How Can I Keep from Singing?

Recently, one of my co-workers and I were chatting. He's in a band and I was asking about what he did in it, did he sing? And eventually it came up that I used to sing. Quite true, I did. I used to sing a lot in fact. My family has always encouraged it, especially on my mother's side, and I was in choir in middle school, through high school and college. After starting in our basic level as a freshman in high school, I quickly moved to our audition-only madrigal and jazz choir, as well as our larger SATB group. I got my first solo as a sophomore, joined our sweet adeline quartet, sang a lead in our bi-annual musical. I eventually lead the jazz octet I co-founded at one of the state's most prestigious competitions at which we took fourth place; the only student-lead group competing. I won an award when I graduated for all I'd done in the department. I sang all eight semesters in a women's choir in the conservatory at Oberlin and sang in the symphonic choir both there and at Sonoma State University. I felt like a liar the entire time.

Captain America 2, The Winter Soldier: Short, Controlled Bursts

It's a fucking snakeskin turban, people. And no, Mom,
 she doesn't "just look that way" and those aren't her real
cheekbones. Gah, we argued so much about this dumb movie.

It's always a kick in the pants when the Oscars come around. My degree is in cinema studies and working at a grocery store comics. This left me rather depressed, having read my living-the-dream, scriptwriting amigo's annual top ten list to discover I'd only heard of any of the films via a fashion blog I read and not seen a single one. I haven't seen any of the nominees this year, except (cough) Maleficent which is up for costume design. Arg.
through high school and college, I was ever so tapped in to Hollywood (and beyond). The steep drop in my consumption of film--at least current film--coincides quite noticeably with the absence of any disposable income to speak of. Ah, how culture eludes the impoverished! I graduated six years ago in the spring and I've reduced myself to what I can steal from the internet, my streaming-only Netflix subscription, and movies related to my chosen field,

Giving Me a Number, Taking Away My Name

More than the snobbish angst of having not enjoyed any high art at the multiplex this year--and that's being generous in assuming some was made, I'm a cynical snob--is that I have no brevity in my nature. My articles on Watchmen and The Hunger Games are more akin to essays, and between tracking down images, writing and editing, they took days of time to produce. This is a hurdle, more than a flaw, I'd say: It's the way I tend to rant articulately about my opinions to a few people, promise myself and others that I'll write down my thinking and then never do that is the real, real problem. But, since I'm a deli-slicer extraordinaire these days (we don't give out numbers, actually), I might as well do as Devo commands and get up off my ass.

I've Got One Hell of a Job

This is a challenge all writers face: Not writing and feeling bad about it. Let's remember to work with what we've got, draw inspiration from whatever truly does inspire us, and just keep trying to write it down. I did see some movies that were in release this year. I do have opinions about them, discerning critiques as a writer, a filmgoer and a scholar of the silver screen. Let's get nitty and gritty, let's think critically about mass-audience entertainment, let's commit to following through on our promise to ourselves and each other and elevate even the lowest common experiences to the level of intelligence befitting discourse! Or, at least let's delve into a very long exploration of Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier, like I fucking said I would when I saw it in April. Yeehaw!

After this point, there are mega-spoilers, not that I probably need to warn anyone about a movie this old and some triggering things like descriptions of violence. Oh, and hereafter, there will be no more references to "Secret Agent Man" by Devo, in part because Steve Rogers makes the worst secret agent ever.

The F Word

In my personal life as well as in my writing, if I had to put my finger to one truth, its that sex is absolutely vital, and one of the most telling aspects of personality and mental state. Sexuality is an essential thing, yet how we choose to act sexually is influenced so very much by our gender, our class, our education, our mood, our luck, our love. I love to think about it, especially in the context of my characters, because it helps me know them and helps me explore my own biases, feelings and desires. That being said, writing a good sex scene is really hard!

This morning, I read through the top ten entries on The Guardian's annual Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction awards. I wanted to see "what not to do", and compare it to my own work, from my novel The Wide and Burning World, which is, in parts, a veritable treatise on writing about sex. Let's take a look, shall we?

The following article contains sexually explicit writing that's NSFW (no pictures, though) as well as triggering things like non-consensual sex, sexualized violence and rape. 

Are You Listening?

I've just finished an epically long chapter in a novel of epically long chapters, 18k+ words from one of my three main perspectives. And to celebrate, I've been watching the British drama Broadchurch. Why is a gritty stone-who-done-it a celebration? Why, because of David Tennant, of course.

Oh rilleh?

The Land of the Rising Sun: An Introduction

A Little History

I began studying Japan late in college, when my then-bf-now-husband told me of his dream to teach English in Kyoto after graduating, simply out of a desire not to be left back in the States, dateless. I took a crash course in Japanese for ten weeks at UC Berkeley, and immersed myself in the early-modern history, too. The culture I had relative headstart on, having been interested to a non-serious degree in anime and manga since I was a kid. The considerable gaps in my East Asian education were filled in by said reason-for-going, an EAS major, nearly fluent in the language (and half-Japanese to boot). Long story and one hemorrhaging national economy later, and our dreams of Nippon were tabled indefinitely. That is, until we received the money to book tickets from my generous in-laws, and took a three-years-belated honeymoon of 18 jam-packed days. These posts, tagged Progress, are the tale of that journey, one that expanded the horizons of this novice traveller and renewed our commitment (now much older and wiser) to a future in Japan.

The Hunger Games: What's Not to Love

Since I just did a knock-down-drag-out about Watchmen and adaptation, I'm going to take a more emotional turn in this exploration of The Hunger Games.  Yes, it's adapted from a book, but I came away from this action flick aimed at teenaged girls feeling so damn sad that I figured there was more gold in them thar hills than in the dry flats of critical analysis.

Is the Past Tense of "Snit" Snoot or Snot?

I caught the preview for The Hunger Games when it was in the second-run theater I frequent and was most intrigued. Then I missed it because I "frequent" the movies only in comparison to the dentist. I got in a snit about how I'd heard it was a rip-off of Battle Royale, which it isn't. Then I got in a bigger snit about Shirley Jackson's The Lottery. Then I had a lot of laundry to fold, so I checked it out on Netflix. Along the lines of Watchmen, the trailer had looked so good that I was dreading the disappointment, (in this case) of seeing the concept bloated to feature length. That is to say, despite the bunch I'd gotten my snooty panties in for no real reason, I was still invested enough to be concerned as to whether it would be good. So, props to that trailer editing; it truly is an art form in itself.

At the time I saw the film, I hadn't read the book, though I have since. I haven't read the other two, wanting to enjoy the forthcoming sequel in a situation as close to my viewing of the first as possible. To restate: I don't know what's going to happen in the rest of the series. Possibly, this will result in a number of my points being rendered irrelevant predictive, in which case, I win at stories. And by I, I mean we, since mega-kudos will be due to Suzanne Collins for being equally as perceptive about the potential of her own work. On the other hand, I may actually be exploring the material on another level, in which case there's a little more content in the world to spark conversation and I am again duly fulfilled. Also, snoot-snoot-I'm-smarter-than-the-author/no-you're-not-she-intended-to-do-something-else.

And for those of you to whom this will matter, though I think it should be obvious... Team Peeta.

Watchmen and Me

Some of you may recall that, in a long-ago era known as 2009, the movie Watchmen was released in theaters. At the time, I was a senior in college, hellbent on expressing my passion for adaptation, cinema and comics in an academically-fruitful manner. I still remember the first time I saw the trailer, with its wrenchingly atmospheric visuals and haunting Smashing Pumpkins whine, and I had just read the graphic novel for the first time the summer before (and probably at least twice in the interim). Something exquisitely anticipatory happened in my chest when I gorged on those few perfect minutes, like a giggle trying to escape through my tightly-closed lips and humiliate me in my desire like an erection in skinny jeans. But I didn't see the film when it was in theaters. I didn't see it until last week, in fact. Why not, what I saw when I watched it and what happened when I did are not a mere review, but tell a story that is as much a part of my life and personality as film, comics and this comic in particular are the influences on my creative work.