"She's a Muppet Baby..."

I have a total confession that, honestly, I'm not even a little embarassed about making. I think that The Rachel Zoe Project is both entertaining and quality television. Rachel gallivanting around saying so much, while not really saying anything at all, and petrifying everyone that encounters her with her unintelligible barks of commands, it's quality, bananas, I'm telling you.

I totally admit though that Zoe as a media cultural driving force has questionable approaches and viewpoints, particularly dealing with the issue of weight, but really, it's reality tv, it's not like Tyra is as progressive and sensitive as she pretends to be. They're television characters. They're a reflection of the dominant values of the manstream media and its audience.

Most importantly, everyone knows, the best low brow reality television, births the best parodies:



She is shutting it down...like a rave.

This or That- Dedicated Divas

Welcome to a Monday Morning Segment called This or That! A simple premise, I pin two competitors together here of commonly, and not so commonly, disputed against binaries, renditions of the other, whatever, and let you all decide which one triumphs over the other in greatness, longevity, or any other standard you see fit. Just a way to pass time for those of you working mindless underpaid internships or jobs you hate but are grateful to have in this market.


We're gonna start things off right with two major players' renditions of the great American classic, "I Will Always Love You," but who has earned it more? The delightfully tacky yet unrefined Dolly Parton, or Whitney herself, proving to us all recently that it ain't over til the cracked lady sings (don't call it a comeback).





A true, or even casual really, fan knows that it was Dolly's song first and was written and recorded by her in 1973 for Porter Wagoner, a business partner . The song became the second hit off her album Jolene (the first being Jolene, the title track, which is really the anthem of my life if you think about it) and though Whitney rejuvenaed it on the bigscreen in 1992 in The Bodyguard, Dolly had already made a place for it in cinema in the 1982 flick The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (the film of my life). Both made the song huge hits in their respective communities, Dolly's being country Whitney's Top 40, and it is probably going to be the career hit for Houston (given the sounds of things off her latest tracks). But what say you? Whose song is it actually? Argue in the comments people. For your consideration:

A Story About Two Strangers, One a Little Stranger...

So after having seen the trailer for the new(ish) Fox Searchlight flick, Adam, I immediately thought "I have to see this movie," cute, atypical love story with a hot chick and a quirky guy, everything I ever wanted when I was straight. Though I'm starting to admit myself the realization that more often than not trailers turn out to be much more enthralling than the films they're advertising, and this was unfortunately not an exception.

Point of warning, there are plot spoilers in here, so if you intend to see this movie, I have two pieces of advice, one, don't read this, two, wait for the DVD.

The movie tracks the relationship of aspiring children's author and daughter of privilege Beth and Asperger's syndome sufferer Adam, who we learn from the film's opening scenes has just lost his father and works as an electrical engineer for a toy company, a job framed as unsuited for him because of his overzealousness about the technological capabilities of his creations and a lack of attention towards the necessity of efficient production.

Beth and Adam have a meet-cute in the laundry room of their building, where she has just moved into, and he loans her his laundry card as she unloads her clothes into the washing machine and her back story onto Adam. The film then tracks their interactions and illustrates Adam's bafflement about how to deal with his attraction to Beth, and Beth's underexplained attraction to Adam's eccentricities (which any viewer who saw the trailer knows all along is caused by his disability).

There's also a kind of cumbersome side plot of Beth involving her father, Peter Gallagher, who comes across as a Sandy Cohen but is really way more a Caleb Nichol, and legalities behind some business dealings...I don't know. I think that her dad was intended to act as a foil to Adam in that although Adam lacks tact and is a fountain of impulsive honesty, her dad's dishonesty was always cloaked in a manipulative masquerade of good intention. But this is really beside the point.

The point is that from the beginning Beth is a completely unsympathetic character who is too self-centered and unjustifiably perpetuating problems for herself with her own naivety. It is clear to the viewers from their initial interaction that there is something different about Adam that is rooted in more than nerves or a low level of social skills. His Asperger's, which is a form of autism characterized by difficulties in social interaction, is pretty ostensibly manifested in his interactions with her to the point that she comes across as oblivious and self-martyring for trying to maintain a romantic relationship with him.

I am definitely not saying that romantic relationships aren't possible for these people. However, the film doesn't realistically portray what motivates the development of Beth's attraction to Adam beyond the level of friendship. She just comes across as unjustifiably feeling sorry for herself for misalignments of their points of views and comes across as selfish and cruel at points in the way that she seems to set him and herself up for collective emotional instability.

The one good part is that they don't live happily ever after. But the film does take an equally formulaic approach of tying loose ends. Adam moves to California doing something with astronomy, which is a topic he is an idiot-savant for, after having been heavily prepped for the interview process by Beth. And Beth stays in New York, opting not to go with him and instead publish her children's book about a family of racoons living in Central Park that just didn't belong there (a reference to their first date of sorts).

Beth acts as, how Neil Morris puts it, "Adam's social guide dog" into the closing scene of the movie where it all becomes apparent that without all that heartache, Adam never would have ascertained his full potential. And neither would have she.

I will say that for an indie flick it did lack the typical overwhelming element of social commentary, aside from the obvious exposure of living with Asperger's (which I do think is important exposure) and one scene where an egregious arrest is attempted on Adam for looking for Beth at the school playground (damn the pigs), and it also lacked the excessive use of handheld camera (though it found its nauseating way into a couple scenes). Overall save yourself the eight bucks and ask an open-minded only child what they think it'd be like if they fell for an autistic guy in an apartment they probably don't deserve in Manhattan. You'll probably get a similar narrative as Beth's.

Little Boxes Made of Ticky Tacky

Of recent my pursuit of higher education has come to an unfortunate and unexpected halt temporarily, damn you recession, and I've been forced to relocate back home until further plans make themselves available to me. Catch is, home is new for me, as my family now lives in good 'ole Cary, North Carolina, a growing city that matches every suburban stereotype from gas-guzzling SUV's to gaudy homes with no yards, this means a whole new, not so pleasant adventure.

Cary is known to many North Carolinians as the Concentrated Area of Relocated Yankees. This is not an exaggeration. A typical response to this acronym is, "Well great James, your Drescherian style speech patterns must be no big thing to these people, right?" Wrong. What's unusual about Cary is although it is geographically located in the south and inhabited mostly by outsiders, they all seem to have adopted the stereo-typical southern attitude of shunning difference and encouraging conformity and old fashioned values. Low taxes. Focus on the Family. That kind of shit. This makes being a comfortably queer person with no pretense a little inhibiting to live in this setting.

On top of this, the city planners of this montrosity ought to be embarassed of themselves because the overwhelming absence of small businesses and the car-centric culture encouraged by the town's and surrounding towns' infrastructures is at the very least inefficient and sooo not green.

What I tell people to liken it to are the establishing shots of America Beauty and Weeds.

It's also worth noting Cary's proximity to an area of North Carolina known as Research Triangle Park. This attracts many people who work in the ITech industry, an industry that doesn't necessarily pride itself on social skills and sparkling personalities, moreso encourages efficiency, practicality and is generally attracts less than personable and interesting individuals. (All of this is SO not J-Wo). As a side note, this proximity also accounts for the very prevelant Indian presence in the area, because for one reason or another many Indian people get into this industry. That's really neither here nor there though.

Due to some sort of combination of the aforementioned attributes, Cary as a community becomes a community that is bound together not by common histories (as everyone comes from somewhere else) and not by common interests (because how many stimulating bar conversations have you had around the issues in ITech?) but primarily by the overwhelming consumer culture that has developed (strip malls and housing developments for as far as the eye can see) and by conversations revolving around heteronormative familial structures, i.e. WHOSE HAVING A BABY NOW?!* And as Cary was reported to be the 3rd fastest growing city in America in 2008, it shows little sign of slowing down.

The absence of a culturally rich environment is really the least of the detrimental affects of this rapid development in this area. Although, I'll admit, it's one that bothers me the most. In addition there are obvious environmental affects manifested on a large scale, and on a local scale with the overwhelming runoff expediting the destruction of Jordan Lake just west of Raleigh, not to mention, state legislation has gotten unjustifiably lenient on restrictions protecting the lake.

There's plenty more I could bitch about this personality-less wasteland of a city but really this was just intended to be an introduction explaining why I'm starting this blog. In sum, Cary's just not gonna cut it as a conversational lotus for my fabulosity so I'm doing what every good disgruntled twenty-something year old student aggrivated with the job market is doing, bringing it all to the internet.

And believe me you ain't seen nothing yet.

*said reasons for Cary's lack of charm are admittedly speculative, but believe me when I say it lacks charm!