At around this point in the American Idol season, I remember why I always resisted watching this show.
(Can someone please tell me why Taylor Hicks won Season 5? Because I still don't understand. And by the way, has he dropped off the face of the earth? No, I doubt I'm that lucky.)
Michael Johns didn't deserve to leave. Carly Smithson certainly didn't deserve to leave. I am so over Jason Castro and his lazy, devil-may-care approach to the last three or four weeks it's not even funny. He doesn't care. He has been horrible for a while now, and it doesn't even seem to faze him. What Simon said last night was dead-on accurate: this is not the Jason that the judges put into the contest. And still he's safe. I don't get it. He should've left tonight, not Brooke.
David Cook is the only contestant left standing that is truly inventive. I mean, he made me like Dolly Parton, Michael Jackson, Mariah Carey and Neil Diamond -- that's some kind of talent.
Anyway, the best part of tonight's elimination show had nothing to do with any of the contestants, but rather Natasha Bedingfield's performance of "Pocketful of Sunshine" and how it spurred my very reserved, very completely-opposite- of-gregarious 11-year-old nephew to burst into a very lively, surprisingly decent "I've got a pocket, got a pocketful of sunshine, I got a love and I know that it's all mine..."
I love this song.
i am outside, and i've been waiting for the sun
and with my wide eyes, i've seen worlds that don't belong
my mouth is dry with words i cannot verbalize
tell me why we live like this
keep me safe inside your arms like towers
tower over me
'cause we are broken, what must we do to restore
our innocence and the promise we adored?
give us life again, 'cause we just want to be whole
lock the doors 'cause i'd like to capture this voice
that came to me tonight so everyone will have a choice
and under red lights, i'll show myself it wasn't forged
we're at war, we live like this
keep me safe inside your arms like towers
tower over me
'cause we are broken, what must we do to restore
our innocence and the promise we adored?
give us life again, 'cause we just want to be whole
tower over me and i'll take the truth at any cost
'cause we are broken...
...if you took my advice and saw/read/listened to something I have recommended on this blog because you probably didn't like it. Whatever "it" was.
I'm going to have to start issuing one of those disclaimers that they slap on DVDs with Bonus Features -- especially commentaries by the cast. You know the one: the views expressed are the sole responsibility of ______, blah, blah, blah.
Basically I just need to, you know, stop recommending things that I like because apparently? Yeah, apparently I am in the far, far minority when it comes to movies/bands/books/characters that I really, really love. I can't remember the last time my parents have liked a movie I suggested. Actually, I can't remember the last time anyone has liked anything I suggested.
I guess I just have bad taste. Which is fine. I like what I like. But I really need to stop recommending stuff.
It was incredibly fitting that the final two words of Meredith's voice-over on Thursday night's post-strike return of Grey's Anatomy were "They evolve."
In the Grey's timeline, six weeks have passed since we last saw the doctors of Seattle Grace and in that time, Meredith has (finally) started going to therapy. Her therapist (well-played by guest star Amy Madigan) provides a bit of exposition by reminding Meredith that in the several appointments they'd had, Meredith hadn't said a word, and then volunteers that, as she is on staff at SG, she'd heard a fair bit of the gossip surrounding Meredith, Derek and Rose, and Meredith insists that she's not there because of Derek.
And then the beeper goes off, and she's off.
To race Cristina and Izzie through the halls. (I laughed -- loudly -- when Cristina hip-checked Izzie into the wall. So funny. And totally vintage Cristina.)
It seems that the residents are participiating in an age-old weeks-long competition whereby procedures, patients and surgeries have point values and at the end of the set time period, the resident who has accumulated the most points wins the as-yet-unknown grand prize.
As you may have guessed, hilarity ensues.
Izzie, who trails Cristina (obviously the leader), Alex and Meredith by a large chunk, grabs an incoming ER patient (played by Cheech Marin) with a fractured ankle and is determined to diagnose him with, you know, something other than a fractured ankle. She puts the guy through test after painful test only to find out that he's got a fractured ankle. And the flu.
Watching Cristina both suck up to Hahn (who I STILL DON'T LIKE) and squabble with Alex over the number of stitches she gets to do (each stitch equals a point) was also amusing.
In intern land, George and Lexie have moved into what George appropriately calls a "crap-partment." It's rundown and overrun with roaches, and neither struggling intern has much money to furnish the place. Which leads Lexie on quite the funny scavenger hunt around the hospital looking for things to steal. A bedpan becomes a fruit bowl. A cut vase of flowers given to Rose by a grateful patient is a table center piece. Bed pads are place mats, sheets a convenient slipcover for the couch -- you get the idea. Seriously, Lexie is adorable. I love both her and Chuyler Leigh. Probably my favorite exchange between Lexie and George came at the end, as the two roommates are sitting on the couch in their "renovated" apartment.
George: You should've stolen a TV.
Lexie: I tried. They're bolted to the ceiling.
I hope Chandra & Co. keep these two as nothing more than roommates with a nicely budding friendship -- they're great as friends and Chuyler Leigh and TR Knight have great chemistry. But we have gone down the more-than-friends route twice already with horrifying results. So please, PTB -- let poor George have a friend who remains a friend.
Meredith ends up winning the contest because she happens upon a patient brought in for a badly bitten hand after he, his wife (his rebound girl, which makes Meredith think of Derek and Rose) and his brother tangle with a bear cub and its overprotective mother. The brother's got his intestines hanging out of his stomach, the wife had a big chunk of scalp hanging by a skin flap, and the guy's got a hole in his hand from the bear's teeth. (The guy and his wife are played awesomely by Jason O'Mara, whom I love, and Clea Duvall, whom I love more.) Through a series of events, Meredith discovers O'Mara's character has a massive, inoperable brain tumor.
And so she gets 80 points, which vaults her over Cristina, and gives her the Holy Grail -- the Sparkle Pager. Every time a resident gets a surgery, he or she must first page Meredith on the Sparkle Pager to see if Meredith wants the surgery first.
Anyway, it was a really enjoyable episode. I absolutely love this show. I always like Meredith, even if she does border on the annoying sometimes, but this episode showed that she really is evolving. (Except maybe when, after figuring out the guy had a tumor, she throws her arms up in the air like she'd just scored a touchdown and yells tumor!) She dealt with a difficult situation in her patients and then followed that up by turning down a juicy surgery to instead do research on patients with similar tumors. She then presents the information to Derek and suggests setting up a clinical trial and does so in a totally professional, not-awkward manner.
And then she returns to her psychiatrist and says that maybe it's time she started talking.
I'm looking forward to the remainder of the new shows, particularly next week, when Kate Walsh returns.
"Oh, come on," I said dubiously. You have to know the effect you have on people."
He tilted his head to one side, and his eyes were curious. "I dazzle people?"
"You haven't noticed? Do you think everyone gets their way so easily?"
He ignored my questions. "Do I dazzle you?"
"Frequently," I admitted.
I'm pretty sure that Kevin convinced his mom to take him to Target to buy Twilight after we were done with Keenan's game today. He once told me that if I read Cirque du Freak, he'd read Twilight, and when I told him that I had the first book ready for pick-up at the library, he turned to his mom and told her she had to buy him Twilight.
This will be the longest book he's ever tackled. And I think the first one whose protagonist is a girl. But he's psyched to read it and already thinks Edward is cool.
I can't say I blame him. Edward Cullen, fictitious or not, pretty much dazzles me, too.
If you listen to the radio (and/or saw Wednesday's American Idol), then you know who Leona Lewis is. Or you've at least heard "Bleeding Love."
I am currently obsessed with it. As are Keenan, Kevin and Mia. I picked them up today to take them to Keenan's basketball game and on our way we heard some of our (current) favorite songs, which included "No Air" by Jordin Sparks and Chris Brown, "All Around Me" by Flyleaf, "Four Minutes" by Madonna, Justin Timberlake and Timbaland, "Never Too Late" by Three Days Grace and "See You Again" by Miley Cyrus -- yes, I'm ashamed to say, that song is forever in my head, and it's also my five-year-old niece's favorite song at the moment -- and we were waiting for "Bleeding Love" to come on.
I dropped Keenan off at the gym for warm-ups and the twins and I went to Quizno's for a sandwich. Guess what the first song we heard after getting back in the car?
Anyway, as I said, we are all super in love with it.
I am so absolutely sick to death about the degradation of morals that has been intensifying for quite some time, yes, but recently has been even more rampant and blatant than usual. I'm not Catholic, but I followed a lot of Pope Benedict's recent visit, and I was so incredibly impressed by his proactive stance on what's been going on, not only in the Catholic church, but in society in general. I love that he referenced Paul when he said that while all things may be lawful, they are not necessarily beneficial. He called -- rightly so -- a lot of the hedonism present "false freedom."
Reading the Time article I've posted below couldn't have come at a better time. It was informative, well-written and encouraging -- that not all popular trends are smutty and there is still honor in being virtuous.
Is it any wonder why I love this series of books?
Stephenie Meyer: The next JK Rowling?
By Lev Grossman, Time Magazine
Five years ago, on the night of June 1, 2003, a Phoenix housewife named Stephenie Meyer had a dream: a young woman was talking to a beautiful, sparkling man in a sunlit meadow. The man was a vampire. They were in love, and he was telling the girl how hard it was for him to keep from killing her.
Meyer had not written anything much before then. Her main creative outlets were scrapbooking and making elaborate Halloween costumes. But the dream was so vivid that she absolutely had to write it down. Then she kept on writing. She wrote the entire story of the young woman and the vampire from start to finish. That story became a young-adult novel called Twilight, and she followed it up with two sequels, New Moon and Eclipse. Together the three Twilight books have sold more than 5.3 million copies in the U.S., 4 million in the past 12 months alone. They've spent a combined 143 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list; when Eclipse was released last August, it bumped the final Harry Potter book out of the top spot on some lists even though it came out only 2 1/2 weeks later. Her first non-vampire novel, The Host, will be published next month. A movie of Twilight will be in theaters this December.
Meyer, 34, is a huge success at selling books, but she's becoming something more. People dress up like her characters. They write their own stories about them and post their tales on the Internet. When she appears at a bookstore, 3,000 people go to meet her. There are Twilight-themed rock bands. Meyer has, like one of her vampires, turned into something rare and more than merely human: a literary phenomenon. How?
There's nothing particularly fantastical about Meyer's life. She grew up in Phoenix, the daughter of a CFO at a contracting firm, and went to Brigham Young University, where she met her husband, an accountant named Christian who goes by "Pancho." They got married at 21 and have three sons. They still live just outside Phoenix in a town called Cave Creek, in a large modern house guarded by towering saguaro cacti. Smart, funny and cheery, Meyer does not seem noticeably undead in person. An observant Mormon, she doesn't drink alcohol and has never seen an R-rated movie. She's not perfect--although Mormons avoid caffeine on principle, she drinks the occasional cherry Diet Pepsi. "It's about keeping yourself free of addictions," she explains, sitting on a huge couch in her living room. "We have free will, which is a huge gift from God. If you tie that up with something like, I don't know, cocaine, then you don't really have a lot of freedom anymore."
The characters in Meyer's books aren't Mormons, but her beliefs are key to understanding her singular talent. The heroine of Twilight is a girl named Bella who moves from Phoenix to a small town in Washington State (a part of the country Meyer had never visited when she wrote Twilight). Bella feels like an outsider at her new high school, but she is immediately drawn to a strange, otherworldly, ridiculously good-looking group of siblings called the Cullens, particularly to 17-year-old Edward.
The Cullens are actually a local coven of vampires. Edward has been 17 since 1918. He is super-strong and super-fast, he can hear people's thoughts, and he does not breathe or sleep or age. His skin is cold, and when exposed to the sun, he doesn't burn--he glitters. Edward and the Cullens aren't ordinary vampires: they have renounced human blood on moral grounds, feeding instead on wild animals, which they hunt by night. He and Bella are instantly, overwhelmingly attracted to each other, but he is also wildly hungry for her blood.
Resisting that temptation is a constant struggle. Edward's choice--and the willingness to choose a different way in general--is a major theme in Meyer's books. "I really think that's the underlying metaphor of my vampires," she says. "It doesn't matter where you're stuck in life or what you think you have to do; you can always choose something else. There's always a different path."
True. But that does not exhaust the meaning of the Twilight books. Certainly some of their appeal lies in their fine moral hygiene: they're an alternative to the hookup scene, Gossip Girl for good girls. There's no drinking or smoking in Twilight, and Bella and Edward do little more than kiss. "I get some pressure to put a big sex scene in," Meyer says. "But you can go anywhere for graphic sex. It's harder to find a romance where they dwell on the hand-holding. I was a late bloomer. When I was 16, holding hands was just--wow."
But it is the rare vampire novel that isn't about sex on some level, and the Twilight books are no exception. What makes Meyer's books so distinctive is that they're about the erotics of abstinence. Their tension comes from prolonged, superhuman acts of self-restraint. There's a scene midway through Twilight in which, for the first time, Edward leans in close and sniffs the aroma of Bella's exposed neck. "Just because I'm resisting the wine doesn't mean I can't appreciate the bouquet," he says. "You have a very floral smell, like lavender ... or freesia." He barely touches her, but there's more sex in that one paragraph than in all the snogging in Harry Potter.
It's never quite clear whether Edward wants to sleep with Bella or rip her throat out or both, but he wants something, and he wants it bad, and you feel it all the more because he never gets it. That's the power of the Twilight books: they're squeaky, geeky clean on the surface, but right below it, they are absolutely, deliciously filthy.
Becoming Stephenie Meyer
Meyer wrote Twilight in three months flat. "I know to the day when I became a writer," she says. "One day. Which is cool." Once she'd had the dream, she wrote like a woman struck by lightning, barely sleeping, typing one-handed with a baby in her lap. (At the time, she was taking care of three children under the age of 5.) Even now she does her writing in an open office area in the middle of the house. She's not interested in a room of her own. "I can't close doors and write. Even if the kids are asleep, I know that I could hear them if I needed. I feel better if I'm kind of in the center of things and I know what's going on."
Her story reminds one a little of J.K. Rowling's--Rowling wrote Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone as an unemployed single mom while her baby daughter slept--and Meyer is quick to point out that her success is a direct result of the way Rowling changed the book industry: children are now willing to read 500-page novels, and adults are now willing to read books written for children. But as artists, they couldn't be more different. Rowling pieces her books together meticulously, detail by detail. Meyer floods the page like a severed artery. She never uses a sentence when she can use a whole paragraph. Her books are big (500-plus pages) but not dense--they have a pillowy quality distinctly reminiscent of Internet fan fiction. (Which she'll readily grant: "I don't think I'm a writer; I think I'm a storyteller," Meyer says. "The words aren't always perfect.")
Whereas Rowling's works maintain a certain English reserve, Meyer's books are full of gusting emotions. Bella never stops gasping and swooning and passing out and waking up screaming from nightmares. Her heart is always either pounding or stopping. (Bella's histrionics don't feel at all unrealistic. When you're writing about adolescents, melodrama and realism are the same thing.) Rowling labors over her intricate plots, but Meyer's stories never bend or twist or branch. They have one gear, and she guns it straight ahead till the last page. The way she manages the reader's curiosity, maintaining tension and controlling the flow of information, is simply virtuosic. She creates a compulsion in the reader that is not unvampiric.
Meyer and Rowling do share two important traits. Both writers embed their fantasy in the modern world--Meyer's vampires are as deracinated and contemporary as Rowling's wizards. And people do not want to just read Meyer's books; they want to climb inside them and live there. James Patterson may sell more books, but not a lot of people dress up like Alex Cross. There's no literary term for the quality Twilight and Harry Potter (and The Lord of the Rings) share, but you know it when you see it: their worlds have a freestanding internal integrity that makes you feel as if you should be able to buy real estate there.
Meyer first realized something was afoot when she gave a reading in Seattle and somebody drove 4 hours and took a boat to get there. At twilightmoms.com a website for fans over 25, there are more than 200,000 posts. Last year there was an Eclipse prom in Tempe, Ariz. "It's not like Harry Potter, where you can wear a wizard's robe," Meyer says. "But they do what they can. One girl even had colored contacts!"
Beyond Twilight
You wouldn't want to live in Meyer's next book. Her fourth Twilight novel, Breaking Dawn, will be out in August--it's already No. 8 on Amazon.com--but on May 6 she will publish The Host (Little, Brown; 619 pages), a science-fiction novel being marketed to adults. It's set in the near future on an Earth that has been conquered by parasitic aliens who take over the bodies of humans, annihilating their hosts' personalities. One human host resists; she lives on as a voice in the head she shares with the alien. When host and parasite (who goes by Wanda) meet up with the host's old lover--now a resistance fighter in hiding--the alien falls for him too and joins the humans. It's a love triangle with two sides, a ménage à deux. Like Twilight, The Host is a kinky setup--two girls in one body!--played absolutely clean.
And like Meyer's other books, The Host is about love and choice and demi-human creatures. ("I rarely write about just humans," Meyer says. "You can get humans anywhere.") The Host is also set on the same slow burn as Meyer's other work: while there's hot kissing, it's a strict PG. But The Host is a grittier read--much of the book is set in a hardscrabble resistance hideout. Nobody has nice clothes. There's romance, but much of The Host is about Wanda's attempts to fit in with her new human bedfellows, about feeling alone and different and unlovable--literally alienated.
If there's a formula to Meyer's work, it holds true here: she rewrites stock horror plots as love stories, and in doing so, she makes them new again. She writes vampire novels without the biting and science fiction without the lasers. Instead, she slows down the action, tapping it for the pent-up emotional drama that's always been present in it but had been all but invisible until she came along. "That's what I like about science fiction," Meyer says. "It's the same thing I like about Shakespeare. You take people, put them in a situation that can't possibly happen, and they act the way you would act. It's about being human." And sometimes there's nobody quite as human as somebody who isn't.
"I did a really funny
prank where I got my assistant to paint all the cars in your
neighborhood white so you would wake up and think it was snowing. That
was a good one." -- Tina Fey
Poehler interviewed Fey for an article in the most recent Marie Claire, which features Fey on its cover.
It is hilarious. I encourage you to pick up a copy so you can read the entire article.
"Tina Fey on Top"
By Amy Poehler
I am in 30 Rock — the building, not the show — trying to find Tina Fey, whom I'm supposed to interview. It's taken hours. After giving three passwords, I finally spot her surrounded by a phalanx of hip-hop dancers and bodyguards. Eventually Fey breaks from the group, mounts a pilates Cadillac, and starts working out. I pull up a chair next to the machine and begin.
AMY POEHLER: I have a couple of things I want to ask you about. You were homeschooled, correct?
TINA FEY: Um, no. I was school-schooled.
AP: And you grew up in the North Pole?
TF: Pennsylvania. Did you Google me? Is that how you got your information?
AP: Yeah. Is your name Karen Felcher?
TF: Um, no, although I can see why you're confused, because that is my porn name.
AP: OK, then I'm going to start again. We're in a movie together coming out this month called Baby Mama. Tell everyone what it's about. And please, do it right.
TF: It's about a lady — a business lady — who wants to have
a baby, but her junk is broken, so she calls upon the services of
another, healthier lady to be her surrogate. You play that lady, and
your character is a little bit of a charming dirtbag, so complications
and delights ensue.
AP: And we have some very great actors in this film with us. Who are they?
TF: Sigourney Weaver. Steve Martin. Gregorias Kinnear. This is
going to sound like a lie and a fib, but those people actually are in
this movie.
AP: Tell us about the fashion shoot you had to do for Marie Claire. How did that go?
TF: I was very unhappy with the clothing selections they had for me, so I ended up making most of the clothes myself.
AP: Amazing. There are a lot of stories about you peeing in
corners when you go on a photo shoot to mark your territory. Is that
right?
TF: Yes. Yes, it is.
AP: What are your beauty rituals?
TF: Some people work with a trainer, some people work with a
stylist. I work with a celebrity fecalist. A fecalist is basically a
person who comes and collects my stools, and then examines them to see
if I'm eating right and if I should be drinking more water and what my
moods should be.
AP: And you're producing your fecalist's reality show, right?
TF: Yes. It's called Eric Gurian: The Turd Whisperer.
AP: OK, let's talk about when we first met — in Chicago, in 1993. What were we doing?
TF: We were probably eating Italian beef sandwiches and getting our hair permed.
AP: Actually, we met in class at the ImprovOlympic Theater. You taught me my first real beauty lesson.
TF: I was 22 or 23, and I had only recently learned that you
can pluck your eyebrows or have a lady put hot wax on them and remove
portions of them and shape them. So this was a big thing that happened
to me, and I passed that information on to you.
AP: Back then, I used to get my hair dyed at a place called
Big Hair. It cost $15. They just used straight bleach, so my hair was
the color of white lined paper, and my eyebrows looked like they were
done with a thick black marker. So tell us a little bit about a play
you wrote while in Chicago in the early '90s, about Catherine the
Great.
TF: Yes, yes. I used to take playwriting classes, and I wrote a
one-act play — I can't remember the name of it, but it was really about
the way women are perceived as leaders. In the play, Catherine the
Great would say things like, "You know, John F. Kennedy had
extramarital affairs and no one says anything. But I bang one horse and
now I'm a horse-banger for all eternity? That's it? That's what I am?"
I think Hillary Clinton's got to be able to relate to that.
AP: Being a tough, capable broad has never been easy — look at us. Although we did have a lot of fun on Baby Mama. Boy, did we play a lot of pranks on each other.
TF: We love pranks. I mean, we're kind of like Cloons and Damon
that way, doing a lot of, like, $250,000 pranks. I did a really funny
prank where I got my assistant to paint all the cars in your
neighborhood white so you would wake up and think it was snowing. That
was a good one.
AP: I had an assistant on Christmas Eve fill your trailer with rats, and we laughed. Oh, the pranks.
TF: So much pranking.
Did some music downloading last night and ended up with two of Fall Out Boy's and Panic At the Disco's Fueled by Ramen labelmates: Paramore and The Academy Is...
Thanks for the Paramore recs, Janie and Cori, 'cause I absolutely love them. The "Listeners Also Bought" feature at iTunes suggested The Academy Is... and I love them, too.
Speaking of Panic, while I like their new CD, I totally miss the fun quirkiness of their debut -- and I miss the exclamation point, as well. "The Only Difference Between Martyrdom and Suicide is Press Coverage" might be the best title for a song ever, and it's definitely one of my favorite songs.
I've always liked Fall Out Boy and I still think "I'm just a notch in your bed post, but you're just a line in a song," from "Sugar, We're Going Down" is such a great line.
I love this whole indie rock/alt rock/power pop/pop punk genre.
Mondays used to be so sparse when it came to watching TV, especially after Prison Break became so ludicrous that I abandoned it. (Speaking of, the fact that they're bringing the supposedly-beheaded Sara back next season is kind of insulting to even semi-intelligent TV viewers everywhere.)
After a craptastic week and a weekend that saw lots of sleeping and lots of watching movies that make me somber (Atonement, Juno, Speak, In the Land of Women) and/or that are just plain depressing with no redemptive quality that I can think of, except for the Tracy/Chris storyline that was far, far too short (Into the Wild), I'm definitely looking forward to the return of the last of the shows affected by the writer's strike.
Except the schedule's been majorly shifted around.
Tomorrow alone brings brand-spanking-new episodes of Gossip Girl, Bones, and House, all three of which I watch, in addition to Dancing With the Stars (seriously, what is up with me and reality TV this season?) and Medium.
Tuesdays are less crowded now that House and Bones have jumped to Mondays -- other than American Idol, I watch NCIS and Women's Murder Club (which returns April 29).
Ditto with Wednesdays: just one non-Idol show in Criminal Minds.
Thursdays are jam-packed now that both Grey's and Lost have returned, because in addition to both of those, I still watch The Office, Scrubs, CSI and Without a Trace. Yeah. That's a lot of TV in one night. Thank God for TiVo (especially since Grey's, The Office and CSI are all on at the same time.)
I'm trying to get into Moonlight, which is on Fridays, but that's the only thing I watch that day after never being able to quite get into Ghost Whisperer and getting tired of Num3ers.
On Sundays is yet another (awesome) Bruckheimer criminal procedural in Cold Case.
