, Bottticelli and television, and you have a tendency not to edit.

Love Lessons

2005-05-29T19:10:00.000-04:00

As I explore my Indian-ness for the Indian chick lit--er, social satire--I realize that I will definitely have to cover one very important bit of Indianicia (which means "of things related to being Indian" and which, incidentally, is also not a real word). I am speaking of the Kama Sutra.

Now, growing up, I knew that Kama was the god of love, and Sutra is a type of mantra or form of learning. I'm not saying these are the actual definitions, but this is what I thought they were. However, I did not encounter the Kama Sutra until my pre-teens, when I was flipping idly through TV Guide and saw that Playboy was playing something called "Kama Sutra Stories III." Normally I would have gone to the Indianica expert in our family, but thank God I didn't, because that was my father. The last thing I needed in my adolescence was any Playboy-related discussions with my father. I'd already once asked him if our new car was a Vulva or a Volvo, and he'd looked at me sternly and said "Never, ever say that word again."

But this only delayed my realization of what exactly the Kama Sutra was. And when someone tried to tell me that it was an Indian sex manual--a how-to guide--with all sorts of dirty pictures, I thought they were joking. First of all, everybody knew that only Westerners had pre-marital sex. Second of all, if there was an Indian sex manual, wouldn't I have seen it by now?

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with Indian sex. Everything in my environment--parents, relatives, Indian books, newspapers--told me that only Westerners were obsessed with sex and made dirty movies. After all, Indians didn't even kiss. According to Bollywood, they expressed romantic feelings by jiggling around their eyes a lot. (Don't laugh. I knew Eskimos had that nose thing, so maybe Indians just didn't kiss). Anyway, when I was confronted with the Kama Sutra again, I was shocked. What kind of Indians were these anyway? And were all these instructions important?

I rather formally studied the Kama Sutra in college in my Hinduism course. It is actually a rather complex book, but there are a few things of importance. Firstly, the Kama Sutra is a guide of Indian etiquette, and only the second chapter is the dirty how-to guide. The rest is on seduction, romance, etiquette when dealing with other people's wives, courtesans, and nice wholesome stuff like that. But it really is like reading Miss Manners, with a Dr. Ruth chapter thrown in. Secondly, it is remarkably gender-equal for its time. It believes that the men and the women feel sexual pleasure--an idea that wasn't present in the West until the 20th century--and part of a man's pleasure came from the pleasure he was giving. My favorite line is from the biting chapter: "Thus if men and women act according to each other's liking, their love for each other will not be lessened even in one hundred years."

So, immediately, one would assume that India was a very liberated country when it came to gender equality. This is far from the case. In fact, the Kama Sutra--a book valued in Western culture but not in the East--is both pro-sexual and pro-gressive, My relatives and every Indian book or magazine I read were either closemouthed or utterly chauvanistic about things like child marriage and spousal abuse, let alone adultery or sex. And gender equality? Please. Men drank; women didn't. Men could have multiple spouses, women couldn't. Male babies were preferred to female babies. The dowry system was alive and well. And, oh yes, that whole burning-the-widow-at-the pyre thing (really only present in rural areas, but still).

This, in reality, was what studying the Kama Sutra in college did for me; it was kind of a philosophical crossroads. This is not, however, what I tell people. I simply look coy and say "Well, I am Indian. We learn these things in private lessons at a VERY early age." A sense of manners prevents me from telling you if I can back this up or not--it would be very un-Kama Sutra like to brag. But that is the best thing about the Kama Sutra; it is the ultimate trump card in the culture wars. The Irishman boasts he invented Guinness, the Italian says he invented pizza, the Frenchmen invented both champagne and cheese. Hell, the Brit even claims he invented civilization. But I just smile, wait my turn and say "Kama Sutra," which means "we invented good sex." Game over.

Conclusory Note: To write this blog entry, I thought I'd do some research and call up my family to ask their opinion of why the Kama Sutra is so revered in Western culture, and so ignored in Indian culture. These are their responses:

Mother: God, why don't you please get married already?
Brother: You asked who about what?
Father: Never, ever say that word again.

Word Artist

2005-05-27T17:28:00.000-04:00

I want to be a great writer. I don't know if I'm allowed to say that. I don't claim to be a great writer now, but I have a goal, and that is to one day read my own writing and say "That's really good. No one else could have thought of that." Like many people, I have moments of this, but they are few and far in between.

I've been in a stranglehold with money lately, thanks to the IRS, and I started looking back at my legal career a little fondly. It was so nice to know where to go each day, know that the work would come in, know that if I put my time in, my bank account would magically plump right up every two weeks, thanks to the miracle of direct deposit. Once in a while, I used to have fantasies of being a really great court attorney, but all those fantasies just centered around striding up and down the courtroom in a Yves St. Laurent power suit and dismantling a hostile witness question by question. Then, of course, there's the press conference. I didn't, however, imagine the painstaking details that every trial attorney must go through--prepping witnesses, going through files, discovery motions, demanding clients, choosing a jury (only to have it turn against you), making up the exhibits...who cared about that stuff? I just wanted to win in court. It didn't take long for me to realize that this had nothing to do with being a great trial attorney. It was just theatrics; I wanted to pull out the stops and give a great performance.

So I'm a ham. But when I think of being a great writer, I think of different things. Don't get me wrong--I think of nice juicy advances and magazine profiles and all those literary prizes that everyone feuds over. I too want to be the Next Big Thing and have all my books adapted into highly inventive independent movies. But mostly, when I think of being a great writer, I think of getting more and more accustomed to sitting in front the computer, pulling things out of my head and molding them with words until they make good sentences and not suffering through the process like it's some kind of torture--which happens more than I like right now--but actually enjoying it, relishing it, feeling like...an artist. A word artist.

Because while it was all the outward trappings of being a lawyer that attracted me--the money, the prestige, the trapped audience of a jury--the only reason I do what I do for a living is because of those few, rare moments when I can re-read a sentence and think "wow." As if someone else had written it.

So I want to be a great writer. I don't just want to sell books. I want to last. I want to evolve. I want to Say Something and manage to Entertain at the same time. It feels insufferably grandiose to say all this. I should just say that I'm happy I ever got published. But it isn't enough. Maybe it's not meant to be enough. Maybe that's what keeps you going.

Snakes and Earrings

2005-05-26T22:58:00.000-04:00

You can tell a lot about a person by the books she reads. Or, I used to think so back in college. The best way to understand anyone in college was to ask them who their favorite authors were. The list was unbearably generic. Sophomore girls were discovering their feminism, and their books invariably included Women Who Run With the Wolves and Wiccan Love Spells. Anyone who was one-tenth Irish ended up pontificating about how he'd retraced Dublin exactly as it was done in Ulysses. Ditto for anyone one-tenth Native American. Even if they were as white and preppie as the Ivy League snow, they'd corner you at some party and start raving the Oppression of Their People and how Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony was suppressed by white American literary hegemony. Indians--well, there weren't many Indian-Americans at Claremont McKenna College. And Bollywood wasn't hip then. So we continued to plaster our walls with Monet prints (I personally preferred Maxfield Parrish) and stuck to the old British canon: Donne, Tennyson, a little Eliot for flavor.

But post-college, it's different. You can never predict anyone. You don't even know if your friends read anything beyond the New York Post sports page. And when they tell you what they're reading, it can surprise you. Witness, for example, my friend Julie. She is a Southern belle, minus the accent (though she can go Scarlett O'Hara at moment's notice). She likes opera and works as an editor for Dutton. She secretly reads romances--the period piece ones with pirates and breast-heaving women--under the covers. I've known her for a while now, so when she told me she'd purchased an erotic Japanese novel, I pictured something kind of Madame Butterfly-ish. Memoirs of a Geisha with the dirty parts written up more.

What she sent me was Snakes and Earrings. Written by the obscenely accomplished Hitomi Kanehara (he was 20 when he got Japan's most prestigious literary award), it is erotic, but not in the way you think. The story centers around Lui, a vaguely nomadic Japanese girl who's part of the disillusioned punk subculture in Japan. When her lover Ama--who, thanks to the miracle of piercing, is literally fork-tongued--goes missing, she realizes that she knows little about identity, let alone sex or love. The novel is filled with filmable visuals--Barbie Girls in camisoles and blond wigs, dragon tattoos that remain eyeless so they don't come to life, punk girls working as psuedo-geishas for drink money (the only use they seem to have for traditional Japanese culture). The common thread through all this is the complicated relationship that Lui has to pleasure and pain--not just in her S&M sexual activities, but in her obsession with body modification, in tattoos and piercing. Each moment of artistry results in bodily pain, and it's hard to guess what Lui enjoys more. It's a dark, terse, unrelenting little book, and, to put it mildly, not what I expected from Miss Julie at all. But then again, this book was a smart business decision. Is it really what she reads under the covers, along with her Harlequin romances? What kind of girl is she? Then again, what kind of girl am I to recommend the book? But I do. It pushes against your boundaries, and you should always push as hard as you can on those.

So people surprise you. And this book surprised me. It's been so long that a book has managed to be both genuinely engrossing and turn my stomach at the same time. You'll read it in one sitting and feel dirty.

Just light a cigarette and enjoy it.

The Social Satire

2005-05-21T17:36:00.000-04:00

Well, my loyal blog readers, I have a confession. I have been putting this off for some time because I don't actually know how to say it. I feel that I might be letting many of you down. However, the reality is that I have no choice, and sometimes you just have to do things for money. In short, what I have to say is this: I am writing a chick lit novel.

And it's even worse than that. It's going to be an Indian chick-lit novel.

You may hurl your samosas at me in disgust.

Look, you knew it was inevitable. I've been pondering it for much too long, and I'm much too broke. The problem is, my irritation with the genre makes it impossible for me to just whip one out. I have to think. I have to ponder. I have to like the heroine, like her Mr. Right, like her Best Friend and even like the Gimmick. And as for trading on the Indian part, well, what can I say. It'll probably sell.

Actually, I make some promises about the Indian-American chick-lit book. They are listed below, and I will count on you, my anonymous public, to make sure that I don't break any of them.

1. Despite the fact that this is in fact a chick-lit novel, I will do everything in my power to move it away from the "chick lit" category and into the "social satire" category. (Category title courtesy of my cousin Siva).

2. There will be mention of some Indian things that I like. However, the phrase "As the scent of curry wafted through the air..." will never be found in this book.

3. References to a) arranged marriage and b) Bollywood will be kept to a minimum.

4. You will, hopefully, like the heroine. Really. Because I have to first.

5. I will NOT give the book a stupid pun for a name: "Exes and Ohs," "Original Cyn," "Better Homes and Husbands" "Bride and Prejudice."

5. This promise is very, very important. I promise you, all of You Who Read My Writing, that if this book is published in any way shape or form, it will absolutely not have a quirky, girly cartoon of a woman with a shopping bag and high heels on the cover. I swear to you. I will make them put a dead fish on the cover before I add another badly designed, obnoxiously colorful cartoon woman frolicking gaily on a cheap mass market paperback to bookstore shelves.

Other than that....Mea Culpa. I'm writing chick lit. What can I say? Curry sells.

Sole Feud

2005-05-17T18:41:00.000-04:00

At last night's party, there were many writers, and, as is customary, we fell into various discussions of writing and publishing. No, they are not the same thing. There is good news and bad news about this. The good news is that writing is grueling, emotionally draining, exacting work. The bad news is that publishing is worse.

Any writer will say "I'm just happy to be published." Forgive me, but this is snobby bullshit. Seeing your book on the same shelf as Lolita will, I admit, give you great joy. However, if you don't realize that writing is only half your job, and if you ignore the various aspects of publishing (including production, cover design, special markets, publicity and publicity and publicity) then your lovely book will sit next to Nabokov for about a year before it disappears forever. Do you want to see the Mona Lisa in a dark room? Does Maria Callas sing in a soundproof room? No? Then wise up. Learn to market.

Now, as you go about learning about publishing, a strange thing will happen. You will become obsessed with publicity and the time you spend writing will start to dwindle. This is normal. In fact, this is the case for 80% of the publishing industry thinks like anyway. Writing is just another commodity. Anyone can do it, right?

Well, don't get too cynical. Lots of people think that way, but you just have to have faith. Despite the monstrous publicity machines out there, good writing still counts.

Allow me to demonstrate with the following examples, which have happend to a young author that you may have heard of.

EXAMPLE 1: An investment banking firm decides to go into publishing--the smart way. They conduct extensive research into the "best" topics for books--the bestselling topics that is. Unsurprisingly, they include sex, diet, business and pets. (Fido is big business). Their plan is to be a "unique, marketing oriented, entrepreneurial publishing firm" that will "quickly turn" out "exciting, highly visible, headline grabbing subjects into mainstream best-sellers." Writers? Of course, writers--we're going to need those. So an ad is placed in order to turn "bright and personable authors into “stars” of the publishing world and their books into ever-growing 'brands.'" Ability to write is not nearly as important as attractiveness and willing to market the hell out of yourself. Some celebrity friends willing to write introductions would be helpful. Our writer signs up, only to be informed that there will be no advance. This is unacceptable to her and her intrepid agent, and she manages to get a small advance, on the condition that she churns out 40,000 words in six weeks. The writer develops tendonitis, but complies. She is promised The Today Show, MTV, a reality show, and major news and media publicity.

Result? The first book produced by the publishing company is an incredibly embarassing book merging as many of the above topics as possible. The publishing world responds with deafening silence. Our writer's book languishes until author and agent decide to track down publishing company--who, perhaps realizing that publishing isn't as easy as it seems, decides to give the author rights back to her yet-to-be published book. She will not be giving back the advance until she resells the book.

EXAMPLE 2: A man from a prominent New York family loses a lot of weight, mostly by joining Overeaters Anonymous. He ends up on Oprah, and with a spread in People magazine. And, incidentally, a book deal for a homestyle cookbook, the advance of which is equivalent to our writer friend's first book. This happens all the time, but what is worse is that the "author" is, well, illiterate. Perhaps he knows this, as he sits on the book for two years before hooking up with a very shady book packager. Named after a famous women's television network (but no relation to it), this book packager decides to squeeze every last dime out of the author and the freelancers hired to complete the book. It would take me a Lifetime to catalog the sins of the book packager, but that is not the point of this post. Suffice it to say that our writer friend is hired to ghostwrite the extended introduction of the cookbook--in a hurry, 10,000 words in one week. Tendonitis again, but she complies. The book, because of recipes and authorial incompetence, is not delivered in one week. It is delivered eight months later to compile a saleable cookbook. During this time, the writer is, of course, paid zilch. When the delivery payment is finally paid, the book packager takes--well, all of it, leaving the "author" to pay the many freelancers. So, there's another six months of emails from "author," book packager's VP (who is a WONDERFUL and COMPETENT person and the only thing holding them together) and our writer friend. The "author" writes emails like the following (reprinted verbatim):

"and i got a bad deal on how the payments was do be done. so i am trying to give you money when every i can it's not like i have a lot of money hanging around or lot of money i'am makeing.This was the toughest time i had in a long time because i had to pay this payments out. So i'am sorry about what happen but their's nothing i can do i can't give you what i don't have.S o please don't call me i give you what i can. we are almost done again i can't give you what i don't have!!!"

It takes a nation of millions and a Rosetta stone to translate the above. Please don't strain yourself. It is included to show simply that "authors" cannot, in fact, always write. Here's another example.

"i am know to that busy and did not know how it works.but i know one please just don't treating me again. you are owe just a little bit of money now and it's almost over.but treating me is not going to work it will just make me very very very angry!!!"

"Treating" in this context, is actually to mean "threatening." In a sense, it could be very clever wordplay in the e.e.cummings style. Unfortunately, "author" has never read e.e.cummings. Perhaps you feel this is cruel, but allow me to state that "author's" family has always had plenty of money and plenty of opportunity to educate "author." Another excerpt:

"I never had so many people calling me for money and stressing me out. And yes it's very very depressing.I truly had to hold my tough with [redacted] with all her threats. I am the kind of guy who don't take that stuff lithely. Please have her understand do not and i mean don't every call me again."

Again, some translation. "Lithely" could actually mean "lightly." This is an unfortunate faux pas, as, having seen this "author" I can assure you that with or without weight loss, he has never taken anything "lithely."

RESULT: A year and two months after the "emergency," one-week project was assigned, our writer friend is paid in full...in no less than 11 individual, unpredictable payments spanning 6 months. The book is barely listed on Amazon.

MORAL? Writing still counts, dammit.

Che Elvis

2005-05-16T23:04:00.000-04:00

Recipe for a Hoppin' Fundraiser

You are two theater types who have decided to do a documentary on Elvis. Yet, like many theater and documentary types, you are short of funds. You decide to:

a) get drunk and complain to anyone who will listen how art is dead
b) scrap the project and focus on your t.v. commercial career
c) throw a party.

If you picked (c) then you may keep reading. The rest of you need to have more faith and persistence in your art.

Tiffany and Jayce Bartok are an extremely engaging couple who are also both actors, directors, documentarians, and kick-ass fundraisers. Together they comprise Vinyl Foote Productions, which does all of the above and can be located at the following website: www.vinylfoote.com. Among their many current projects is the documentary Altered by Elvis, which "follows lives imprinted, fathered, fulfilled and destroyed by our greatest 20th century icon."

Now, not surprisingly to those of you who read this blog (and thank you, btw), I am an Elvis fan. I am an Elvis fan for the same reason I am a Springsteen or Steve McQueen fan: because he is a guy. Sure, he got into those rhinestones and scarves and all that stuff, but Elvis was, at heart, a denim-wearing, smooth-talking, drink-downing guy. With a hot voice. (This is called a Bonus). So I always perk up when someone talks about him with respect.

Vinyl Foote decided to throw a fundraiser to help the documentary along. Most artists have no sense of publicity, marketing, or party throwing. I, too, have been guilty of lazy party-throwing, (i.e. "I picked the bar, they serve liquor, what more do you want from me?") However, the enterprising duo at Vinyl Foote apparently never do things by half. Tonight's fundraiser included the following:

1. LOCATION: A hip, Eurasian themed lounge called Mission in Nolita, featuring a raised stage area behind beaded curtains. Cover charge at the door was merely suggested donation; I cried poverty but still paid up a percentage.

2. ENTERTAINMENT, PART 1: Chanteuse Vanessa Morel, who sang classics like "Time after Time" (Cyndi Lauper), "Love is a Battlefield (Pat Benatar, you heathens) in true diva fashion.

3. ENTERTAINMENT PART 2: Swingin' Elvis impersonator, complete with pelvis swiveling and black velvet/rhinestone jumpsuit.

4. NIBBLES: olives, crudites, grape leaves (mmmm. grape leaves), hummus, etc.

5. SURPRISE DESSERT: Bosco-inspired chocolate cake (actually someone's birthday cake, but we stole some).

6. RAFFLE: of champagne, scarves, gourmet peanut butter, and, my favorite, the Che Elvis t-shirt (Elvis in a Che Guevera pose and hat). ATTENTION: to the person who won the pink Che Elvis t-shirt. If you have changed your mind about it, please contact me as am dying for it.

7. SILENT AUCTION: of Audrey Style and Elvis Presley by Pamela Clarke Keough, The Bombshell Manual of Style, Elvis stamps, giant Andy Warhol banana (get your mind out of the gutter, folks), stints with personal trainer and make-up artists.

8. BACKGROUND VISUALS: Breakfast at Tiffany's on the big screen, also, sneak peak at Altered by Elvis.

9. GIFT BAG. Oh yes, the holy grail of NYC parties. Includes: Saponeria Honey Bubble Bath, Three Custom Color Lip Gloss, Tony & Tina Vibrational Remedy Fragrance, etc. For disappointed boys: stop complaining, explore your metrosexual side and live a little. Bubble bath is good for everyone!

I'm sure I missed something, but it was all such a dizzying feast for the senses. And if I spent too much money, then it was for a good cause.

To Elvis. And Vinyl Foote.

Common Sense?

2005-05-12T00:15:00.000-04:00

So, like many bloggers, I do have many hangover posts. However, I would like to say that, in my defense, I have many drunken posts as well. Like this one. I will describe my night in the following free-form poem:

Friends in town
off to Tortilla Flats,
Inevitably.

Free Tequila shots;
tinsel and Mexicano decor.
Black velvet Elvis looks
much better after
strawberry margarita(s).

Hula hoop
Unused, alas.
Free pitcher for 3 minutes.

Good Mexican food
in the West Village?
No way, dude!
(good cheese counts for a lot)

Bachelorettes meet sailors,
So why am I watching
America's Top Model?

In other words, an excellent night.

I received a letter from an inmate today who saw the article about me in India in New York. One never knows how to respond to a letter from the penitentary, but it seems that this inmate actually has good intentions, and is contacting me for professional reasons regarding The Street Law Handbook. He and another inmate have written a book entitled Police Encounters: The Black Man's Guide to Handling Encounters with the Police & Protecting Your Constitutional Rights. The book was apparently written from personal experiences and experiences of "people on the wrong side of the law," which I assume are his fellow prisonmates. Now they seem to want me to be involved in the marketing of this book in some way, but I haven't actually read it and therefore can't recommend it one way or another. But, according to my penpal, the book was "written to assist people of color who are most often the target of unwanted police attention and the unfair practices of law enforcement" Can't argue with that.

So while I can't do too much to help another book--too many balls in the air, as it were--I can do the following a) order it myself to see if I can recommend it and b) tell you about it, and link the website: www.kommoncents.com

Now, having done my civil service fo the night, it's time for Pedialyte.

The Simpsons

2005-05-10T22:49:00.000-04:00

The above is:
a) the answer to yesterday's quiz question (a)
b) the answer to most of my pop culture references

Sigh. Is high culture really dead that nobody knew that? bonus points for answer (b)

Adapt This

2005-05-10T00:33:00.000-04:00

I am pleased to report that I did indeed see The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy this weekend, and that I thought it was quite good. Now, before all my fellow Hitchhikers beat me with things the movie missed or got wrong--and there were quite a few--allow me to say this: the movie got the spirit of the book right. This standard is in accordance with the principle thesis of my, er, thesis in graduate school, entitled "Fancy Dress: A Comparison of Period Piece Adaptations in Modern American Film." Before I be accused of trying to encourage readership of the aforementioned paper, let me reassure you that only one copy of the thesis exists, and it is resting comfortably in a dusty file cabinet waaaaay in the depths of the NYU Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. I would, of course, be happy to offer anyone a digital copy of the thesis, but, alas, it does not exist. Or rather, it does exist, on floppy, only I typed it on an outdated Mac computer using a program known as Clarisworks (a/k/a "Too Cheap For Windows"). This has encrypted it in computer hieroglyphics, and no known Rosetta Stone exists.

Back to the thesis's thesis. An adaptation cannot work if it intends to mimic everything in the book, down to the letter. Witness, for example, Sin City, which was adapted quite slavishly, and with the involvement of the comic book's author. Even the visuals were preordained. Now, I liked Sin City, but this was mostly because My Beloved Clive was in it. (Take a moment now to ponder Clive's rugged masculinity. Mmmmm. Clive). And the visuals. The story had its moments, but the narrative was bogged down by the filmmakers refusal to take chances.

The Hitchhiker movie is doubly cursed, as I realize through conversation with my friend--oh, let's call him "O"--who could not help but compare it to the v. successful British television series made of the book. I did point out to him that, in a television series, there is simply more time to fill in all the details and the blanks. In a film, things have to be sketched quickly. Think of an artist painting a brick wall. The amateur draws and shapes every brick in the wall, while the artist can paint the same wall with a few, well-placed brushstrokes. V. Zen, no? This is the goal of a film adaptation--not to mimic the book, which is impossible given the differences in the mediums (media? Discuss.) But instead, the goal should be to capture the spirit that the book itself was trying to convey.

I think the Hitchhiker movie does that quite well. This is 45% due to the casting of Martin Freeman as Arthur Dent. "O" noted that they had been working on the movie for decades, and it only got made through a convergence of bizarre fates: 1) Douglas Adams' death (a notorious perfectionist, he held the script up for years) and 2)Men in Black (proving that yes, people do want to see funny sci-fi movies with loads of special effects). To that list of chancey fates meeting, I would add 3) the birth and acting career arc of Martin Freeman, especially after The Office. (Question: why do I now find him sexy? Discuss).

So that's that. Now I have a quiz. A man in Japan claims to have invented a device which can translate the gurgling, babbling and general yapping of babies. (read here)Perhaps he thought of this gadget out of thin air, but I'm betting that the idea came to him while watching a) this television show as b) this character invented the same device.

Discuss.

42

2005-05-04T01:21:00.000-04:00

I have always had a love-hate relationship with Anthony Lane, and today I found out why. Many do say that his cocktail-breezy, faux Noel Coward ramblings are mostly an exercise in style over substance. And, as a person who takes film seriously, it's hard to read him sometimes, because he doesn't--not like a true fan does, anyway. He's too busy doing his little linguisitic gymnastics to really dig into why a film works or doesn't. But, despite all this, I absolutely love reading his film reviews, and I found the reason here in his review of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

"There will be two completely separate and, I might add, mutually hostile audiences for the resulting fim. One will be composed of 'Hitchhiker' fans, millions strong, who will interpret every minute discrepancy between what they are watching onscreen and what they once read on the page as heresy punishable by law, or when possible, stoning. These people are lunatics, and I am one of them."

Simple. To the point, and it summarizes exactly why I like Anthony Lane: He may have gotten P.G. Wodehouse all wrong on occasion, and he just doesn't get Tarantino or Rodriguez, but underneath the ironic dandy hauteur is a Hitchhiker fan. And, as other Hitchhiker fans will agree, that is enough. If you don't know that the answer is, or that white lab mice are actually the smartest creatures on the planet (with dolphins running a close second, and humans the third), or if the gray Sundays don't, at least once, think of the long dark tea time of the soul then, alas, you are not one of us. Even if you see the movie, you won't get it. Actually, we don't get it anymore either--nobody gets it like a junior high schooler, because 1) that is when science fiction means the absolute most to you in your life and 2) you, er, haven't actually read the books since then, so you're not sure you remember why the misnamed Hitchhiker trilogy (there are four books) made such utter, cosmically and karmically sound sense. But it just did.

The movie? I'm curious. But Anthony Lane thinks it wasn't the same, and I think he knows what he's talking about.

(quiz: explain the title of this post)

Grandfathers

2005-05-01T17:13:00.000-04:00

Sivram is here. Sivram is my grandfather's youngest brother, about 73, and an unstoppable talker. He's currently telling stories about how his father's father was murdered and then his father was so disgusted by the behavior of his father's uncles, that he just...well, I'm not sure who we're talking about. The geneology is somewhat dizzying back there. But it's nice to hear him talk.

When my grandfather turned 81, we had an enormous religious ceremony in Madras to signify him seeing his 1000th moon. That meant lots and lots of family--and you can't call them "uncle" and "auntie" either. Chittapa means mother's younger brother; Chitti means mother's younger brother; Periamma means mother's older sister, Periappa means mother's older brother, and it just goes on and on and on. The effort it took to keep all the names and titles straight was staggering, because my grandfather had eight brothers and my grandmother had six sisters and a brother and they all had plenty of kids.

I soon realized that when it came to my grandfather's generation, I spent all my time with the grandfathers but not the grandmothers. The grandmothers gossiped and ran the ceremony and were concerned about my impending marriage and ancestry. All fun, but the grandfathers got to hang out on the porch and get into heated arguments about philosophy and science and lectured me silly when I asked smart-mouth questions. Up until then, I always thought that there was this big thick line between my relatives in India and my relatives from elsewhere, but talking to my grandfathers, I realized there was a lot I didn't know.

Sivram--firebrand, inventor, hellraiser--got into fights and married an American in the 1950's. Along the way he got his PhD in chemistry (on scholarship) and became a Professor Emeritus at some university in Nebraska. Now retired, he lives in a mobile home and conducts scientific experiments in his den and goes on safari. Khanna didn't live long enough to get married, but if he had, he would have married Meenaskshi in an arranged marriage. Since he died, she married Vichu, the youngest, instead. He got a PhD in chemistry and moved his family to Germany, where he still lives. Cheenu was philosophical, stubborn and independent. He married a German woman--also in the 1950's--and went to live in Louisiana, where he became a professor of microbiology. Cheenu liked to get his brothers all stirred up and fighting, and then would sit back like some kind of satisfied, troublemaking Buddha. Jairam refused to go through with his arranged marriage and married a girl he loved instead--a girl who, incidentally, was one of his students at the university he taught at. He got kicked out of the family for a while for that.

And Doray? Doray, my grandfather, had no higher degrees. He worked in the railroad and put all of his younger brothers through college and their PhD's, watching them get sophisticated and adventuresome and settle all over the world. My grandfather was the head of the family--not just his own, with my grandmother, but of the families of his brothers. He was strict and hardy and funny as hell, the kind of guy who, when he got knocked down by a scooter while walking to the store, dusted himself off and kept walking. (He was 78 at the time). He believed in simplicity and duty; he was the one who taught me to do right by your family, no matter what.

As he talks, it seems clear that Sivram Chittappa still likes to think of himself as a devilish young man. Though not all my grandfathers are around anymore, listening to his stories makes me really realize the hubris of youth. We think we invented adventure and and rebellion and idealism, but it's actually been in our blood for a long time...

Tom Wolfe Was Right...Sort Of

2005-04-30T19:22:00.000-04:00

The reason you can't go home again, I think, is largely because, if you do, you can't get a blasted thing done.

I sit down to type. But am I comfortable? Wouldn't I be more comfortable at the table? It would be better on my wrists. Remember when I needed those wrist braces? Why don't I wear them now? Why didn't I bring them? But don't type with that laptop, your father needs it. What am I typing? Is it that silly blog, or is it something I'll actually get paid for? By the way, why can't my own parents read the blog? And now it's time for lunch, so I'll need to move the laptop to the couch. Why don't I type later? Besides, Fill-In-The-Blank Auntie is coming over in twenty minutes. Maybe...I should change? Of course, if I want to wear that, it's okay, but I look so much nicer in that other shirt. Your mother will find it. Can I please watch the stove? Well, I can just put the computer to sleep for a moment, and then watch the stove. Remember to save my files. Do I need a floppy? Your father has a floppy, he'll go get it. Am I still typing that blog? But it doesn't make me any money. Is that the doorbell? Can I get the doorbell? Where is your mother?

(work word count: five)

It's delightful and frustrating to be completely thwarted in any attempt to work. Because then Fill-In-The-Blank Auntie comes and it's time for gossip. Who's wedding is being planned? Where are they holding it? But the food is terrible there. Who is coming to next weekend's party? Can they bring potato curry/chapatti//mango chutney? No lasagna, please. And let's make sure the men don't get so drunk this time. The kids? We've given up on the kids.

(work word count: seven)

Who's going to India soon? Can they bring back some spices/copper utensils/bootleg dvd's? But no saris. We definitely don't want any saris. No matter what the border looks like (gold thread embroidery) or what color it is (saffron fading into rose) or how many yards it is (six yards), we definitely don't want anyone to bring us any saris. No, not even if they are incredibly gorgeous. We would be insulted by any sari someone would bring, especially if it came from Devi Sari Emporium in Gil Nagar, and we would complain unendingly about the inappropriate generosity, as we have done for the last twenty years.

(work word count: ten)

Fill-In-The-Blank Auntie will also complain about her children. Even though they make so much money and are engaged to be married and live within shouting distance of her home and have just bought a new hybrid car, Fill-In-The-Blank Children are completely impossible. But your daughter looks so nice, even if she doesn't practice law. The blue in the hair is very cute. Let her do that sort of thing, she's young, and besides, she's not my daughter, so what do I care? At least she's gained some weight. She used to be such a stick figure, it wasn't healthy at all. What? How is Fill-In-The-Blank Uncle? Oh, don't get me started on him

(work word count: thirteen)

After invariably bringing food and gossip, Fill-In-The Blank Auntie will leave. I will sit down at the computer again, brimming with optimism and puritan work ethic. But oh no. It's time for lunch, and we will be serving some unbelievably delicious homemade South Indian food. As usual. And after lunch, Fill-In-The-Blank Cousin is coming over and we're going to play Mah-Johngg. You love Mah-Johngg, don't you? So, like an unruly baby, the computer will be once again put to sleep.

(Total work word count:fifteen. Witnessing the comedy that is home: priceless)

Lynch Land

2005-04-28T22:11:00.000-04:00

I grew up in Almaden Valley, which is far south San Jose, and is definitely David Lynch land. San Jose has been getting a lot of Blue Velvet comparisons lately, because of the Wendy's Chili Finger, but I think the comparison is long overdue. Almaden Valley is as south as you can get; it's where highways come to die. When we moved there, our house was still farmland; all of Almaden used to be acres of farms filled with horses and grape and peach crops. We lived across rolling hills which, blithely ignoring "No Trespassing" signs, I used to escape into for hikes. (I once had a sudden encounter with an irritable bull, which would have been comical if it had been The Three Stooges rather than me). The nearest bar to either of our houses was the Feed & Fuel, a country-western themed bar where truckers line-danced and fueled up--in all sorts of ways.

People are always surprised at this description of San Jose, but it only became Silicon Valley headquarters in the early 80's. That's when hordes of over-educated Asian and East Indian immigrants poured in--where IBM went, they followed. Living in San Jose was being in the center of constant change, trickling south. Tomato canneries and meat-packing plants were replaced by Sun Microsystems and Oracle headquarters. Downtown San Jose acquired opera houses and jazz clubs and a decent (for California) public transit system. San Jose teenagers grow up drinking beer the backseat of Corvettes, getting stoned in stadium rock concerts, and being extremely elitist about our "alternative" taste in music.

But, except Constant Construction of Three-Bedroom Houses, Almaden Valley has stubbornly refused to take part in the change. For most of the upwardly mobile population here, the lengthening of the highways and expansion of the malls has been a good thing, but there's still an Almaden Valley hidden in the hills. I used to like to drive when I had things to think about, or when the going got tough at home, and a few wrong turns had me up in a strange new world. Driving through the foresty country roads, you'll find the old inn and restaurant which resembles nothing less than the Country Bears Jamboree House in Disneyland, complete with a big-wheeled wagon out front. It promises food, lodging and live, banjo-themed entertainment. You keep driving and pass the Blue Barn--an old Victorian house with a blue barn that always seemed to packed with pick-up trucks in field and raucous parties. The road thins into a sliver, which is tough since it's a two-way road, and you have to pull over if you see another car. There's the New Almaden Museum, which looks like a little house converted into a littler musuem. It's differentiated from the other houses by the painting of an Indian with a tomahawk. Soon, a gorge opens up and the road gets winding; you travel over bridges like a Grimms' Brothers fairy tale. Below, there's a swampy looking lake, and driveways become long and lean, sometimes leading to a bored looking horse in a makeshift corral. Eventually, when the forest gets deep and the bridges get rickety, the road ends abruptly into a gate. At this point, a uniformed soldier emerges to let you know that you've hit The Mysterious Army Base, and it's Best If You Turn Around.

Our favorite show growing up was Twin Peaks, but though we recognized the tall redwoods and oddball mentality, it was still Lynch land, a blue velvet world removed from ordinary, boring reality. It was clearly as far away as you could get from suburban, tech-obsessed, single-family home, hyper-educated San Jose. Right?

Right?

(btw, the Feed & Fuel is still the closest bar to my folks' house).

Flying Home With Bruce

2005-04-27T11:41:00.000-04:00

The flight on Jet Blue always goes by fast because they have those fabulous television sets (even if most of the channels are ESPN or Fox News). I swear, I couldn't find anything, and I really tried, but that's how I ended up watching nearly all the episodes of The Surreal Life. Surprisingly, I learned a few things about life in general: 1) obnoxious 22-year old models can get any man they want if they're creepily aggressive and persistent (that chick from America's Top Model) 2) over-the-hill ex-child stars can be much hotter than over-the-hill ex-models (Christopher Knight (Peter Brady) vs. Marcus Sheckenberg)(Fine, make fun of me, but li'l Peter has some really hot biceps) and 3) never underestimate anyone, as yesterday's perky girl band bassist can become today's perky fetish dominatrix (Jane Wiedlen of the Go-Go's).

But then The Surreal Life marathon ended, and I started to feel gross, like I'd eaten a couple bags of potato chips. Too much junk food for the mind. Luckily, to counteract this, I found out that VH1 was playing its own marathon of Bruce Springsteen videos, and that kept me occupied for the rest of the flight.

I never called Bruce Springsteen the Boss; it feels like a mad-up nickname that doesn't fit him right. My appreciation of Bruce was at odds with most of my other musical tastes (brit pop; grunge; garage bands; punk; rap), but there was something about him. There are those who dismiss him as just another working class. overly-patriotic white boy, but they aren't looking hard enough. Early Bruce was all about being a misfit, an oddball, a dreamer--something that a middle-class Indian girl who stole library books could relate to. His most exuberant songs are all about trying to get out on the open road and chase down dreams (Born to Run, Thunder Road), but when he sings soft and low (Secret Garden, I'm On Fire), I will believe anything he tells me. Yes, I had a crush on him, like I'd have a crush on so many blue collar poets, because he was a man who loved women and all their secret gardens--without being any less of a man. My favorite image is the video from Tunnel of Love--the abandoned carnivals, the song of rebirth, and a scruffy, sexy, wiser Bruce singing, "you learn to live with what you can't rise above." I feel like I'm always trying to catch up to him.

Watching Bruce on the plane seemed fitting, because his music was one of the reasons I came to New York. Not because I thought he was representative of boys from Jersey (although it was startling to find out how off the mark I was on that one). It's because when he sang "it's a town full of losers/and we're pulling out to win," I really believed he was talking to me. I felt to born to run; I had things to do; I didn't fit in. There were a lot of images and daydreams that brought me to New York in particular (Debbie Harry playing at CBGB's; cocktails on top of the world; all-night Eurotrash parties in abandoned warehouses; writers huddling in coffeehouses in Tompkins Square; vintage clothing stores), but Bruce is the reason I ever thought of leaving town.

Now things are different. He has political and social caushes; he has a family; he has an Oscar. And while I'm glad that people have finally started to take him seriously as a writer and poet--someone who embraces all of America, not just garage mechanics and good ol' boys--I think I'll never feel the same way as I used to about him. My Bruce has stopped wanting to run out and tackle that open road, and I'm not sure I have. But maybe that's just fine. As the plane landed yesterday, I realized that the Bruce I loved, the voice of running away, has now become the soundtrack of coming home.

Yes, I Know the Way...

2005-04-26T15:12:00.000-04:00

For once, I've been smart enough to call a car to the airport instead of trying to catch a cab. The trick is, with this flight, all the cabs in my neighborhood are going off duty. Sometimes they only think of it when you're in the damn cab. Then they stop and ask you to get out, or they discreetly radio their buddies to find some sucker who will take you. I got tossed around in three different cabs once like some sort of very angry hot potato. And that third cab proceeded to rear-end someone on the BQE, so I missed my flight anyway. My only recourse in these circumstances is to level a Medusa like glare at previous cab driver and assume my Lawyer Mode with the next one: Bitchily, unapologetically demanding. Or, of course, I could just remember to call a car.

I am going to San Jose, which is a kind of weird place. I will describe it in later posts. Suffice to say that while people may think I'm going there to see my folks, I am actually going to put an end to that Wendy's Chili Finger debacle once and for all. (Apparently the woman who found the finger has been arrested, and the police are offering $100,000 for any knowledge of the origin of the finger. I am on the case.) I hate waiting at airports, and I usually end up in the store called BOOKS and either succumb to some zen business motivational manual, or catch up on magazine reading. I will learn "Celebrity Diet Secrets" from US magazine and "How Thin is Too Thin?" from Star Magazine. Each will have Jessica Simpson on the cover.

Bloody ANZAC

2005-04-24T21:10:00.000-04:00

I admit it. I am drunk. It's 9:00 and I have attempted to make pasta, which has been a total disaster since I have spilled all the shredded cheese and cut the garlic into big slices rather than crushing it properly. (My goal with fresh garlic is to slice it thinly, like Paul Sorvino does in Goodfellas, with a razor). Anyway, while the pasta boils, I can tell you about the Australians.

Australians are bad. They drink all the time. I was at the Sunburnt Cow, some Australian bar in the depths of Avenue C, drinking to celebrate ANZAC day, which is like Veteran's Day, only it has to do with the Australians and New Zealanders sent to certain death in various wars by the British. Not sporting, exactly, but there you have it. The celebration of ANZAC day involves some sort of coin toss game which everyone circles and shouts and bets money on, and drinking yourself into a coma by noon. I showed up at three with Mary and her boyfriend Joe, thinking this was respectable, and was blotto before the sun when down. I freely admit that I flirted with all sorts of youngish aussie boys and danced rapturously to Come On Eileen. There was some sort of free Fosters-and-meat-pie giveaway, which I managed to convert into various Stoly drinks.

The lowlight of ANZAC is that I got the hiccups. I got the drunken hillbilly bimbo hiccups. Seriously, I couldn't stop. All sex appeal and intelligent conversation dies with hiccups. Instead, people amuse themselves by suggesting cures to you that only get you to do ridiculous things. I drank out of the wrong side of the cup and held my breath and swallowed. At one point, Mary and three random strangers shouted at me, in order to scare the hiccups away. If there was an old wife there, and she had a cure, we would have tried it. My only consolation is that I was amusing my friends greatly.

Eventually, the hiccups went away, and I even managed to get into an intelligent conversation about the L-Word, and why men should watch it. Not, as commonly noted, for the innovative, varied and well-lit sex scenes, but because it portrays an interesting world of women who seem to be doing just fine without men. If pressed, boys, we could do it. It isn't our first preference, but if we have to...

Anyway, the combination of Stoly and hiccups had made me blind stinking drunk by 8. I barely even danced when they played INXS, which, as many know, is the seventh sign. I decided to go home.

Note to drunken pasta makers: be careful how much pasta you put in the water. Otherwise it will overflow and spill pasta everywhere. Then you will attempt to pick up the pasta, only to get burned on the hot stove. The trick is to turn the stove off before gathering up loose pasta. Trust me, you need to know this.

The pasta is ready. It's time for the goings-on at St. Mary Mead. If you know this reference, then you are someone I want to know.

Room for Rent

2005-04-23T20:46:00.000-04:00

There are few things I hate more than looking for a roommate, but it looks like I'm going to have to do it again. My v. cool roommate Mary is moving out to move in with her boyfriend, and all I can do is hope they get an apartment in our building, which would be very fun.

I'm one of those people who actually likes roommates, once you get the right one. The longest I've lived alone is four months, but that sounds pretty rough now, when I'm also working at home. I have had a couple pretty bad experiences, like that girl I took to court, or that temporary lawyer guy. But mostly I've had exceptionally good experiences, like Mary, and my former roommate Julie, who was visiting this weekend. The ideal roommate for me is someone who really wants to live with someone, and likes the idea of coming home and making a martini and watching some B-movie. Or, alternatively, throwing a party. I know that the days of keggers are behind me; but clearly, I still like the idea of having a sort of college-y, social atmosphere around the house. Besides, whenever I want to, I can go to my room and shut the door.

It helps, of course, that I don't have to get up in the morning, and that the roommates I've picked have the same party levels as me (i.e. weekends are fair game weekdays are not). Julie was probably my most social roommate, having lived in Australia and made enough friends to keep us busy for a while. At one point, we had gone 11 weeks of having at least one guest staying with us. And I really liked it, actually (though I can't convince Julie of that).

But really, it was because I had all day to sit typing on the computer. So while everyone was out sightseeing or at the office, I can get my work done, have some alone time and be ready to drink at night. Guests give you the excuse to party in the apartment, which is much cheaper than trekking out to a bar. (which, actually, we also do anyway).

So given my track record, I'm actually a little optimistic about the new one. You can start to get the hang the roommate hunt if you've been at it long enough. You also need a little blind faith, but still, it's not the worst thing in the world.

Deranged Marriage?

2005-04-21T23:59:00.000-04:00

Am watching The Golden Girls' episode where Dorothy finds out that Sophia had an arranged marriage but got it annulled and sailed off to America. She asks Dorothy not to tell anyone (Bear with me, this is going somewhere). So Dorothy, who's recording some family history thing, says that Sophia was a pioneer in the women's rights movement by refusing to be thought of as chattel.

Now, arranged marriage is a thorn in my side. For those of you who are curious, when most people ask me where I come from, I still say "San Jose, California." But mostly they're curious about my heritage, so I always follow up with "Madras, India," which is where the folks are from, and what makes me Indian. I myself am more technically from "Poughkeepsie, New York," but people always seem a bit dissatisfied if I give them that as my second answer.

There are lots of follow up questions as to exactly where me and my family are from, and they usually go like this: "South India. Tamil. Brahmin. Kodumbaakum." And after all that, there's the question that everyone wants to know "what's your family's story with an arranged marriage?" I've gotten a little touchy about the subject. I went to a conservative college where people tripped over themselves to ask the question. It made me feel like all the other questions were just warm up pitches

Anyway, I was also thinking about this because, recently no fewer than two of my friends sent me an article entitled "Is Arranged Marriage Really Worse Than Craigslist?" by Anita Jain. The article was a pretty well-written piece about the trials and tribulations of a single 30 year old woman trying to find a nice guy in New York, and willing to go through Craigslist and through her parents (dubious) choices on matrimonial websites. (Oh yes. There was one called www.marryadoctor.com. I kid you not.) My responses, which were big essays on Why Arranged Marriage Is Not For Me, were probably just defensive measures to ward off being seen in the stereotypical (and pretty untrue) "subservient Indian wifey" role. But I do get a little, er, animated on the topic, mostly because it seems there don't seem to be any Indian-Americans who are writing about Why Arranged Marriage Is Not For Them.

I mean, Jain smokes, drinks, carouses and generally sounds okay, (except that it does sound like she has lousy taste in men, Indian or otherwise). The whole essay is about the losers she's been out with, both through Craigslist, and through her parents' setups. She ends up saying that one is no worse than the other, and she'll continue doing both. My response is: if something gives you nothing but negative experiences, why keep doing it? There are other websites, other methods. I mean, if you pick from a pool of certain ill-fitting statistical expectations, why should you be surprised when you keep getting lemons? Guys who advertise for a "Brahmin caste" or specify that Ms. Right must have a M.S. are as tiring as those ultra-demanding chicks from That Show I Hate. All those days you spend going out with them could be spent with friends, at parties, and generally figuring out what works.

I think Indian-Americans are afraid to say "it's not for me" for three reasons. First, we might be wrong and actually meet a great person through this method. Second, if we get nervous and feel like we're running out of options, we might decide to give it a try, and then we'd look stupid having denounced it. Three, it's a recognized part of Indian culture, and we don't want to sound like we're disrespecting the culture.

Hey, I can take the risk. In the event of the first two reasons, I'll either be wrong and married to Mr. Right (um, gee, the agony), or I'll have bigger things on my mind than what I wrote on my blog some late night. And as for that Indian culture excuse: gimme a break. All cultures have customs and nobody in the culture follows all of them. I think you pick and choose. This custom used to be about child-marriage, exchanging property and dowry, and yes, (thanks, Dorothy) treating women like helpless chattel. If you want your parents' help finding a match, that's great, but don't hide behind religion and society and say it's customary and that you can't go against it. Besides, there are so many more beautiful, powerful customs in India that I don't feel sorry to let this one go by.

And frankly, I just don't think that the places my parents look for eligible men is a place where my Prince Charming is going to go. In other words, unless it's a hilarious Touchstone comedy staring J.Lo, my guy is not going to be advertising for a wife. I just don't see it, and will go so far as to say that if it happens, then it's a goddamn, straight-up, fluke. And it goes both ways--few guys who are that ready to be married--not in love, not with a girlfriend, but married--are going to be very happy with me. Right now, anyway.

Faced with six nights a week of going out with Craigslist or marryadoctor.com lemons (or shoes that don't fit, if you prefer), I'd rather make a martini, put my feet up and watch David Brent dance around and sing "Simply the Best" at the motivational seminar.

And if that cuts down the percentage of Indian men in my dating pool, then so be it. Mr. Right can be any damn color he wants; it's not going to make me any less Indian.

Hootchie Stories

2005-04-19T19:27:00.000-04:00

A ridiculously beautiful day, which means I accomplished nothing and will be up until 3 trying to do what I should have been doing all day. I ended up down in Union Square trying on party clothes at a hootchie store.

Ah, yes, allow me to elaborate. For those of my audience who are, well, guys, I will explain. I am not, exactly a hootchie. (actually, since I am no longer college aged, the appropriate description would be "floozy," and I am not that either). However, I, and other respectable impoverished females, have a secret hootchie store where we get our club/party/hootchie gear. Everybody knows what I mean: those one-shoulder fuschia tank tops; those stringy glitter halter tops; anything with "punk rocker" stenciled on to it. Trampy and trendy.

You could, as Paris Hilton does, buy out gorgeous, exquisitely-made cutting edge designer trampwear, but why bother? We are planning to dance in them, spill drinks on them, and talk our way into clubs with them. We don't care that they're going to fall apart in a couple washes; they'll be out of style by then anyway. So for these clothes we go to the hootchie stores.

The most bottom of the heap hootchie store is the "Everything Under $10 Clothing Store." This like all the hootchie stores I patronize, is a chain. (I've heard rumors of a "Everything Under $5 Clothing Store" that could just be folklore). The "Everything Under $10 Clothing Store" is serious about its title. You will geniunely find tops, pants, dresses, shooes, swimsuits, lingerie, sweaters and accessories, all under $10. The only mention of a natural fabric will the be a tag on some bustier that reads "50%Mylar 50% Cotton" only it's spelled "Cotten." Unsurprisingly, these shops offer very slim pickings as they are sized all wrong and often held together with staples. But once in a blue moon, you'll find a quality hootchie top there--not too vulgar, just revealing enough, and doesn't push your boobs into a weird place.

The top end of hootchie tops is H&M. H&M, whoever or whatever they are, are gods. These shops feature cool outfits at pretty decent prices. Some women dream of the Ralph Lauren store; I want one day and a credit card to shop at H&M's.

In between these two are the following, in descending order: Urban Outfitters, Forever 21, Joyce Leslie, Bang Bang, Contempo Casuals (beloved in high school, if it's still around) Strawberry, Wet Seal(another that may be gone)and Rainbow. Some of you not on the East Coast may not recognize the names, but I have patronized them all, with pride. That blue sequined/glitter tank? Wet Seal. The black vinyl pants? Bang Bang. That weird lacy camisole top? Urban Outfitters. That t-shirt I cut up to look punk rock? Rainbow. You get the drift. They are the reason that I will never pay more than $7.99 for a tank top--ever.

Now, you may think that at my age (i.e. above 17) I should not be purchasing clothes which were designed solely on paparazzi phots of Britney Spears. But I figure it's only hootchie if my whole outfit comes from hootchie stores, a la aforementioned P.Hilton. No, I distinctly remember Vogue magazine saying that every outfit should have at least one quality piece. I've always tried to follow that ideal, except that instead of the $3500 Chanel jacket, I have my $50 Express Anchorwoman black slacks.

If you have not guessed, this has nothing to do with being either a lawyer or a writer, but it is about how I spent my day. Which means that I will spend my night, here, typing. But it was a damn fine day.

(Ladies, feel free to enter your vote for the best hootchie store below)

My Fellow (Slinky, Opinionated) Female Bloggers

2005-04-17T20:46:00.000-04:00

It's a bit embarrassing to admit, but I don't read many blogs regularly. I check up on my girl bunnyshop to see what stylish items I would be buying if I had money, and I browse through Wonkette for some political info (though history has proven their election predictions to be a little suspect). And, of course, like many New Yorkers, I browse Gawker.com on occasion to see what Paris Hilton accessory (chihuahua, Sidekick, Nicole Ritchie) has recently been misplaced.

A recent visit to The Gawker, however, filled me with blog-envy, as I saw an excerpt from a blog called opinionistas. As it is a blog written by a hip, young, female attorney who lives in Manhattan, the situation was further exacerbated by the fact that two well-meaning friends sent me the link to say "uh-oh. another lawyer-writer and SHE'S on gawker.com." Oh, dear.

A well-known fact is that the vast majority of bloggers and blog-readers are male, usually white male. Perhaps only white males have access to computers--I don't know. But since it's nice to support the sisterhood, I decided to take a look at both Opinionistas, and another girl-blog, The Slinky Cat Speaks. This last is primarily because The Slinky Cat has been nice enough to post comments on my blog from time to time.

This is what I have deduced about my fellow bloggers. My immediate reaction is that I would probably enjoy having drinks with the chick behind Opinionistas. She's creative, she hates Sex and the City, she's unafraid to bash lawyers and the law life, and she does it in full rant mode. I find her writing a little undisciplined and hard to follow, but that's to be expected from a blog that aspires to be an "interior monologue on the computer screen." In substance, a lot what she has to say about the law is on target (more on that below). Slinkycat is focused in terms of a topic, but I find that her subject matter often parallels mine: odd New York moments, parties, gossip, confrontations, self-deprecation. I identify most when it's personal--about herself rather than about the world. I have a sneaky suspicion that she is not based in the U.S., though I'm not sure why. I'm also not sure that she's a lawyer.

Both are hugely entertaining looks at the lives of young women-writers, sort of an alternative to the dreaded chick lit. I have to admit I turned a little green on The Slinky Cat's exegesis on the relationship between Carrie and Mr. Big, but for the most part, I find her writing and life generally pretty damn funny. So she is linked at the left.

There's no question that I find a lot interesting in Opinionistas as well. La Opinionista herself appears to live in Soho and work for an employment law firm. A friend noted that since she is still filled with fire and brimstone, that she is probably a recent graduate and junior associate. I asked someone whose opinion I respect if he felt that her descriptions of lawyers and law firms was accurate, and he felt it was. I myself don't have such colorful stories, as I felt utterly beaten down by my law firm the minute they took the photo for my i.d. badge. I remember only walking down maroon corridors filled with perplexing modern art and feeling vaguely that I'd been taken hostage by drafting and collating terrorists. Now that I'm safely out of that world, I don't have as much anger about it as Opinionistas does.

What I found most interesting were the various comments after Opinionistas' blurb on gawker.com. Almost all were from fellow attorneys. Many commended her wit and her accuracy in depicting what people don't know about law life. But quite a few others seemed offended by it. This last group of attorneys seemed united by one common theme; namely "you knew what the life was when you chose it, so you have no right to complain." Interestingly, this is also the justification of paparazzi hounds for their lifestyle and career choice. To wit: "I have a right to chase J.Lo down a dark alley because she knew that this was part of the celebrity life when she chose it, and therefore cannot complain when I take pictures of her thong underwear when she trips and lands on her face." I didn't buy it then, and I don't buy it now.

I do some work for a legal publisher, and part of my job is going through mountains of confidential feedback from associates at both small and large law firms. Everybody hates their hours, but they are terrified to admit it openly. Instead, everyone says "the hours suck, but I knew that when I picked this job." I applaud their foresight. I, personally, thought the work was going to be much more intellectual, the hours much more manageable, and the job much more satisfying. I am still not quite sure by what process the large urban law firm manages to suck the life marrow out of your bones, but I suspect it has to do with the fact that you are suddenly faced with adoration and acceptance by society at large (you're a lawyer, you must be smart!) and treated as disposable as a tampon by your boss and co-workers. I think this identity crisis is at the core of lawyer burnout.

I'd like to see opinionistas give in less frequently to her anger and delve a little deeper into why firms and lawyers are the way they are. I feel like she could come up with some real gold on the subject. Furthermore, I do find one thing in common with her critics--namely, if she hates it as much as she seems to, why is she still practicing at this firm? But, in the meantime, she's linked at left as well, and I look forward to following her battles with the inexplicable, many-tentacled monster that is the law firm world.

Hustle to Kung Fu Hustle

2005-04-16T02:32:00.000-04:00

I was at an east village bar talking to a lovely young man in a (nice) vintage suit who spent a good portion of the evening telling me that while his agent thought he as a genius (said twice) he had no respect for people who told him that, and that he would much prefer someone to say "you're crap, but we want to publish you anyway." Now I found him truly precious, and the richness of the contradictions and the material in general could fill a blog post, but I will let it go, because I want to write about something else. To wit:

Go See Kung Fu Hustle.

Now, it is rare that I actually recommend a movie to the world at large, as I think some things are largely dependent on taste and sensitivity. However, it is 2 o'clock in the morning, and I am not sure how much longer I will be awake/able to type, and I am very sure of myself. If you read this blog, for any reason, you should go see Kung Fu Hustle. It is already the best movie of 2005.

It is, unfortunately, the kind of movie that brings out the film major in me, kind of like the creature rising from the Black Lagoon. (or was it Blue Lagoon? Discuss). It really is that kind of movie. While the most interesting thing about Tarantino is his love for Hong Kong action movies (before he became too literal), then it makes sense that there should be a Stephen Chow, a Hong Kong action hero with a love for American movies.

There is about as much plot as there is in a Tom & Jerry cartoon, but there are three groups of people to worry about. There is the murderous Axe Gang, a group of prohibition-era gangsters who dance in Busby Berkeley formation with their weapon of choice, led by a sexily effeminate and ruthless leader. There are the inhabitants of the Pig Sty, the poorest section of town, which has its own group of misfits: bitchy landlady, gay tailor, sexy laborer. Finally, there is small-time hustler Sing (Stephen Chow) and his big puppy-dog sidekick. Sing has learned there is no use to being a nice guy, and wants desperately to be badass in the Axe gang.

The whole movie is essentially a tug of war between these three outfits--or, if you prefer, an elaborate excuse to have the funniest fucking fight scenes on the planet. Think Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, with a sense of humor. Just as you expect it to lapse into sentimentality, it gets cheesily hilarious. When there's romance, it sours. Characters slap the shit out of each other like Warner Bros. cartoons, and the only real disappointment is that an anvil didn't actually drop on someone's head (and that there were no references to the Acme Corporation). It's all about loving American movies, the best things about the Golden age and the modern age of movies: speakeasies, nattily dressed gangsters, Western standoffs, the Three Stooges, The Shining, The Matrix, the leisure-suit Vegas of the 70's, Chuck Jones cartoons, Bugs Bunny, Frank Capra, Buster Keaton, superhero comic books, silent films, Silence of the Lambs, fortune cookies, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Gangs of New York, lots of Quentin Tarantino, glamourous Fred Astaire musicals, broad Scary-Movie slapstick, Chaplin, Roadrunner, Bugs Bunny, Martha Graham, West Side Story, and everything that Bruce Lee movies have taught us about martial arts. It even throws in a telling reference to Greek mythology.

You will like this movie if: 1) you like to discuss/study movies, especially old movies 2) you like Bugs Bunny or Tom and Jerry 3) you like movie martial arts on any level 4)you like movies that are surreal, sublime or silly. Just a warning: like I said, the plot isn't the point. The fights are-- think of them as a mixture of comedy, violence and dance. Both the movie and the fight scenes mix obvious cliches with unknown ideas, cheap puns with filmic philosophy.

I'm actually holding myself back here--there's a lot more I could say about its brilliance. Maybe I just love it because I recognize another film buff at work. But just know this: it is funny, it is unexpected and you'll feel pretty giddy leaving the theater.

Now--did I make the right choice? Should I have written about the self-deprecating genius-dandy sitting in the bar and telling me about the evils of the literary scene? Well, go watch Kung Fu Hustle, and then you tell me.

Fancy That

2005-04-15T20:21:00.000-04:00

Cat Fancy magazine has emailed to tell me that they like my article idea, and that they will mail me a contract. The only hitch seems to be that I don't recall pitching an idea to Cat Fancy magazine. It does sound like something I would do...er, drunk. Apparently, the idea had to do with cats and the law.

Now, the only reference I can think of is that loathsome Wisconsonian proposal to allow people with small game licenses to hunt feral cats. Feral, in this case, means "without a collar." So any pussy with out a collar is literally fair game. Luckily, the Wisconsin governor and half the state oppose the idea, so it may not happen.

That topic, however, would be a hard-hitting article of journalistic integrity. I don't think Cat Fancy does hard-hitting articles of journalistic integrity. I think they do stories about how to own a cat. And if the fuzzy barbarians running all over my house are any indication, I am not the person to be advising others about owning cats.

There is an upside to this. Namely, that my article has been approved for the 2006 Calender. So that gives me at least seven months to figure out exactly what I may or may not have pitched them about cats and the law.

If I have ever told you my article idea, please comment below.

Food Porn

2005-04-12T15:22:00.000-04:00

I have a strange little fetish. It has to do with eating. Or, specifically, reading while I'm eating. I like to read about food while I eat the food.

Now, I happen to think that there are perfect books for any occasion. Literally any occasion. Beach reading is cheap, trashy novels about exotic locations and improbable love affairs. Traveling in general should have at least one book of essays about your destination. Bathtub reading is girly books or film books (I don't know why, but film books go nicely with a bubble bath). Airplane reading is usually magazines, although sometimes I'll be browsing around the bookstore and be suckered into buying a psuedo-business book like "How To Be the CEO of You Life" or "Seven Successful Secrets of Dogwalkers and How To Apply Them To Your Career."

Anyway, when I eat, I like to read about food. I think this harkens back to when I was a child. I was a notorious undereater who did not like to be at the table for any reason. If I had a book, however, it went by less painfully, but my parents thought that was antisocial and wouldn't let me read at the table. The only meal that went by pretty quickly was breakfast, and I think this is entirely due to the fact that I read the back and sides of cereal boxes in great detail. This is where I learned about Riboflavin and Natural Coloring #2 and that [insert cereal name here] is part of a complete nutritious breakfast. (This last part is presumably for lumberjacks, as the breakfast always pictured had milk, orange juice, two pieces of toast and a banana. That always sounded like its own complete breakfast to me. But without the cereal, there would be no cereal box, and therefore nothing to read).

At any rate, many foodies do take food literature quite seriously. My ex, an excellent chef and crazy foodie, had shelves full of literature about food and cooking and various cuisines--you know, the high-brow stuff like M.F.K. Fisher and James Beard and that guy who writes for Vogue. I liked reading those books, but they were lacking something crucial--pictures. And while I like food magazines like Gourmet or Food & Wine (and like to keep a few on hand), they too seem lacking, as the descriptions seem to pale behind long and technical recipes.

My favorite item of food literature is in fact not really literature, but food porn. It is the Williams Sonoma Seasonal Catalog, which someone at Williams Sonoma mistakenly thinks I am affluent enough to receive. Normally the catalog is filled with ridiculously expensive cookware and plates and utensils and useful items like lemon zesters and garlic presses. Since I do not cook, this is of no use to me.

No, what I like in the seasonal catalog is the dozen or so pages of prepared food and seasonings that you can buy directly from William Sonoma. All the food is beautifully shot and carefully described. Thoughtfully, the folks at WS offer both the sweet desserty foods and the spicy cheesy foods, so I can read it for meals or for snacking on cookies.

Witness, for example, the caption accompanying a picture of The Big Caramel Apple: "Each confection begins with a magnificent Washington Fuji apple, a variety prized for its juicy crispness and sweet, slightly spicy flavor. Candymakers double-dip the apple in handmade caramel that’s been simmered in copper kettles to rich, buttery creaminess. The apple is blanketed with a thick layer of Guittard dark chocolate and finished with a drizzle of chocolate." Now I'm not sure what Guittard dark chocolate tastes like or where exactly Washington Fiji is, but doesn't it sound delicious? And look at that thing. It looks like a big chocolate bowling ball.

And how about the one for Lobster Stew: "The hearty melange ...contains cream, butter, milk, spices and more than half a pound of lobster chunks with every quart." That sounds pretty damn rich, and this picture just makes me drool.

The funniest part is that I like to read about the meat and fish as much as anything else. Even though I eat neither, it just sounds so good! Everything is succulent and moist and applewood-smoked or maple-bourbon glazed or Cajun-spiced or sliced paper thin. And they come in flavors! Case in point: the Sausages by Amy can come in Chicken, Mozzerella, Peppers & Tomato (that's one variety) or Chicken with Apple and Gouda or in a half a dozen other flavors.

Who is Amy? ("A third-generation sausage maker") How do you make a sausage taste like apple and gouda? Is there hickory involved? And what is hickory? These are the questions that vegetarians like me wonder about, but I'm happy to have them unanswered. The truth is, I know that once I try one of Amy's Sausages, it will never live up to its description: ("flavors lean cuts of chicken and pork with herbs, fruits and vegetables to reduce the fat without diminishing flavor") and will just taste like...well, meat. Which I find bland and oily unless covered by one, preferably two, condiments.

Of course, my favorite part of the WS Catalog is the cheese. I can read about cheese all the time. For example, did you know that the Parmigiano-Reggiano Cheese below is "moist and intensely flavorful" and "revered as one of the world's great cheeses."

And it has its own little aristocratic history: "...made by hand from the finest all-natural ingredients in Emilia-Romagna, the region in northern Italy that also produces prosciutto di Parma and Aceto Balsamico. Following a tradition almost 700 years old, cheesemakers age wheels 12 months or more before initial inspection by the Parmigiano-Reggiano consortium. Wheels that pass the test are branded and aged at least six months longer to become eligible for the consortium's highest rating; our cheese is cut from these vintage wheels. Delicious grated over pasta or risotto." What does this all mean? It means it's a damn fine cheese.

Now, as this cheese goes for about $50 a wedge, I will not be ordering it anytime soon. However, as I read this description while eating my sandwich with melted Kraft 2% American Cheese, I will be very happy and full of cheese-love.

What can I say? Food porn. And proof that there's something to read in any situation.

What About The Blue-Haired Girls?

2005-04-11T15:14:00.000-04:00

I have decided to write chick lit. This obviously a surprise to my regular readers, who have been subjected to my tirades on why chick lit is formulaic and ridiculous. Allow me to say only this: it is, but maybe it doesn't have to be. Besides, I need the money.

What changed my mind--more than my agent or my poverty--is the book I'm currently reading, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and its sequel But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (gee, golly, I hope so). These lovely little chick-lit predecessors were written by Anita Loos in 1925 and have more to say about the relationship between men and women than Candace Bushnell could dream. They're essentially about two daffy, gold-digging flappers who are out for a good time and rich men. I started reading this because I've just seen Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the movie, starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell. And I saw that only because I was reading this really fabulous cultural study about the conflicting views of Marilyn Monroe. (The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe by Sarah Churchwell) So that's how I get hooked on things, and while it does mean I'm going to give my own version of chick lit the old college try, it also means that the other books I'm ostensibly reading (most notably Lucky Jim, which I love) get put aside until I forget the plot entirely and have to start all over.

The Marilyn Monroe thing is new though. I never realized how much I liked her until I really started reading this book. For the most part, I've been more aligned with fast-talking, gum-chewing, wisecracking dames like Rosalind Russell or Katherine Hepburn. This probably comes as no surprise to you if you are my friend, or if you are an editor I've tried to pitch something to, or if you are a cabdriver who jets through the crosswalk even though I clearly have a walk sign. But what's surprising about Miss Monroe. is that far from being a victim of her own publicity, she was actually a smart-mouthed dame who spent her life trying to make up for a lack of education, and created and controlled her own persona. She did do too many drugs, and had lousy taste in men, but she also read Chekov and Freud and Thomas Paine, and was known to tell someone to go fuck himself if he got out of line. Like many Hollywood-ites without a formal education, she was touchy about it and spent much of her time trying to improve herself through classes and the "right" books. (Groucho Marx, another who never made it past high school, was widely regarded as one of the most well-read people of his time) It was funny to realize that as messy as her life may have been, she may not have been the "victim" of men and her public persona that everyone made her out to be. Even now, a certain skeptic responded to this by saying "Are you actually trying to tell me she was some kind of genius?" And my answer is unless you have a Colonel Parker or Karl Rove pulling the strings, most successful people are smart, or become smart, along the way.

If I sound like I'm trying to justify reading a book about Marilyn Monroe, well, I am. Up until recently I thought it was just one step away from reading about Elvis or UFO's or Elvis in UFO's.

Anyway, so I got inspired to watch the movie and then read the Anita Loos book, which is very funny and made me believe that chick lit is salvagable after all.

Packing Meat

2005-04-10T00:46:00.000-04:00

What, exactly, happens to you when you eat too much cheese grits? Or is it too many cheese grits? At any rate, this is a serious question, and quite relevant at the moment, actually.

My editor friend Julie and I started the night at Kimberly's apartment, which is an lovely picturesque pied-a-terre in the West Village. There was absolutely nothing to drink except champagne--the actual French kind. Actually, Julie brought Coronas, but I think she drank most of them herself. It was a tiny room full of artsy people, and, as one person commented, you couldn't throw an oil-cured olive without hitting a fellow writer. It was very enriching, although I think the champagne helped a lot. And the cheese. This was a perfectly elegant little soiree where one could safely wear a vintage white Chinese silk kimono (if one owned such a kimono), and not feel out of place.

But we did leave at a decent hour and decided to find a slice. For those of you who are unfortunate enough not to live in New York, I will get into the Philosophy of the Midnight Slice later. There is nothing better, believe me. But unfortunately, we headed in the wrong direction and ended up in the Meatpacking District. I would say that the Meatpacking District has gone Jersey, but my roommate, who is from Jersey and clearly not the kind of Jersey I'm talking about, objects to the appellation. Suffice it to say that the S&M club has been replaced by a fancy, tastefully neon restaurant, La Perla has a boutique next to Western Chicken, and the cobblestone streets seem clogged with a wide variety of taxis, cars and limos--with many of those SUV- or Hummer-limos (which surely are mutations that God never intended). And all the bikers have been replaced by skinny chicks who want to dress rich rather than dress pretty, and the meat-packers have been replaced by those who, whether from Jersey or, say, Long Island, work very hard to make you believe they are indeed packing meat.

Ergo, not an easy place for a slice. But we were hungry and determined, and we came upon a solution which all reasonable, drunk and reasonably drunk people would agree upon: we got cheese grits at the Hog Pit.

The Hog Pit is next to the sex-club-turned-tasteful restaurant, and while its clientele has changed from hairy shaggy bikers to Upper East Side yuppies who want to know if "out of work" is one word, it does serve a mean, cheese-oriented menu. It may be surprising to some that an organic-produce type gal who has never been further South than Virginia should love cheese grits. But cheese is the main reason that I'm simply a vegetarian, rather than a vegan. Julie, who is Southern, needed no prompting, and we squeezed into the bar, ordering two orders of cheese grits and two glasses of water.

Now I am not actually sure what a grit is, only I know the whole cheese grits dish is very bad for you. It's white flour and eggs and cheap cheese and salt and lots of other non-South Beach stuff. Which is the dilemma, because grits taste so damn good that your mouth keeps craving them even though your stomach is plotting an elaborate revolution for the next morning. So between the champagne and the olives and the groovy funk music at the previous party, plus the pretentious yuppies and the intentionally trailer trash decor at the Hog Pit, I really don't know if I ate too much. But we will find out, won't we?

Apres Hiatus

2005-04-09T13:35:00.001-04:00

Why a hiatus, you ask? Sheer disorganization, really, and getting easily distracted. I blame it on the weather, which is suddenly wonderful and making the dog walking a lot more fun. I've spent the last week wandering around feeling like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Why the weather has to be any different is a mystery to me.

Last night we Had People Over. This is our generic term for our parties, which can be as small as three people or as large as thirty. My roommate Mary and I both like to throw parties, only it's funny how we can never predict how they're going to turn out. One of our craziest parties was with just six people. Everyone showed up with vodka and, for some reason, cheese (we're near a Whole Foods; the cheese selection is irresistable). At five o'clock people were still smoking and drinking and arguing and I was sure that, at any given moment, people were going to burst into song. Last night's party wasn't as crazy, but we did have the door open (the cats like to hang out in the hallway) and there was a fair amount of smoking on the balcony (though I suspect that drifted into the hallway as well). And because we have the right kind of friends, friends who don't waste time bringing flowers or candy, we had no less than seven bottles of vodka, quite a few bottles of wine, and "an amusing variety of beer" provided by Ollie, who drank most of them, including, I suspect, the Mike's Hard Cranberry Lemonade. And, of course, the usual amount of cheese.

Having people over is wonderful, especially if you live in my apartment building where the neighbors don't complain because they're usually sitting on your couch with a gimlet in their hands. And you can play your own party music, as bizarre as it might seem to others (Ray Charles, George Clinton & Parliament, Dimitri from Paris, Les Sans Culottes, in that order, intermixed with Mary's music, of course, though I put my foot down on Beta Band--too mellow). I wore my trampiest halter top because it's my party and I can tramp out if I want to (and I don't have to go outside).

After taking good care not to be too hungover (see previous entries) I am back on the computer, with apologies to my loyal fanbase of six, who have been lawyerwriter-less for the last week. Sometimes inspiration does not strike. Actually, I'm not sure this is inspiration, but at least I'm back on the horse, so to speak.

.
By the way, Les Sans Culottes, if you haven't heard of them, is a fabulous faux-French band by way of Brooklyn. Which means that they are all actually American, but they sing and speak with Inspector Clouseau accents. The music is very late 1960's go-go French mixed with modern rock and techno with lots of harmonies and guaranteed to make you want to shimmy and twist like you're in some Gallic acid-trip version of a Frankie Avalon movie. They really have to be seen to be believed, but luckily, they're playing at Studio Seven on the 16th. Definitely buy tickets and see them--unfortunately I'd be out of town, but otherwise I'd be shimmying with you...

I'm a Happy Person, I Swear

2005-03-30T12:57:00.000-05:00

Looking back on the previous posts, I realize that I sound like the world's grouchiest lawyer-writer. In reality, I've been in a really good mood lately, with the weather getting warmer and all sorts of other nice things happening. So, in order to lighten the mood of the blog, allow me to share with you a fun bit of graffitti I saw the other night on the bathroom walls of a bar.

I'll be right back, Estragon
Yeah, right, Godot.

Who says good writing is dead?

High and Mighty, part 2

2005-03-30T11:17:00.000-05:00

Kudos to Camille Dodero. Sure, she wrote High and Mighty, that not-quite-accurate portrayal of High Times, which I took issue to in my last post. But she wrote back to me and defended her article. I can't publish her words, because I promised that it would be strictly off the record, but I can publish my response, which includes a mea culpa for grandstanding (which, I'm worried, is becoming my new "thing")

dear camille:

thank you for your note. I'd like to say that it's
nice to see a journalist standing behind her article
rather than the usual trend of blaming the editor for
"changing my words." I also understand how hard it is
to write a long piece so quickly

That said, my complaint isn't so much that the current
staff doesn't speak highly of the Stratton/Mailer era
(I know they don't) or that they should have. I felt
that the article, in entering the spirit of the
current High Times, took a much too favorable
viewpoint of its "return to its roots." As you state
in the article, its roots were in counterculture, not
just pot culture. I also take issue with the idea that
the magazine I was working for was more
"celebrity-driven" than the one now, which has just
featured Darryl Hannah, of all people.

I would have liked to have a more balanced approach,
maybe quote or two from Richard, John, or Annie
Nocenti (who was the primary editor I worked with, but
is rarely mentioned, given the male-focused market of
the magazine.) I felt that your classification of the
Stratton/Mailer/Nocenti magazine came directly from
disgruntled employees rather than an actual evaluation
of what it was. If you had talked to Annie or Richard,
for example, you would have learned that the primary
reason that advertising dropped was because they
refused to use ads from "fake bud" advertisers. These
people sell "fake" or "legal" pot which is not pot and
is a total ripoff, and is used by dealers to stretch
their supply. The current magazine uses ads from these
people, which is hardly faithful to their mission or
to their readers. Of course, it does help when you
make your advertising director into your
editor-in-chief.

You may ask why I'm so riled up. As an attorney, I
would not write for High Times as it is now (nor was I
asked to, incidentally) because that would simply
classify me as a "stoner lawyer" (which might even get
me disbarred). I was, however, happy to write for a
magazine that DID teach people--and stoners--something
other than how to classify weed.

However, in case you think I'm too high and
mighty myself--and I can get that way--I don't always take my
own advice. For example, a call to Annie reveals that
Hunter S. Thompson didn't write for the magazine in
the 30th Anniversary issue; he was, as you say, simply
interviewed and profiled.

so, I guess what I'm saying is that I would have liked
the other side to have been addressed, if not actually
elaborated on. Now that alternet.org has picked up the
article, I worry that a larger group of people are
going to accept the fact that a true High Times pot
smoker must be a stoner, rather than an activist. It
was not always the case.

Thank you for your reply back; I appreciate it.

Not-So-High Times (A.K.A. "Why, alternet, why?")

2005-03-29T23:01:00.000-05:00

Gabe sent me an article from alternet.org, which I usually respect as they really do care about journalism and writing and actual news reporting. This article, entitled "High and Mighty", however, is pretty awful. It's about "new and improved" High Times, which, from what I understand, is simply about three-foot bongs and Bonghitters, the High Times softball team. (They're 15-3-1). The writer is happy to recycle the usual stale cliches ("As might be expected of a magazine whose employees work on all things marijuana, everyone looks pretty damn happy") and to steadfastly ignore the idea that pot smokers may be interested in things other than trying to grow and identify buds. (We don't expect wine lovers to start their own vineyards do we? And we don't require that they drink at least three glasses a day in order to qualify as a "wine lover.") This knee-jerk "counterculturalism" pisses me off. If you've got a love for something illegal, educate yourself, take a stand, and try to change the system and people's minds, instead of just being passive and complaining about "The Man" keeping you down.

Anyway, as many of you know, the former editors (Richard Stratton, John Mailer and Annie Nocenti) are my friends, and I wrote for the magazine under them, so I have a definite bias. But it was enough to get me riled up enough to send a letter to alternet.org. Why should anyone think of pot smokers any differently if they're happy to adopt the "stoner" culture? Naive as I am, I thought alternet would be above the stereotype.

This is the letter I wrote. In advance, I ask you to forgive any grandstanding; it's just my lil ole way.

Dear Editor(s)

I am writing regarding the article published on March 29, 2005 entitled "High and Mighty" by Camille Dodero

As a author and journalist, I had the privilege of writing High Times during the all-too-brief Stratton/Mailer reign. Far from being a "celebrity-driven Nation," the magazine was recapturing its real goal of actually being (rather than simply posing as) counterculture. I find many things troubling in Ms. Dodero's article, not the least of which is the insinuation that a "true" pot smoker is one with two foot bongs and vaporizers, rather than the occasional dime bag user. This reveals the elitism of the current High Times: if you don't smoke as much as we do, the same way we do, then you're not one of us.

When I wrote for High Times under Richard Stratton and John Mailer (and, incidentally, Annie Nocenti) I was very excited to write for a progressive magazine, which didn't just supply stoners with paraphernalia, but supplied people who care about pot and counterculture with the means of continuing a rebellion. Three foot bongs are nice, but what about legislation articles? What about all the other things that pot smokers think about BESIDES growing? No, they don't just stare into space, thank you. They listen to music, they write, they play video games, they think about sex. The so-called celebrity-driven High Times knew this and had columns about these subjects. It was something that ANYONE--the lifelong stoner or the occasional smoker--could read.

How, exactly, is that "slick" or "corporate?" Dodero's article never explains this. Instead, it's simply assumed that since circulation supposedly shot up in the short term, High Times had "returned to its roots." Its roots, in fact, were far different than what it's become now, a fact that is simply ignored in this article. For example, why is the magazine's early "Hunter S. Thompson" sensibility in the 1960's laudable, while the fact that Hunter S. Thompson actually wrote for the magazine during the "celebrity-driven" era is never mentioned? How exactly are Ani DiFranco and Jim Jarmusch "celebrities" while Snoop Dogg with some bud is not?

Gloriously shot pictures of buds are nice, but in the end, they're no different than any other glossy, marketed centerfold. What was once a revolutionary magazine of politics and culture--what Playboy was to the mainstream in the 60's--is now again simply another Penthouse or Hustler. In other words: Pot Porn.

Suffering

2005-03-28T17:45:00.000-05:00

For you Sex and the City fans out there, rest easy. I have been cruelly punished for the previous entry's diatribe (or was it a tirade? Discuss) against the show. As I was walking dogs in the pouring rain, I realize that I was compulsively humming that horrifying Gap "Pretty Khaki" song. You know the one, where Sarah Jessica Parker frolics gaily through a faux-street singing "I Enjoy Being a Girl" in a manner which would make even die-hard Doris Day fans vomit. I hummed and hummed and walked the dogs, who, not surprisingly, were staring at me with disgust. And it's still stuck in my head.

If there is a hell, then this is its theme song. Oh, the humanity.

The "I Hate Sex and the City" Diatribe

2005-03-27T10:33:00.000-05:00

(above: Charlotte, Carrie, Samantha and Miranda)

We were at a pretty cool party last night--lots of liquor, lots of food--to celebrate a fellow author's book deal/move to Los Angeles. The crowd was intellectual but lively, which almost made up for the fact that party was located on the Upper West Side. At any rate, at some point, someone mentioned Sex & the City, and I almost launched into my near-patented Sex and the City Diatribe. Almost. I have better manners than to dominate the conversation like that. However, I decided to save it up for the blog, and here it is.

Thesis: I am the only woman I know who LOATHES Sex and the City.

But why? It's just a show
If only it were. I managed to ignore it as long as possible, but it became a cultural phenomenon. Unlike something soothingly airheaded like Melrose Place, Sex and the City purported to Say Something about single women's lives. It was heralded as feminist. It wasn't. It was a giant step back in feminism, and the show is both stupid and dangerous.

Why dangerous?
Because it features nothing but caricatures of women who were are supposed to take seriously. Carrie is the neurotic-normal Everygirl; Miranda is the career-minded ballbuster; Charlotte is the old-fashioned preppie princess; Samantha is the sex-crazy party girl. These, by the way, are not new caricatures; they have been seen various other shows, including Designing Women and Golden Girls (which was a far more revolutionary show: Old people with fulfilling lives! Involved in the world around them! Still having sex! Extraordinary!)

But don't you find Sex and the City funny?
Sometimes. It has sort of a crude Mad magazine type humor--lots of squeamish embarrassment and self-humiliation. (which, as I pointed out earlier, doesn't mean that it's any less self-involved). Frankly, I prefer it when it tries to be funny than when it tries to Say Something About the Modern Woman.

But it's about four thirty-something single women who are happy being single! It defies the stereotype that women have to be married at that age!
Are you kidding me? All these women do is chase after men, usually inappropriate or unavailable men. If they find a half-way decent one (Steve, Aidan, Smith) they act like neurotic harridans until any self-respecting man would throw in the towel and hit the road. They are obsessed with men, even while they claim to be happy in their (empty) lives. When do they find happiness in anything else?

What about in their friendships with each other?
I find their friendship forced and unrealistic, and very Carrie-centered. I particularly hate Carrie as I am compared to her often. She is supposed to be the "quirky, downtown girl," but everything about her screams "spoiled Upper East Side Socialite." Even her bizarre wardrobe is more high-risk couture than low-rent vintage. And she CANNOT write.

But why do you take it so seriously?
Because everyone else does. I was happy to ignore the damn thing, until every single women in the world began raving about it. Aside from the usual episode hype, there were books, articles, and essays (in places like Salon.com, no less) written about the Importance of the Show to Single Women. Which is a crock. Now thirtysomething unmarried women ("spinsters," sometimes) are not even allowed to be unhappy with their situation. They have to pretend that they're having the time of their lives without men, even as they secretly obsess about them.

You must not like or know many thirtysomething single women.
I beg your pardon. I am a thirtysomething single female writer living in New York City. As much as it disgusts me, I am fucking Carrie. Myself aside, there are plenty of thirtysomething, fortysomething and fiftysomething single women out there who say they do not want men, and I admire them for it. These women read books. They partake in high culture (without needing to classify it as pretentious or mock it) and low culture (i.e. fun without money). They are involved in their community and in charities. They take an interest in the world around them, including the world outside of Manhattan. Sure, they may buy Manolo Blahniks, but they have full exciting lives that do not revolve around shopping. And, most of all, they are not lying to themselves. If they do not really want marriage, then they don't go throwing themselves into serious relationships and wondering why the guy doesn't commit. (Of course, on the show, when the poor fool does commit, eventually, he gets stomped on).

But isn't it cool to see women enjoying and talking about sex?
What's new about that? The previously mentioned Designing Women and Golden Girls were full of sex. In fact, the way those women talked about sex was natural, as opposed to Carrie and Co., who apparently want big Broadway lights over their heads saying "Hey! We're liberated! We can talk about sex!" What those other shows didn't have, that is the very core of Sex and the City, is marketing genius and product placement. Sex and the City should be named Money and the City.

Money?
The show is aspirational only because of how much money and free time these women have. When I saw Carrie bitching because she had to pay more than $700 a month on her football-field sized one-bedroom, I went into spasms of disgust and went to clean my toilet. Poor Charlotte and her gigantic $20,000 diamond ring. Poor Miranda dating a lowly bartender. (Incidentally, Steve the bartender is the only middle-class man these women will deign to date. Even Smith the waiter had to become Smith the model/indie film star before Samantha could take him seriously). These women couldn't even go to ordinary bars; it had to be fancy hotel bars and Green Apple Martinis, usually paid for. And if I had to see Carrie in one more slutty, unrealistic outfit designed by an "up and coming" fashionista, I'd have killed myself.

Unrealistic? But isn't it supposed to be fantasy?
I wish the show had made up its goddamn mind. A pure fantasy would have been acceptable. So would a realistic show about lives of single women in New York City. This damn thing tried to be both. And who wants to be--let alone date--these neurotic fruitcakes? Their shallow lives seemed sad to me. Believe me, I knew women like these--Of a Certain Age, too thin, designer clothing, Pilates bodies, a look of bitter, pinched failure in their eyes. After all, I worked in the film industry. Give me an plump, honest, unglamorous fifty-year old, librarian-hippie any day.

So obviously you've put a lot of thought into this. In fact, it sounds like you've seen a LOT of the show.
I have seen almost every episode, never by choice. As I said, I am apparently the only woman in the universe who hates this show. To me, it's like watching a car wreck of femininity. That said, I have always had female roommates and lots of female friends. I have been regularly subjected to the show since it first aired.

You sound like you really look down on anyone who watches the show.
Some of my most intelligent, most respected, most glamorous friends watch this show. They have so much more substance and are so much more interesting to me than any of the characters that I simply find their fascination with it baffling.

Don't you like anything about it?
I like some of the idea of New York being a glamorous, exciting place for single women. It is. While the acting and was generally heinous (Carrie and Samantha being the worst offenders) and the writing pandered to the lowest common denominator (teary breast-cancer bullshit anyone?) I thought Kristen Davis's (Charlotte) acting got better towards the end.

But what about Samantha--wasn't it great seeing an older woman guiltlessly pursuing sex, without emotional ties?
Firstly, I don't know many (happy) women like that. I do know a few, but they seem to be exceptions the rule. Most women like to have sex with some emotion or connection attached. Frankly, I think most men do too. That said, I would have been happy to see a Samantha character if she hadn't been such a cartoon. Apparently, a woman can't enjoy guilt-free sex without becoming some sort of leering parody of an aggressive man. (Not for nothing, but many thought Samantha was actually a gay man in disguise).

Incidentally, why are you writing this?
I'm writing this because I think that Sex and the City has become an accepted cultural phenomenon, and no one is talking about its negative effects. I feel alone in my disgust. I'm hoping there are others who agree or would like to enter the debate. Like I said, I'd have been happy to ignore the damn thing if only the Cultural Powers That Be would have let me. I am also writing this as practice for a section in the Lizzie Borden chapter in my book, The Devil Inside Her. The connection? Part of the hysteria around Lizzie Borden was our fear of thirty-something spinsters, and the fact that they are sexually repressed or sexually loose. Contrary to popular assertions, Sex and the City did nothing to change that.

Okay, you've made your point. Is there anything else?
One last thing. Why was everyone so shocked and disappointed when all four women ended up in monogamous, committed relationships at the end of the show? Who do you think this show was marketed to? Middle-class America. The same middle class America that complained that Carrie, as a (I am not making this up) role model, shouldn't be smoking. So the writers had her quit. The show sells a fake glamorous life of single women, but essentially it was just another chick-lit novel where Mr. Right (or Mr. Big) conveniently rescues the heroine from spinsterhood. Middle class America could not stand for their beloved heroines to be happily single. The ending was not a betrayal, but a complete fulfillment of what the show was about.

Are you through?
Yes. I feel much better, thank you. I'm going to go see if I can catch an episode of The Golden Girls to cleanse my palate.

Secession Cabaret

2005-03-25T11:47:00.000-05:00

If the idea of seceeding from the Bush States of America makes you want to sing and dance, have I got the event for you. Jason Flores-Williams (writer, law student, hellraiser) is organizing the second Secession Town Hall and Cabaret event. Jason is fiery and opinionated and will get you thinking about the world around you if it kills him (or you). This upcoming event is put together by Jason, The Brooklyn Rail newspaper, and someone named Sara Valentine (aka Little Miss Bigmouth) who I know nothing about, but kudos on the name. The event includes readings, a town hall format where everyone airs opinions and questions, and some sort of cabaret. There's a DJ. Now that's how politics should be done!
Time & Date: 6 p.m. Saturday April 16
Location: Union Pool, 484 Union Ave in Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Media contact: Jasonflores_williams@hotmail.com

Now, I myself am not sure if I want to secede. I like America. I don't see why those right-wing religious meglomaniacal conservatives can't all move to Utah and secede from US. That said, I think it's important to get involved in politics now, rather than wait until the next Presidential election. We must work hard for four years to prevent, at all costs, the following phrase: "President Cheney." No. It cannot be.

The hangover is gone today, and am contemplating going out tonight. Years of being a nerdy shut-in in high school have made me nervous about staying in on any Friday night. This is even though I work from home and can go out and get plastered any night of the week, and even though I hate the tourist B&T crowds that show up on the weekends. I just worry that if I start getting comforable staying in on weekend nights then I will be forgotten by the world and Never Go Out Again. Horrifying.

Hangover Central

2005-03-24T20:18:00.000-05:00

I was very hungover today. I am often hungover. This is not necessarily because I go out drinking every night (I don't), but because of a physical ailment. Allow me to tell you my sad story.

When I was a young, hardy lass, I could drink like a Greek sailor. Actually, I could drink with Greek sailors, as was the case one night in Tijuana. (Two Greek sailors, one Swedish-American masseuse, her nondescript friend, and a fellow freshman who played football, to be specific). All the drinks a freshman gourmand picks: cheap tequila, Captain Morgan's Spiced Rum, Everclear, Kahlua and cream. I was tiny, and I could drink my weight in liquor, and don't think I didn't tell everyone (including my parents) about it.

The tolerance waned over the course of college, and stalled as I got my M.A. But then there was law school. Ah, the drinking we did. There wasn't one Irish bar that didn't know my name. Or, at least, vaguely recognized me. To this day, I think that law and liquor and inextricably linked (and the number of alcoholic lawyers may prove my point).

But then it happened. One day I couldn't get out of bed. I was really sleepy. Really, really sleepy. I couldn't wake up. I felt swollen. My lovely doctor friend Sanjay took me to the emergency room (Sanjay is an opthomologist, but for me he's a general practitioner, part-time shrink, and has been known to do a little backalley stitches removal). After the standard two-hour emergency room wait, the lovely doctors there told me the unfortunate truth--at the age of 23, I had contracted Mononucleosis (aka Glandular Fever). You know, the kissing disease that you're supposed to get when you're, um, twelve. Symptoms: sleep all day and all night, feel like crap.

Since it was, indeed, the kissing disease, I turned to "B," the man I was kissing during this period. "B.," I said in a friendly way, "have you given me mono?" B. looked shocked. "Me, no! Have YOU given ME mono?" He paused. "After all, you can get mono drinking out of a water bottle. Maybe you drank out of someone else's water bottle at Legal Aid." Well, that made me think. I was working at Legal Aid. It might actually be a germy place. I looked at him, and he looked at me winningly.

What can I say, I'm a sucker. I figured I drank out of a germy Legal Aid water bottle. Never mind that he was barely able to stay awake and his friends told me that he was running a fever. What did I know?*

Well, when you get mono at 23, your body takes a long time to recover. I tried to go back to drinking a couple weeks later, when I felt awake. I nearly passed out from the headaches, stomaches and general bodily rebellion. The doctor said I should take about six months off of drinking, which I did. (More or less. Don't judge me!) After that, I was at zero alcohol tolerance.

Now, friends and family, you know how hard I have worked to build that tolerance back up. And I like to think I have done a bang-up job. However, it has all come with a price, and that price is the Morning After Hangover Curse.

The Morning After Hangover Curse is this: regardless of how much or how little I drink, I get a hangover. The symptoms can be mild: dry mouth, dehydration, mild headache, fatigue, general malaise. On bad days, like today, it's serious headache, ugly queasiness, exhaustion, extreme grumpiness and a desire to do penance.

Allow me to say that mono does affect the liver, often permanently. People complain of getting too cold or too hot in situations where, before the mono, they were fine. My point is this: I am not a big baby. This is a physiological condition.

I have learned much about preventing a hangover. Here are my Thirteen Rules of Preventing a Hangover.

1. Drink clear liquor (vodka for me--Stoly, Grey Goose or Cirac)

2. Alternate with water towards the end of the night.

3. No matter how tired you are, stay up an extra half-hour before going to bed.

4. One or two slices raisin bread, buttered.

5. Lots more water before bed, along with...

6. Pedialyte (unflavored is the least obnoxious. Drink half a bottle) Gatorade will do in a pinch, but it's not the same.

7. One Advil. Two if you're a big person.

8. Get eight or so hours sleep. Use a girly sleepmask if necessary.

9. Morning: coffee is key. Have one cup upon waking. Maybe two. Chase it with some Cheerios for the fiber. Drink some water. Then go back to sleep.

10. Upon waking the second time, put on one of those cooling blue gel-masks over your eyes. Pray for forgiveness.

11. Soon after, have one or more of the following: cheesy omelet w/ onions, jalepeno, salsa; slice of pizza with garlic; quality mac & cheese with black pepper; nachos, anything from Taco Bell.

12. Keep active as to not give into the urge to curl up in ball and moan. But not too active.

13. No hair-of-the-dog bullshit. Stay sober for the rest of the day and night. Drink water consistently.

Now you know. You too will be able to drink excessively and manage your inevitable hangovers, as I do.

(*B. disappeared soon after, and I discovered that he had had mono-like symptoms before mine had manifested. We saw each other on the street five years later, and pretended not to recognize each other. Ah, New York dating).

Gratuitious Sex Entry.2

2005-03-22T22:45:00.000-05:00

So, as promised, a little late, the Second Gratuitous Sex Entry.

Now, what many people do not know about me is that I have written a book tenatively entitled The Sexiest Films of All Time...And What They Can Teach You. This is, of course, in a continued effor to give my Brahmin parents something to brag about to their friends. I wrote the book more as a film book about sexy films, rather than any type of kinky sex manual, as I have a degree in film studies, but alas, not in kinky sex. The book is brutally simple in its marketing where I describe each film briefly and what's sexy about it. Also included, presumably, will be a nice stock photo image of the film in question.

I say presumably because the book, though finished, has yet to be published. I wrote the book for a brand-new publishing company that you will not have heard of. They were actually formed as a subsidiary of an investment company that decided that it would get into publishing...for the money. Leaving that aside, the publishers want the writers to get involved in every aspect of marketing and packaging of the book, and that the majority of the money was going to go towards publicity, and making the author really, really famous. This is what every writer wants to hear.

Unfortunately, since I have delivered the book to the publisher, I have not heard a peep. The last I recall was sitting in a film stock footage company for hours while we poured over the photographs and wondered which would make us a million bucks. Since I was paid a small fee for the book and am not particularly eager to be known as a dating expert (I'm more in the "Ladies, Don't Try This At Home" category) it is not a total tragedy. I do feel annoyed that it may have been a waste of my time to write a full book that may not be published.

That said, let the Gratuitous Sex Entry continue. This one is called "Hot Chicks in Arty Foreign Films." Before you complain that you hate subtitles, let me remind you that foreign films are allowed to be a hell of a lot more explicit than the American variety. And my, my look how big the pictures are!

Paz Vega in Sex & Lucia. Gotta love the title, but it is misleading. The movie is actually about Sex & Lucia, but also about Sex & Lorenzo, Sex & Elena, Sex & Carlos, Sex & Luna...well, you get the picture. Nothing is left to the imagination, but the sexiest parts are the moments between a couple who've just met. Rather than the meaningless humping that usually goes on, these two actually seem to enjoy the excitement of meeting someone new and amazing. It's romance without thousands of tiny candles lining a bathtub that improbably fits two, or some arty mysticism. The couple in question--Paz Vega being an integral part--take naked polaroids, they do stripteases, they make each other laugh, they jump into bed, they experiment. No 9 1/2 Weeks griminess here--monogamous sex can be Fun, & Rom! However, for those of you requiring 9 1/2 Weeks griminess or arty mysticism, there's both when the porn star's daughter tries to get it on with her mother's boyfriend, and when the heroine and a naked man cover each other with mud. Satisfied, you perverts?

Catherine Deneuve in Belle Du Jour. Okay, it's made in the 1960's, and it's not a movie and not even film but Cinema. It's even French. Before you fade away, allow me to describe opening sequence. Hot Severine and her hot husband Pierre are in a carriage. Pierre says "I love you" and Severine ignores him. Then Pierre calls her a slut, drags her out of the carriage kicking and screaming, gets the horseman to tie her by her wrists, and whips her a little bit. Then he lets the coachman have her. Then you realize it's Severine's fantasy. Not enough? Severine's other fantasies lead her to start working in a brothel. She becomes their number one attraction. When a strange Asian man comes in with a ticking box, the other girls are scared off. Severine takes him in. An hour later a maid sees her face down on the bed. When she looks up Severine is radiant as only a girl who's had some really dirty things done to her can be. Now that should be enough--go rent the movie.

Ana Lopez Mercado in Y Tu Mama Tambien. This is for all those people out there who have worn out the rewind button watching the dirty Matt Dillon-Denise Richards-Neve Campbell threesome in Wild Things. You know who you are. It's time for a change; let Senora Mercado show how a threesome is really done. 1) Get yourself two hot teenage Latin studs with something to prove 2) Go on a road trip in beautiful scenic Mexico heading towards a beach that may or may not exist 3) Jump both boys separately, and let them each think it was his idea, and then make sure the other knows about it. This will get them all fired and jealous of each other. You know--mucho mexicano tamale. 4) Find a shack on the beach, get drunk and start dirty dancing. 5) Retire to the aforementioned shack for some three-way play. It helps to have an absolutely perfect body that was made for bikinis. Bitch.

That's all for now. Let's see what happens to my ratings when I try and court the international vote.

Street Law Series, Redux

2005-03-21T01:04:00.000-05:00

So Friday saw two meetings; the first with Court TV and the second with Spike TV. The Court TV one might have been a longshot. They have, afterall, a pretty established demographic. I'm not sure what that is, but I have a feeling its the same people who buy the National Enquirer even though they don't believe a word of it. Spike TV might be a little more positive. We sold it as a "you should know this stuff to be a Cool Guy on The Streets." So we handed both TV's a book to peruse and our little proposal, and off they went to consider or bring to a meeting or whatever. I still don't understand what I'm doing. (I'm sure Gabe will explain it to me eventually) Not surprisingly, the future of The Street Law Series remains uncertain.

But it was a generally mellow weekend of drunken Scrabble playing and late night noshing (why do I always get a) the nachos or b) the sundae?) Tonight, I was out for comfort food with the girls. As I was looking around the table, I thought we looked very Sex & the City, minus the crude humor and superficial glibness. Actually, we had a little crude humor too, but it still had a ladylike quality to it. I think. The girls and I are all very different (a film production coordinator who takes her dog on shoots and is working on a television pilot; an Egyptian jewelry designer who shops 5 hours a day--as part of her job; a bohemian writer who's secretly working on a major screenplay with a major director; a Conde Nast exec who plans glamorous fashion events; and, well, me)...but anyway, as different as we all are, we all had ridiculous dating stories to share. It was a mass unloading. But I liked being the company of women who have no problem demolishing a giant plate of onion rings. Shows I have good taste in friends.

Laren invited me to go to "Tuesdays@Nine" at the Naked Angels Playhouse. It sounds suspiciously like a reading, only more interesting as you can get the actors to read your work for you. That actually sounds a little fun. It's been suggested that I submit anything, but the idea of sitting down and writing fiction--fiction I care about--still makes me anxious. We'll see.

Tomorrow: The Second Gratuitous Sex Entry.

Adventures in Chick Lit

2005-03-17T14:20:00.000-05:00

Well, I have taken my agent's advice and decided to look into writing some chick lit. For those of you who do not know about chick lit (or are men), it is not gum, but actually a genre of literature (the word is used loosely) that came about after Bridget Jones Diary. It is fast replacing the romance genre, but even though its women are modern and career-oriented, it's pretty much the same: women looking for love, well, find it. I liked BJD, but the stuff that it's spawned is pretty...hellacious. In a bad way.

I picked up a brand-new chick lit book off of the table in the bookstore. To be get your book on a table you must be selected by the bookstore, and your publisher must pay a hefty price. Any book on the table has an exponentially greater chance of selling. Obviously, they have to believe that you're going to make them lots of money. Which is my way of telling you that this book is supposed to be one of the good ones.

Anyway, I picked up the book and read it thoroughly in the space of half an hour. It was atrocious, and confirmed what I have known all along--that chick lit that sells because it is utterly formulaic and the characters are as fixed as those in medieval morality plays. (Think Everyman and Sex and the City have nothing in common? Think again). Witness the following, which is true of EVERY chick-lit book I have ever read.

The Heroine: Is pretty but does not know it. Is quirky, and has a quirky job. The definition of "quirky" varies greatly, but rest assured, she is never a nuclear scientist. She never has enough money. She has egregious taste in men.

Her Gay Male Buddy: this guy either never gets laid, or is a monogamous relationship with the love of his life by the end of the book. He is around for fashion advice, to talk the Heroine out of her bad decisions, and to convince the Heroine that she is fabulous. There is ALWAYS a Gay Male Buddy. For variety, he may be a different race than the Heroine.

Her Best Friend: Her Best Friend has the perfect marriage, to Best Friend's Husband. Every attempt is made on the part of the author to convince you that Best Friend's Husband is not boring. But he is. Best Friend is played by a supporting actress and encourages the Heroine's crazy schemes and tries to build up her self-esteem. If Best Friend is not married, she is fat, but funny and may be even more "quirky" than Heroine.

The Boss: The Boss does not appreciate the Heroine, unless he is doubling as the Gay Male Buddy, in which case he is her best friend. Even if the Heroine and Boss get along, she will change jobs at least once during the course of her book. Any episode taking place at work will be played purely for laughs, rather than for actual achievement. In many cases, the Heroine will just generally be incompentant.

On occasion, as in BJD, The Boss may also be---

Mr. Wrong: Mr. Wrong is an amalgamation of all things that make up a bad boy. At the start of the novel, Heroine adores Mr. Wrong, even though he does not call, he will not commmit and may be married. He may be emotionally needy, but he is Bad for the Heroine. He may already have broken up with Heroine, in which case, he will come crawling back to her halfway through the novel. Everybody except for Heroine immediately realizes that Mr. Wrong is a scumbag. Despite his flaws, he is, however Good in Bed.

Mr. Right: Mr. Right is always handsome, intelligent and charming. He gets along with Gay Male Buddy, Best Friend and Best Friend's husband. However, Heroine is unable to see this for herself. She will ignore Mr. Right for most of the book, even though he secretly has a crush on her. If they do get together before the book's end, she will leave him temporarily and regret it immediately. This will devastate him and he may turn to--

The Other Woman: The Other Woman is usually played by a young Catherine Deneuve. She is sophisticated, successful, elegant and utterly beautiful. She will have that je ne sais quoi that Heroine longs for. Heroine will think that Mr. Right is involved with The Other Woman. Usually, this is a mistake on her part. However, if Mr. Right is actually involved with The Other Woman, he will leave her for Heroine at the end of the book.

The Gratuitous Fuck: If there is a gratuituous fuck for Heroine, it will be some charming playboy type who, in the real world, she would fall for, but mysteriously, in the pages of chick lit, she manages to merely have pleasurable sex with him. The Gratuitous Fuck will wine and dine her, but his chief accomplishment will be giving her mind-bending orgasms. In some cases Mr. Wrong may double as the Gratuitous Fuck, but in most cases, GF is there as a rebound guy. Therefore, when Mr. Right comes along, she will be able to recognize exactly how special the orgasms she's having with Mr. Right are. Of course, it goes without saying that while GF will find Heroine attractive (and will apparently be the first man to really see her Inner Supermodel), GF will never fall for Heroine. He will simply fade away to work his magic on other unappreciated women.

None of this would be possible without:

The Gimmick: All chick-lit must have a Gimmick. This gimmick will spur the heroine into a Transformation. The Gimmick may be a how-to book that Heroine discovers, or an elegant older woman who gives her advice, or cooking lessons (recipes included at the end of each chapter), an exotic location, a new job that Heroine spends no time at (fashion is particularly popular), a shopping fetish, or something similarly, well, gimmicky. The Gimmick is what inspires the title of the book. In many cases, the Gimmick will actually reveal to Heroine that she doesn't need anyone but herself. As she realizes this, Mr. Right magically appears so Heroine does not have to test the theory.

In short, chick-lit is dangerous. It is formulaic. It is, fundamentally, relationship porn. Give me a good, honest dirty essay anyday.

(That said, if I can find a way to write it without simultaneously gagging as I type, chick lit, here I come).

The Regular Job

2005-03-16T01:42:00.000-05:00

I do not have a "real" or "regular"job. Instead, I have several schemes to bring in money. I do not want a regular job. This does not mean I am lazy. On the contrary, I work very hard to avoid a regular job.

The last time I had a regular job was over two years ago. I worked as an assistant to a literary agent, known as Agent. Now, if you could look into Agent's soul, you would see a fat, cigar-chomping, narcissistic chauvinist who chased secretaries around sofas got a Porsche for his mid-life crisis and did shady deals. But the dawn of the new millenium brough forth a new breed of man: the Faux-vinist. The Faux-vinist knows what trouble sexual harassment suits can be. His ex-wife has taught him that women can be easily offended. The Faux-vinist is just sensitive enough so that his true mercenary nature is not revealed. The Agent was a prime example of a Faux-vinist. He was a one-man agency, though Secondary Agent had a desk in the office.

Now, I did not want to be a literary agent's assistant. I wanted to be a literary agent. But while everyone outside of publishing was saying "you should have no trouble being an agent, you're a lawyer," everyone in publishing was saying "you have no practical experience, you'll have to pay your dues." It is very hard to get hired as an assistant when you clearly want to pay your dues as quickly as possible, thereby necessitating the need for a new assistant. Plus it was a tough market, so I took what I could get.

I got Agent. There were many bad signs. Agent's Former Assistant was leaving, and he seemed worried that I would mess up her system. Former Assistant spent a week training me in the office, which was a disaster. There were unread manuscripts in piles taller than me. There were four giant boxes of papers that needed to be filed. There was no greeting area and there was a maze of supplies behind the assistant's desk to the typewriter. The office was in disarray because Agent had just moved into it, to take advantage of the real estate deals in post 9-11 downtown. He loved to point out his office's perfect view of the giant hole where the World Trade Center had been six months ago.

Agent himself had no interest in training or talking to me while Former Assistant was around. The week when she left was like a shock of cold water to the face. I couldn't believe what I had gotten myself into. Not only did I deal with the agency work, I had to do things like pay his ConEd bills and get a cellphone for his month-long Greek vacation and get coffee when he got the yen. I applaud all the personal assistants out there. I just didn't have it in me.

What was most troubling was the hairs sticking up in the back of my neck. Something was off about this guy. The man couldn't say "thank you" but was able to find a way to complain about every person in his life to me. He seemed not to even know I was in the room unless he needed to share something about himself. I learned about his girlfriend, his ex-wife, his tae-kwon-doe classes, his daughter, his conniving editors and greedy authors. It was creeping me out.

The authors loved me. The editors loved me. But Agent finally called me into the office to tell me that he was troubled that I didn't seem very "friendly" to him. This was about the time that I discovered an old email from Former Assistant asking Former-Former Assistant about some incident when Agent had complimented her a little too enthusiastically, and the situation had gotten uncomfortable. I later discovered that Former-Former Assistant had trouble getting away from Agent, and that he repeatedly called and bought her expensive presents to woo her back. (Let's give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he wanted to just woo her back to work).

I started to feel skittish around him, and I think he sensed it. He got ruder, and complained more, and started to find fault with everything I did. His tasks for me got more menial. I was getting a lot of coffee. The one thing that really bugged him was that I was making friends and hanging out with assistant editors in the publishing industry, most of whom were a lot closer to my age than his.

The end came one very rainy day. I'd gotten out of the habit of going to lunch and usually ate a sandwich at my desk. Agent was out with Famous Author, so I left Intern in charge. (That we even had interns was my doing. What I couldn't get him to change was the dial-up internet connection which would only allow one of us to be online at a time. He was way too cheap for DSL). When I came back a few minutes later, Intern had a message for me. "Agent called and was mad because you went to lunch and he wanted you to get Famous Author a cab." I called Agent back and he grudgingly said he didn't know I'd be back so soon and to call a car for Famous Author. I did so. When I hung up the phone, Intern said "He was kind of a jerk to me." I replied, naturally, "He is a jerk. I can't wait until I'm out of this job."

On Monday morning, Agent called me into his office. Apparently Secondary Agent had been in his office when Intern and I had been talking. Despite the fact that Secondary Agent and I were supposedly friends, Secondary Agent notified Agent of my outburst. Agent said I had a bad attitude, and I had no business talking to editors about ideas, and that I had "refused to make this job my own." Most upsetting to him was the idea that I might actually be looking for another job or interviewing. (I wasn't. Yet) He gave me two weeks. I packed my back and left the following morning.

I did volunteer to help the New Assistant via telephone, when Agent got one. New Assistant and I got along fine. Since my departure, New Assistant has been replaced by Newer Assistant and then by Current Assistant. I think. I was rewarded for my help by Agent's decision to contest my getting unemployment. Because you can get unemployement if you're fired, but not if you're fired for misconduct, Agent accused me of trying to do deals with his editors behind his back. He even went through my email and found what he thought to be an incriminating email to an Assistant Editor. Assistant Editor and I rolled our eyes and laughed. More importantly, Unemployment Compensation Investigator and I rolled our eyes and laughed. (I got the unemployment after about four months of paperwork and interviews).

This was it for me in terms of 9-to-5. I went through the motions to look for a more permanent position, but I couldn't bring myself to take anything. In the meantime, I started writing. Eventually, I started getting paid for it. By the time I dyed my hair blue, it was too late to go back.

Now, I have my own agent. My agent is a nice man. That was important to me. If your agent is an asshole then people will think you're an asshole. More importantly, if he's an asshole to others, he'll be one to you. To further my goal of Not Getting A Real Job, my agent has suggested that I write either a) a true crime book, or a) an Indian chick-lit novel. I think I am much more suited for true crime; I think he's pulling for chick-lit. But anything that keeps me off the streets and out of the office is fine by me.

In conclusion, allow me to quote William Burroughs, in a letter he wrote to Allen Ginsburg: "A regular job drains one's very lifeblood. It's supposed to. They want everything you've got."

Literary Smut and Street Psychics

2005-03-15T00:22:00.000-05:00

nerve.com had the good sense to name its new weekly award for quality literary smut "The Henry Miller Award." This I approve of, and I like to think I played a hand in it as I once wrote an article for nerve.com about Henry Miller. Of course, when you turn in a piece of literary criticism to nerve.com, it always has to be dirtied up. "Put in more quotes," said my editor. You know the kind he meant. Thank God it's a pay site, because otherwise my parents might find it. I mean, I felt good about the writing, but after nerve got done with it, it felt kind of--well, cheap and sleazy. Like nerve, basically.

Anyway, I'm glad they named it "The Henry Miller Award" rather than the "The Anais Nin Award." I like both Miller and Nin for being intimate and confessional without losing sight that they are essentially speaking to an audience whose attention they still have to earn. (Not many writers do that anymore. It seems like as long as you're being self-deprecating, you have complete license to keep the camera lens trained in close-up focus on your own face. Trust me, it's no less egotistical). Both Miller and Nin were always aware of the reader. Miller, in his stories, made up a "Miller persona" who, despite the same name, had different traits and experiences than he did. And Nin was so careful about her readership that she edited her own diary for print. Sure, it's still self-involved, but I respect her for it; she was trying to make it more interesting to read.

Back to the point. I like Nin, but her sex scenes always made me feel some Eastern European existentialist film director was shooting the whole thing as an arty underground film. Everybody's bored, the action is removed. They're stories, like fairy tales. Miller is more direct. He likes a good fuck. But even then, the physicality and brutishness of the experience don't detract from the inherent spirituality of sex.

I don't think the nominees for The Henry Miller Award are that good, incidentally. But maybe I'm picky. I happen to like dirty books--some without literary quality, some with--more than dirty movies. (Probably because the people are a lot more attractive in your head than onscreen. And you don't have to worry about some feminist anti-porn argument because nobody is being exploited. Except in your head). The last really good, really literary sex scene I read in a contemporary novel was in Ian McEwan's Atonement (starts on page 127, best part of the book). I'll let you know if I find a better one. I haven't looked very hard lately.

On a completely unrelated topic, I've been getting stopped by quite a few psychics recently, just as I'm walking by them on the street. I don't know what it is. They always tell me that there's something in my face, and I should call for an appointment immediately. One actually told me I had a very unusual aura. I told her it was the blue hair. The one who stopped me today seemed very serious and believable. She said "A man named James is going to be very important to you." I'm almost sure that it was James, but there's a slight chance it may have been Jason, because she had an accent. This gave her a cool gypsy-fortune-teller vibe, but also made her a little hard to understand. Anyway, I said "great, can you give me his number?" But no dice. "He will find his way to you in his own way," she said. Then she handed me a card and told me to come by and she would light some special candles for me.

What I think--and I've clearly given this some thought--is that she didn't say James or Jason, but Jameson's. That is, not "a man named James/Jason is going to be very important to you," but "a drink named Jameson's is going to be very important to you." That my future is linked to a drink makes perfect sense. Hey, James is a nice name, but I've always trusted (wisely) men who drink a) Jamesons or b) Guinness. (Oooooh. Spooky that she knew that). Unfortunately for my theory, she would also need to be in the habit of referring to quality whiskey as "He." This, alas, may not be likely.

So, anyway, I have a little collection of psychic cards, and it's very tempting to go find James or the reason for my unusual aura or what exactly is in my face that I don't know about. But I think we all know that the only time I'll ever do this is late at night, when I'm with a girlfriend and we're blind stinking drunk. We'll pay somebody $20 apiece to tell my friend that she's creative, and tell me that a dark-haired man will fall for me. Which, as we know, is what they tell everyone who shows up drunk at midnight waving money. I will take her seriously and swear that I'll come back in the morning so she can cleanse my aura and find the right crystal to hang around my neck. In the morning, however, I'll just wonder why the hell I do these things.

But the answer is obvious: to write about them later. Duh.