Adventures in hacking my DVD player

You wouldn't believe how happy I was when I learned that I was not going to need to shell out anything like the $80-140 I thought I'd have to spend if I wanted to watch a DVD from outside the US. As usual, big organizations don't like to play nice, and our DVD players here in the US don't play non-Region 2 formatted films. I had found a director's cut of Wim Wenders' Until the End of the World from Germany and had been searching for options around town, finding a couple of sources of multi-region DVD players.

But then I discovered a hacking site that offered codes and instructions passed along by folks who had altered the behavior of their video players. I searched for my model in their database of hacks and found people who had successfully reprogrammed their machines using their remote keypads.

I was elated.

I tested it out by pressing a sequence of keys including the first few digits in the number pi, tweaked some memory codes, exited the menu, turned my machine off and on again, and proceeded to watch my five-hour version of Until the End of the World, a completely different film from the one I fell for twenty years ago in a San Francisco theater when it was first released in the States.

Some perverse instinct grabbed me recently and I changed some of the codes using the remote, but I did it stupidly and removed the ability of the remote to fast forward and rewind at varying speeds and instead only worked to advance or return to the beginnings of chapters.

I hacked again, for the last time, and the remote worked properly again. I breathed a sigh of relief and shut the machine off.

Curiosity: you know, it can get you far, but it can also send you over the edge.

Taking the new mall for a spin

Our town has a new mall, after the slow and languid death of the old one many years ago and the black hole of construction that occupied it for a long time. A friend mentioned recently that her dad had, back when that first mall was built, turned down a chance to own some of that land.

Now it is owned and operated by Macerich, and it is that corporation's territory in more ways than I had realized.

I hadn't understood that malls have a different status from other public spaces because of the ownership of the land. It's like your parents saying, "Our roof, our rules!" when you come home with your "special" friend. They get to say, "No demonstrations on our property because they block trade on private property, our private property." They get to enforce traffic and other regulations fairly selectively, as I understand it.

And what are we left with?

I spent an hour there today because I'm curious. Who goes to this mall? I know bored parents of small children do because it's safe, full of pairs of eyes, full of similar people with similar issues. I saw lots of mall workers arrive, as I arrived around 10 so I could redeem a coupon for a freebie at Panera Bread. I never know what I want there when I go in. I always feel kind of perplexed at the panoply of pain: all those white breads and pastries, all that starchy, sugary stuff with nary a whole grain in sight despite dustings of whole oats suggesting otherwise.

Looking at their menu I felt like I was choosing a breakfast item from the dairy case at the supermarket: Let's see, Grands buttermilk biscuits or the can of cinnamon rolls? Both of those choices are pale imitations of the biscuits, scones, and rolls we typically make at home, but I know people get seduced into thinking that prying those spiral-sealed cans open with a spoon is the experience of baking or is an improvement on the time and labor baking requires. Looking at my options at Panera I felt like I was choosing from a selection of Betty Crocker cake mixes, which are fine for what they are but again are not the same as beating butter and sugar, adding eggs and flour and milk and salt and rising agents and baking it all together until it becomes something more than the simple sum of its parts.

I am deeply skeptical of how designed the whole mall experience feels today. At Panera I like their muffin tops, called "Muffies" -- all the best part of a muffin, a great idea -- and the free "souffle" was okay yet enough salt to burn the back of my throat seemed to be standing in for some of the cheese in the four-cheese "souffle," an eggy center baked inside a pastry shell that stayed pleasingly warm for a while. I know people who write at Panera because of the free wifi (I think we should start pronouncing it wiffie or weefee; I like the play on the word wifey, too). I love it that people like me can work anywhere now, that people like me are being courted with the free wifi and the endless refills, that we are encouraged to make these spaces our mobile workplaces. But I don't like the way the staff are relegated to fast-food workers, assembling cookie-cutter items and always having to answer to some remote entity called "Corporate."

I've felt a tinge of the same dismay every time I've visited a new Peet's coffee outlet in the past few years. They're all pretty, with nice finishes and art that professes the company's interest in the places they buy coffee. But there's little there there, as Gertrude Stein infamously said of Oakland. Mall coffee shops are the unisex replacement for the disappearing lounge adjacent to the department store restroom. The room that allowed you to call it a restroom and not just a bathroom or toilet. Mall cafes and other spaces offer public parlors, environments that are clean and inoffensive enough to disappear so you can use them for your own purposes for a while.

All these wipeable surfaces feel alien after living a block from the original Peet's store in Berkeley for two years in the early 1980s. We were lucky enough to land not on the Telegraph side of campus but on the Chez Panisse side.

I've only dined at Chez Panisse three times, each of them memorable, but at least once a week my housemates and I would amble the block, threading our way along the heaving concrete sidewalks of North Berkeley, to Peet's for a small cup of their rich, deep elixir. We'd claim a little patch of sidewalk or stairway or lean on a newspaper box and watch other people come to life with us under the effects of the brew. Thus was one of the final nails driven into my life before coffee snobbery. (I was a goner from way back: there were too many things urging me in that direction, like when my sweetie returned from Boston with tales of coffee a friend at MIT made after cooling the coffee with liquid nitrogen; the theory was that the highest temperature differential between coffee and water made for the best flavored brew; this accounted for our freezing of all our coffee beans for the next twenty years.)

Peet's defined Berkeley for me: nestled among the Craftsman bungalows of the Berkeley hills, all that dark wood paneling and shelving under low ceilings made for a cozy cubbyhole that got steamy when it rained. It's hard to say whether the wood was all stained dark deliberately or whether some of it was simply coated with the patina of a million visitors, a million transactions before ours. I think it was a lot of both. I loved the way intellectuals engaged with each other, caffeine as the facilitator.

But here, at the Peet's at the new mall, there's no patina, nor do I find impassioned intellects at odds. I go in and buy coffee there anyway, because it's a decent place to sit and write. A woman is reading next to me, a guy is on a laptop, and a couple of women are chatting in the section I choose, the one with a great view of the Flatirons, our beautiful mountains. Real estate agents and contractors meet their clients here and pore through checklists with them. I find I can't concentrate on my novel about a Venetian police detective, again, and I'm distracted from the gorgeous view of our dramatic mountainscape by the names etched on the tops of the boxes across the parking lot: Men's Wearhouse; Staples: The Office Supply Superstore (also subtitled by me "The Only Office Supply Store Pretentious Enough to Have a Name with a Subtitle"); and a storefront with a name that always perplexes me, Massage Envy.

I walk back toward my car along the main row of shops, and even at up to 60 percent off, I know there's nothing I need in any of these stores. I bought socks for our daughter at Gymboree the other day. My friends and I liked the drinks at The Purple Martini one evening when we arrived at the tail end of their four-hour "happy hour." (But the volume of the music videos they had playing on screens all over the bar seemed to increase exponentially while we were there and our ears were ringing by the time we left, around 9:30, when the night was still young for most people.

A man who is maybe thirty walks past me, talking animatedly with himself. "Why? I don't know why!" he exclaims, a daypack and a cotton sack with handles bouncing behind him as he strides south. Off-Center Guy doesn't seem to be slowed by the store displays any more than I am. Maybe it's just us who are out of sync with everyone else, but I'm not so sure.

There's nothing here for him, there's nothing here for me. A couple of shops looked like they reflected someone's individual style: Christina's Collection and a denim boutique. Perversely, the kind of jewel box that is Christina's Collection, preciously named and looking like a little museum, a thoroughly curated expression of one person's unique sensibilities, is simultaneously more attractive and extremely suspect: I worry that if I cross its threshold I may be subjecting myself to the sticky snares of some person for whom this little shop is the absolute culmination of their hopes and dreams, my every glance will be pounced upon, and my every murmur met with an essay revealing the storekeeper's extensive interest in just that detail. Sometimes you just want to browse in a very anonymous way, and that, I'm convinced, is also the appeal of the chain stores. I know people who are very attached to the freedom of being able to buy dinner without getting out of their cars now; at the mall, I have that same feeling. I could buy a garment here without anyone I know judging me for where I shop or what I buy; the store clerks and owners are simply glad to have me as a customer because that means, for now, that they have jobs.

But everything here feels like it's for someone else. The store with all black, white, or black-and-white stuff? Cool idea, but I don't need any of that right now, thank you. I'm just not a person who updates my decor continuously, who swaps out candle holders, dish towels, and coordinating oven mitts every season.

And I know my reluctance to buy my little trendy tops at mall chain stores is slowing a certain economy down in some ways. By buying used things, however, I'm also nurturing other economies I believe in more than I believe in The Macerich Corporation. My friends and I lament that for what you get back it's hardly worth consigning at Childish Things, a shop just a half a block north of the new mall that resells used clothes, toys, and incidentals for families with little kids and babies, yet I still bring some of our used stuff there anyway, if simply to support someone who I think has built a nice business for Boulderites and a kind of refuge for parents of small children, no small thing during that peculiarly isolating time.

I get the most help from a stocking clerk at Macy's, who directs me where I want to go (I feel so geeky for asking the young Hispanic woman for "swimwear"). A make-up clerk who had just started to work with another patron still has a "hi" with a smile for me as I go by. She'll go far, I'm sure, if she doesn't piss off the people she's already working with to get to the other ones she wants to work with.

So who does shop here? Who is this for? Who falls for this?

I suspect this is all for the people moving into all those new houses that look just like the ones on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. I think that show has held up quite a standard in contemporary home design; now I'm seeing so many siding-and-stone clad houses they're starting to look like what we called the "mushroom houses" of the 1980s and 1990s to me. Those houses the developers build on that TV show have become a powerful icon, one that people are grasping hold of right now despite having been lured to overextend themselves with exploding mortgages that they couldn't really finance unless everything continued going just as well as it had been, and we all know how that turned out for most people, don't we? Unfortunately, we don't know how it's going to turn out for a whole lot more people very soon, but foreclosures are on a scary-big upswing.

I think TV is still selling that whole package as hard as it can, though. If you can have everything paved, landscaped, a nice car, and a flat-screen TV, all will be well, right? People think they will be accepted if they look like the ones they watch on prime time nightly, or if they have that house, keep up with the fads. We don't watch much TV compared with the average Joseph P. America, so now and then I'm incensed when a movie or TV show tries to tell you that its people are quirky and charming and special yet all the stuff around them cries, "These people are total fashion victims, enslaved by what people think they should do and want!"

I see around me the minimum-wage workers who have jobs here at the mall and shop here because it's what they know. I recognize the parents with young children who are both bored silly by life in front of the TV and come here for the all-important activity of simply Getting Out of the House so the moms can say they "did some errands" by the end of the day and feel better about themselves.

My mother and I talked this morning about my deeply skeptical attitude toward this new "public space" and she reminded me of Frank Zappa's question, "Is that a real poncho, or is that a Sears poncho?" No Sears stores here at the new mall, but Zappa's question still slices right to the heart of the matter after lo, these many years. Is this a real mall, or someone's idea of what you might want from a mall? Is this a real experience, or a made-up experience? I keep wanting to meet the people the mall designers had in mind when they developed this project. It is not lost on me that all those cool ideas about mixed-use this and that that people brought up during the open comment period before the new mall was developed simply evaporated. Now we've got a soulless outdoor mall (which is ok when the weather's fine but seems bleak and unenticing in the cold of winter, encouraging me to forget about the place for months at a time), filled with national chains selling stuff no one really needs any more, if they ever did. This outdoor mall has no connection with our older downtown pedestrian mall, a missed opportunity to link this with the real center of town if I ever saw one. Why there aren't free shuttles between the two places I do not understand.

So I'll skirt the mall and cash in my freebies now and then (California Pizza Kitchen sent me a free dinner for four just before their real opening but on my last visit they served me food with rancid nuts and I just haven't worked up any enthusiasm about going back there). And instead of buying Major Dickason's Blend for $13/lb. coffee at Peet's, I'll sip my $6/lb. organic, free-trade Italian roast from Lucky's Market and enjoy our own free wifi from my back deck instead. Malls like this one always remind me to look inward, closer to home, for the there I sometimes misguidedly seek out there.

Writing about music, part 277: My favorite arrow

So why keep going on about my favorite band, about their music and how it affects my world, if, as I say, I'm really "over them" now?

Because there's something there, I'm convinced.

I just read a couple of early Ian Rankin thrillers that recently arrived at our public library. They get straight to the heart of this sort of disillusioned, late-40s career cop. His world is a kind of emotional desert: he's pared his life down to his work as a cop, not leaving much room for more. The action and perspective stays tightly focused on him and his thoughts. But in Rankin's more recent books, his detective, John Rebus, finds great solace in music. In fact, I've felt Rankin's become something of a publicity engine for the contemporary Scottish alternative music industry; he calls out other groups too occasionally -- I'm just waiting for his first Gomez mention).

And I think Rankin has created a richer character with his interest in music. So I keep writing about it, trying to capture something about performance, identity, feeling, expression, energy -- all those things music makes me feel and think about. I share some of the experience Rankin invents for Rebus: how that music can pull us through, like time itself or a plot device, getting us from one point to another.

And I love the ride when I listen to Gomez. I love the way they grasp hold of a song again and again -- how they made up the songs to include the reminders to keep paying attention, every time you sing a new verse or change tempo or add a new texture.

Conversations with Gomez

Ooh, it's coming together! There's a documentary about the Gomez message board a brewin', to which I am very much looking forward to contributin'. (And not just because of the production credits for one and all! Woohoo!) The question I started turning over before I started writing was, just what was it about Gomez that got me, anyway?

I was keen on the song I first heard, their first FM radio "hit" that I was aware of, "Revolutionary Kind." My Dad and I both noticed it while we were having one of our idyllic summer drives, this time around the nooks and crannies of Chatham, on Cape Cod, listening to WMVY, the Martha's Vineyard station (where you'll hear more Carly Simon and James Taylor than you hear on most other FM adult alternative stations).

Then when I heard a guest DJ set by my previous Favorite Musician, Neil Finn (of Split Enz, Crowded House, and an illustrious solo career), during which he spun a tune by Gomez on Nick Harcourt's show, Morning Becomes Eclectic in Santa Monica, it was all over.

I saw they were coming to town, bought us some tickets, and brought home the Liquid Skin CD.

"Who are these guys?" my sweetie asked, incredulous.

"Just some English guys," I said. "I don't know much about them."

But we went to the show, and bought the next album, In Our Gun, quickly followed by the first one, Bring it On, and Abandoned Shopping Trolley Hotline and the Machismo EP, and then I was really gone, heels over head. For about the next six or so years.

Coincidentally, during this phase, I happened to become a mother. Turns out being a parent is quite the identity-challenging experience in many ways. Looking back over all the objects of my deepest musical affections, I believe the imaginary creative alliances (dalliances?) I have enjoyed with my Important Bands (The Rolling Stones long ago, The Who in my teen years, Crowded House and Michael Penn in the '90s and Gomez in the oughts) have all been incredibly fruitful, if one-sided, affairs that have gotten me through many an emotional swamp and sandpit.

I don't use the language of love lightly; I do fall in love when I fall in love wiht music. I go gaga. I drove my Ma around the foothills near my house on a recent visit and made her listen to the voice and tone of Elbow's singer, Guy Garvey, whose voice just grabs me there. On the days when Gomez would come to town, I couldn't think or talk about much else on the days they were around. My daughter came to recognize their tour bus.

But after my one big venture (literally a peak experience for me: going to Brighton to interview them at the end of 2003 during a trip to London with my Ma), I never really let the band know who I was, except by posting on the message board occasionally (formerly Step Inside and now an official board tied to the band's official website instead of one maintained solely by fans). All my feeble attempts to join post-show meetups fell through every time.

Yet I persisted in thinking they knew me when I hopped around in sync with Tom at their frenzied noisefests at the Fox. I thought they might recognize me dancing to them and to Ozomatli when they taped an etown show at the Boulder Theater.

But this past Halloween, I had a deflating little experience with one of the members of the band and saw what the true order of the universe really was.

I was sad then, and I feel the same sadness writing this now. It still feels like a love lost, a fantasy that reality could not support a moment longer.

Yet true to the same optimistic, pioneer spirit that sent my parents to San Francisco in 1966 (we often heard "Go West, young man!" exclaimed with a twinkle and a tongue in cheek back then), I decided to Make Something of It. For this all unfolded on the very eve of the month-long Nanowrimo competition, during which I planned to start writing a 50,000-word novel. "If I don't make some of my own noise, no one will ever know who I am," I told myself, and slunk home after Gomez' set to nurse my bruised ego for the night.

The next morning, I wrote out the scene that had put me in my place the night before at the auditorium in Denver, and I felt much better. I proceeded to write 50,000 words during that month, and have since started the second draft. Gomez may not figure as strongly in this version of the story, but they helped me start it off and that's another thing for which I am grateful.

But I'll always be most in their debt, I feel, for inspiring me by just going out and doing the thing they wanted to hear being done, regardless of not having all their ducks in a row. They have said they were fairly ignorant about guitar and music in general when they got started, but they went after something they liked nonetheless and showed that the results can be pretty cool, if a bit uneven in hindsight (sorry, fellow fans, but the ending of "Tijuana Lady" still makes me laugh).

On KFOG, a San Francisco radio station, the news guy, "Scoop" Nisker, always says, "Remember, if you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own," and I feel I have received the same creative carte blanche from Gomez. There's an artistic conversation I'm eager to become a part of, and now I know it's my turn to put myself out there. They showed me that you can just go ahead and do that, and doing so can start a thousand conversations (many of these on the message boards, a topic for another post; specifically, I think it's interesting how people on the board have a sort of collective agreement to stand in for the band for one another. That's my theory and I made it up myself).

Gomez started a conversation with me and it's not over yet. They have helped me remember that no matter how my roles may evolve throughout my life, being and expressing myself is worthwhile. Every day, they inspire me to put my ideas out there, to make something I want to see in the world, and to start my own conversations as best I can. For that (and for spending nearly three hours with me in 2003 so I could write a teensy little story for a local paper -- Rolling Stone didn't bite on my query), I will forever thank them.

Ambassador Joe Wilson's mountainside chat

It's not every day a former ambassador drops in to speak at a time and place near me, but he did just that at the Conference on World Affairs this spring.

I loved going to his talk in part because now I get to call him Joe Wilson, which is what his namecard read. He mentioned that he'd been asked earlier whether he wanted the "Ambassador" title written on the card bearing his name and he joked, "No, I save my title for when I'm trying to get a good table at a restaurant in Iowa," to which someone in the audience snapped, "You mean there are good restaurants in Iowa?" No flies on this audience.

Wilson stood on the stage, relaxed and looking like someone you'd see at the seafood counter at Whole Foods, in a jacket over a casual shirt with jeans and cowboy boots, and longish hair. No shred of worsted or shine of brass buttons. It was great to see him looking so comfortable, literally as if he'd let his hair down. You'd think I know the guy personally, the way I'm going on. I haven't met many people whom I'd describe as affable, but he is one. My first surprise was hearing him say "nuke-you-lar" -- all I can guess is he picked it up from hanging around the Bushes for so long.

I was literally bubbling over with happiness when I learned Wilson's talk was on a day when I had no other obligations. From my mood that morning you'd think I had tickets to Wimbledon. I felt I was getting a perch with a great view on a bit of history unfolding in front of me. When New York Times reporter Judith Miller went to jail for not revealing her story's source, whom we now know to be Scooter Libby, I felt independent journalism had taken a huge body blow, even if I was not initially certain what would suffer most in the end (small papers with small legal budgets? the willingness of reporters to take risks in reporting that could potentially result in similar circumstances?). I felt so naive when I read later about how entrenched Miller personally had been in her professional relationships and her reporting. I suppose I just hadn't conceived of reporters beyond the Woodward and Bernstein model in All the President's Men or the ones I know; I'd never imagined them as part of the same milieu as career politicos like Scooter Libby. Miller seemed to have become a reporter who traveled in the same circles as other powerful, entitled people and had become one herself.

So I was very curious about what Joseph Wilson would say about the whole affair.

He built a case for being a patriot. He spoke of his years of service across administrations and partisan lines. Wilson spoke of his clash with his government over his wife's unlawful exposure by those who were supposed to be on her own side. He described the character assassination that is the stock-in-trade of the current administration. His speech was well crafted; he is adept at bringing audiences with him. Lawyerlike always, he laid out his defenses, such as: Who'd want a junket to one of the poorest countries in the world? More, why would his wife have been interested in sending him to Africa for a couple of weeks just after having two new twin babies? There is always the fact that he was one of Bush Sr.'s go-to boys in the first Gulf War, a detail often omitted from Fox News reports, I'm sure. Not the least of his points were the mere two hours of Google searches it required to debunk the bogus documents of a deal for yellowcake uranium between Iraq and Niger, documents taken at face value by American intelligence.

I felt the urgency of Wilson's plea not to forget about the sixteen words in mini-Bush's Case-for-Iraq State of the Union address, the ones with no basis in fact. Wilson asked, "How come no one knows the name of the guy responsible for those sixteen words but everyone knows my wife's name?" That one drew a roar of laughter and applause. (Even just this past weekend on the NPR radio quiz show "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me," someone was groping unsuccessfully for Valerie Plame's name, when the host said, "You must be the only one in the country who doesn't know it.")

By the end of the half hour during which Wilson laid out his case, his closing argument had me: that Wilson and Plame's treatment by the people in their government, for whom they both served long and admirably, was nothing short of treasonous. Wilson has filed suit against Cheney and his cohorts. Many await the results.

Later, I felt a little of the way I feel after a Steven Spielberg movie, a little manipulated but in mostly a good way. The Plame/Miller events were a landmark and we will be seeing their fallout for a long time. I was inspired to be a good patriot in the sense of standing up for the rights of people to do the kind of work he and his wife did. I mean, who'd have thunk a pair of hardworking career public servants could wind up at such odds with the very institution they were serving? It doesn't seem right that standing up for an "unpopular position" on whether to go to war in Iraq based on solid evidence -- or the utter lack of any evidence to justify said decision -- should warrant the kind of career-killing character assassination those people have endured.

I mentioned to a couple of people the week journalist David Halbersham died at what now seems like the young age of 71 that I was hit hard by his death somehow. I felt called to action. He worked unstintingly independently in his reporting on the Vietnam War. I think of lives like his as a path not taken. And, like many a teenager in the late 1970s, I wanted to be a journalist after first seeing and then reading All the President's Men when I was in ninth grade (I still owe the library a copy of that book, my secret shame all these years). There's still a part of me that wants to go after some big investigative story, like child trafficking, to clench hold like a terrier and shake the threads loose.

For now I'll keep working at what is at the core of it for me, the truth-telling, in my other writing work. But I feel incredibly fortunate to be able to ride my bike a couple of miles to hear and participate in conversations like this one. They keep me on my toes.

Shameless cross-promotion (of myself and an indie film experiment)

Here's a review I just wrote of a film called A Coat of Snow that has some Colorado references and turned out to be more than meets the eye, a real achievement in naturalistic filmmaking.

Here's the concept: young woman brings a video camera to tape her cousin's bachelorette party, upon the request of the bride-to-be. Only the party keeps getting derailed before it really gets going.

The kicker: the whole thing is the product of one person's imagination, even though it looks like it is really unfolding in front of a friend of a friend's video camera.

Whether this is any fun to watch is the question you may have to ask yourself.

My geek fire is all stoked because I had a nice chat with the director, Gordy Hoffman, about his writing. I deliberately refrained from speaking with him until I had finished writing my review. We talked the next day. Here's how it went:

Me: "You wrote that movie?! That's freakishly impressive!"
Gordy Hoffman: "Yeah, I did."
Me: "That's so impressive!"

OK, that's not quite all of it. We had a much better talk than that. He told me I said things other people called out in their reviews, too, and when at first he sounded defensive he turned out not to be. He called mine a thoughtful piece and answered most of the issues I raised in my critique. He also said I had pointed to a "huge hole," which "no one else had mentioned," that, he said, "every time I see it I say, 'that is sooo bad!'" The women's failure to respond to a situation as an emergency at one critical moment broke the story's credibility for me, and apparently for the director as well in hindsight.

We had a thorough talk: when I clarified my unfavorable comments about the acting, I zeroed in on one actress whom he then agreed gave a weaker-than-usual performance in his film. He told me how he regrets having insisted on unknown actresses ("I could have had Claire Danes for the bride! Mena Suvari called about it."); I said that would have given you a completely different experience as a viewer because the moment you recognized Claire Danes or anyone else, you would know immediately it was fiction. It might not have been as surprising or successful as his film turned out, whatever its flaws may be.

In the end I knew he didn't hold my review against me because he asked if I'd like to moderate the Q & A at the screening of his film in Denver on the weekend (I declined, not being much for public speaking; and I prefer to conserve my energy for writing anyway). By the end of our conversation, despite the occasional industry jargon that sailed past uncomprehended, I felt I had spoken with a peer.

Hoffman's got a steep incline to climb to get people to watch his indie film and he knows it, though; in the director's own words, it's a "challenging" movie, not fare for the many "chamber-of-commerce film festivals" that dot the map these days.

I'm glad I saw his film, though. Learning about yet another way to write for film was an interesting experience (and his BlueCat Screenwriting Competition script loglines page inspired me to write a better blurb about my own novel). "Keep in touch," Hoffman said, generously. "OK, in about three years, I might have a screenplay for your competition," I replied, before he clicked off and returned to the life of a struggling indie filmmaker and I to my life as indie writer.

Worlds apart

One of my fixations in working on my novel has come down to this: people are often interested in entirely different things. And certain people are entirely interested in entirely different things. Usually, though, we are so busy constructing the stories that motivate us to act throughout our days ("I have to get to the store before it closes" or "God, drivers are nuts around here") that we don’t often stop and take real notice that people aren’t always thinking what we’re thinking.

Someone just wrote to Dear Abby (to me columns like that are godsends, ears to the ground in the vital effort to collect important data about people and what they are capable of doing) and asked, in light of the recent shootings at Virginia Tech, should I worry or say something to someone else about the customer who comes in and says, “I would not have shot myself afterward,” when talking about the guy who shot everyone? It was a good question: Should we worry about people who think differently from ourselves?

And once you go down that road, you have to ask how we deal with those differences and their consequences. Where do police end and thought police begin?

I believe you have to rewind the tape and go back to the beginning, so you can start to see what a world of a different color that doomed, underprivileged, and angry Virginia Tech student lived in before he died for his personal cause. Think of him coming from Korea to the America available to Koreans who operate a drycleaning shop. This life is not the same color as the America he grew up seeing in the movies and on TV, manufactured in the culture of gleaming golden bodies and cars and exalted as high gospel on "Beverly Hills 90210" and "The O.C." That frustrated kid saw that contrast and shouted to the very rooftops that it was utterly intolerable.

His world is a different color from mine, too, here in my pleasant suburban town with my husband and daughter. I've made choices that have kept me firmly anchored in my bastion of white privilege, and choices that have placed me a little outside it as well. But I'm kind of shocked by the contrast between my sweet life and that of many people around me now. I have too much to lose; I've been coming to think I would live differently -- and perhaps better -- with less but haven't known how to change this course, or even that I wanted to until recently (since Katrina, probably, knowing that if the same scope of disaster rolled through my community, it would probably expose similarly egregious sins of neglect here).

I live in a pretty world, but it's not so pretty to me when its underpinnings are so harsh for so many people, and when I could be doing so much more to extend my privileges to others.

Now, how to translate this back into the story.... I'm hoping I can write for/about/to this disparity somehow, give glimpses of the creative process so that others can change the color or texture of their world as needed to become themselves, to live for their own ideals and dreams.

But in terms of storytelling, it's the muckiness that's always the most interesting part, isn't it? It's the places where the world isn't bright and clear and we're all fully realized. It's where we stumble and fall in the dark, swampy murk, morally and ethically and spiritually and physically.

I've decided...

...to turn my novel into a Bollywood musical mystery. "Like 'Cop Rock,' only with much better music," I told my sweetie last night.

It’s Barbie’s world. We’re just furnishing it for her.

The other day, my husband pulled a Barnes & Noble shopping bag out of his closet. Inexplicably, it contained a May/June 1997 issue of Barbie Bazaar, a doll collectors’ magazine. I started to page through the 'zine, chuckling at a mental image of the editors of Rockrgrl looking over my shoulder and demanding how I could call this a “’zine?” But I stopped laughing when I saw that this ’zine’s contributors were every bit as ardent as any other indie gathering of culture-cultivators.

I also got right away what makes Barbie such a treasure, so attractive to kids and collectors: she is ready for anything, a Nancy Drew of molded plastic, dressed to the nines and accessorized for her next adventure. Like a Girl Scout, the clothes do make the woman: they tell you where she’s going. And Barbie has always been going places.

In all these Barbies of different eras I saw the appeal of collecting: It’s instant time travel. You can zip back to 1963, when all pilots were men and stewardesses were women – or, more likely, “girls.” Barbie had everything a girl could have needed then (except perhaps the prescription for birth control): a two-tone princess-seamed knit dress in bright, contrasting colors with coordinated headbands and/or sunglasses for holding back her Jackie-O flip, with complementing go-go boots, stylish round suitcase, and cosmetics case all covered in the same material.

You can take a trip with 1993’s Barbie in India, a Peace Corps-volunteer type with dark flowing hair who has donning the salwar kameez and bindi of the locals in the hope of taking a more profound journey. You may have known her in college as The Girl Most Likely to Sit on the Floor at a Party.

Barbies reveal interesting cultural shifts over time. As late as 1981, Mattel was manufacturing a doll named Oriental Barbie. I admit I’m mocking again when I say I love the way the box helpfully explains that Oriental Barbie is “from the Orient.”

And I love the bizarre moments in fashion that Barbie’s wardrobe snapshots leave us with. One doll shown here is a ringer for Annie Lennox, with, as the text on the box reads, “surprising but stunning white flocked hair.” She is dressed as what looks like a lawyer and looks like she could shed the tailored jacket to become a dominatrix by night. What I can’t explain is the lute-like instrument the nearly-bald, besuited woman holds out from her body as if she is saying, “Where is the nearest trash receptacle?”

At first I was a bit taken aback when I saw the Donna Karan Barbie. That the Jewish powerhouse designer allowed toymaker Mattel to make a Barbie in her image makes the cynic in me fear that it’s less about what we consider glamorous now and more about building brand loyalty among schoolchildren. But at the same time, isn’t Donna Karan’s story perhaps many a Barbie fan’s dream-come-true? She worked her way up in the fashion industry and if she were to retire today she would walk away with millions, having made her mark on the fashion world.

In translating their design talents to small toys, the couturiers have built brand recognition, sure, but they have also invited children directly into the fantasy worlds they create in their clothing designs. It’s easier to imagine yourself in Barbie’s place than in the contorted place of a smudgy-eyed Vogue model, especially if you’re a kid (or a dreamy doll collector).

The dizzying array of Barbie’s outfits shows as much variety as a designer’s sample book: Her outfits over time employ every possible dart placement, pleat style, sleeve shape, neckline, hemline, cuff, collar style, and so on. Multiply the garment construction variations by the exploding variety of up-to-the-minute colors and patterns and Barbie’s wardrobe seems infinite. She has pants ranging from hotpants to floor-length culottes; her dresses are copies of the most current fashions in New York, Japan, L.A., and Paris. She has shoes and boots for which urban women would battle mobs at sample sales to find in their sizes. You can even purchase her spiffy hairdos: Just attach her beehive and she’s ready to catch that flight and start serving those nice businessmen; slip on her long blonde fall for her night out at the disco.


Barbie Bazaar reveals that many designers create entire wardrobes and special-occasion haute couture just for the dolls. Bob Mackie gowns are gaudy and elaborate, just like his couture originals, and the fevered pitch of some of the discussions indicate that the House of Dior has consistently been a major source of Barbie collectors’ most treasured designs.

As I continued reading, I kept trying and failing to maintain any superiority to the collectors; their enthusiasm for Barbie is so unwavering and sincere. I’m more sympathetic with the collectors’ true desires as I page through the magazine because I see how I share the same reverence for fashion, the same attention to detail these dolls show and inspire in others.

I wasn’t into Barbies as a kid. For my counter-culture parents, Barbie and G.I. Joe dolls were the perfect concrete and visible representatives of The Things They Wouldn’t Allow in Their House; that didn’t bug me too much because I was more interested in eating chocolate sugar bombs and watching cartoons in color at the neighbors’ on Saturday morning than in playing with Barbies, and I knew I could play with my aunt’s collection over at my grandmother’s house every month or two anyway.

While much is made of Barbie’s proportions – I too forwarded that e-mail about what would Barbie’s proportions be in real-life if she were a woman to my friends a few years back – I still don’t think the doll’s popularity is all about her larger-than-life parts. Perhaps her proportions make it easier to make her look good in all those different outfits. I don’t remember thinking about wanting to look like Barbie when I was a little girl: I wanted to be like her, perky and ready for action, the same way I felt walking out of the theater after seeing Goldie Hawn in the movie Cactus Flower.

But I have always been interested in clothes, and in all their variations in color, texture, drape, and functionality. All through school I have sketches of outfits or jewelry in my notebooks. I still have ideas for clothing lines, like one-handed clothing – clothing you can put on your baby and fasten with one hand, which would be great for families with twins and other busy people.

And when I got to junior high school, I knew right away that those things people said about beauty being more than skin-deep and the clothes not making the man (or woman) were all hooey. I remember the proof: it was this blissful week when social groups had not yet formed at the very beginning of junior high, my seventh-grade year. I circulated among all kinds of people, the week before everyone got sorted into groups according to who had the latest stuff and styles (many of them) and who didn’t (me). The opportunity to try out for cheerleading during this week of limbo was my idea, too, another one of those Impossibilities that my parents had arbitrarily chosen never to support. (I heard, “We’re not joiners,” several times when requesting help with brownie uniforms and cheerleading outfits.) Being choreographically challenged didn't help either. The astronomical $85 to rent the outfit for the year put the concrete boots on the dream and sunk it in the canal.

It was just as well, though. I couldn’t stand spending hours chatting about clothes (even though I like fashion), fingernails, and shaving; nor the required bouts of speculation about what certain preapproved members of the generally inscrutable opposite sex might be thinking about. I’d rather have been reading or talking about books or listening to music or seeing movies, all of which is still true today. By high school I was shaving my legs (but not talking about it much) and I was writing essays in AP English about those “popular girls.”

I still have acute memories that center on clothing. There was that day Michelle and Francie both wore the same fashionable sundress to school (white with a big flower appliqued on the front) and had this big old feud over it, or the time in music class when Windy and Karin and some of the other popular girls included us in their circle by passing a down coat around so that we could all play their game of screaming into the coat without being heard by the rest of the huge class. I squirm a bit now to think of the first brand-new outfit I ever bought with my own earnings: a shiny polyester knit skirt and matching long-sleeved, cowl-neck, belted top in black with diagonal bright yellow, turquoise, and red bands that was so disco and so wrong for me, yet I know how proud I felt in my new ensemble, with my feathered hair and cork wedge sandals with the macrame across the toes.

High fashion remains as irrelevant to my daily life as ever; I mostly live in my mom’s uniform of jeans, boot-like comfortable shoes, and knit shirts or sweaters. Yet going to a boutique and seeing the colors, feeling the weights of the fabrics, and trying on artfully constructed clothing, even when I have no interest in buying it, is like a vitamin to me: it connects me to what’s going on in the world and reminds me of all the possibilities that still exist. Sometimes I’m just itching for a chance to put on a costume for a moment, even if it’s just mentally. It's an itch that Barbies and browsing in shops can satisfy equally.

One of Barbie Bazaar’s correspondents brings us up to date on the doll scene in Japan in an article about Takara Jenny dolls. Like Barbie and her friends, Jenny dolls have different identities. The Japanese dolls have a special characterstic, however: a blood type. Some of the characters’ blood types are even listed as “unknown.” It turns out this accurately reflects a Japanese cultural concern with genetic similarity between spouses. The Jenny dolls have endless romantic triangles and varying degrees of friendship as each new doll is introduced. Blood type, social status, and appearance all affect Jenny’s compatibility with her array of boyfriends.

While Barbie has an outfit for every occasion, Jenny seems to have a date for every occasion, says our reporter: “Jenny’s debut was a resounding success thanks to her loveliness and charm. Special thanks should also go to [her date] Charles who, in addition to giving her jewelry, was obliged to give Jenny lessons in dance and protocol.” (I guess everyone had been sniggering behind their wrists about her manners until she started going out with that prince.)

After a line of fair-haired, round-eyed boys, Tom enters the scene as “Jenny’s most controversial friend...a dark, dangerous fellow who poses a direct threat to Jenny’s relationship with Jeff.” The Tom doll has light brown skin, dreadlocks, and a big gold hoop earring. Our Barbie Bazaar correspondent wistfully concludes her report, “Hopefully in the future, Tom will be portrayed in a kinder light.”

The mystery of how a Barbie Bazaar dated a year after we moved into our house appeared in my husband’s closet was at last solved: it was a gag gift my sweetie had forgotten to give to my mother for her birthday. But I got a lesson from it: that I share Barbie’s fans’ passion for fashion. We can’t all afford Marc Jacobs handbags, but for now our Barbies can carry knockoffs in our stead. To all of us with all our ambitions Barbie remains a beacon glowing with the eternal promise and potential of youth: always ready, willing, and accessorized for anything that could come her way.

Good things come to those in Boulder

The University of Colorado recently hosted the 59th Conference on World Affairs, and the little I sampled this year was thought-provoking, inspiring, and motivating. Basically, there are so many fascinating people who come to town (and you also learn about the ones who live here) and suddenly I have new ideas of who I might be in a few years.

Wsshhhp! Rewind: I have been sitting at home for several months plodding/plotting away at my first novel, and needed to get out a bit, which nicely coincided with the World Affairs Conference, if you say it in the lazy way as I do.

So I cleared an entire day last week and went to several sessions. I decided to start with the thing that was calling to me: a discussion about thrillers. Moderated by my friend Robin Beeck, it was an occasionally interesting but somehow dead-end discussion -- mostly people wanted to know what books and movies the panelists liked and discuss the boundaries of the genre. One person on the panel was annoyingly ill-suited to discuss the topic, which can be an annoying aspect of the conference in general. (And in being unable to riff in interesting or confident ways he seemed the least representative of a typical panelist -- he seemed comfortable only in his own niche. More of the people I heard speak were broadly conversant, more adept at holding forth and constructing on-the-fly ten- or fifteen-minute essays on topics of someone else's choosing.)

But then I went to the plenary session on violent crime and that was amazing. I was so glad I went. I missed the first 25 minutes or so, and am sorry to learn it wasn't recorded. Two people spoke of the effects of violence on their lives. One is a lawyer, Mark Levine, whose sister Janet March was murdered. The brother and her family are convinced that the murderer was her own husband, who since tried to kill Mark and Janet's parents and is now suing the grandparents for custody of the couple's children. The brother, a lawyer, took up several causes in his fight to get their issues with his brother-in-law taken seriously. Perry March is a man he and the others around them didn't recognize as evil until it was too late, Levine says of his and his family's naivete. Levine has gone on to advance grandparents' rights, a cause "I didn't even know existed before this," and changed Tennessee law so that children can no longer be returned to homes with murderous or abusive parents convicted of civil or criminal charges.

The second person speaking of the effects of violent crime was Terri Jentz, who recalled surviving an attack in 1977 by a psychopath who first drove his truck over her and her friend's tent in an Oregon campground before he started hacking them with his axe. Jentz has since written a book about her experiences and helped to get the statute of limitations for attempted murder abolished (it used to be that after three years the case was permanently closed) in the state of Oregon. To hear her tell it in her book, Strange Piece of Paradise, Oregon was a criminals' playground up until the mid-to-late 1980s, when victims' rights organizations gained ground and the justice and penal system came under increasing scrutiny by citizens and pols. Her book has a stunning revelation or a profound observation on every page: I can say it is absolutely worth reading without having even finished it yet. From her willingness to confront truths on so many levels unflinchingly honestly, and what she has shown she can draw from her experiences so far I know I will appreciate any conclusions she draws from this.

One of the conclusions she discussed here was that telling the stories to others is powerful and essential to the process of reckoning with evil and crime. She wrestled, however, with whether to disclose the real name of the man who attacked them, because he is still at large, still abusing women. Jentz said she decided to keep his identity hidden because there is a cult of personality that exalts people who commit violence in this culture and she doesn't want to feed any hunger he might have for notoriety for his brand of evil. We could all tell that had been a very difficult decision from the way she spoke of it on Wednesday.

I found the ideas that came out of this discussion revelatory. They confirmed my belief that there are bad people and there is evil in the world; they gave me an extension of that idea, too: that I can be someone who alerts people to that evil and perhaps even suggests alternatives or ways to stop it or mitigate some of its effects.

The most articulate person on the thrillers panel at CWA was a Washington Post writer, Patrick Anderson, who has a love for the genre and has written a book about them. He recommended Michael Connelly (and one of my faves, Ian Rankin) among others (George Pelecanos and Dennis Lehane also got high marks; more than once he said, "and I think James Patterson is the pits!"), whose book The Poet I just read. It had a great observation by an FBI agent that serial murderers and other forms of psychopaths are "from the moon," that they don't share the same set of assumptions and values the rest of us do. I think of how my six-year-old daughter sometimes has similar trouble understanding that her cat can only think like a cat; he'll never be able to think like a person as much as she wants him to or thinks he should. We all want others to think like we do. I know I want people to think the way I do when I'm railing and ranting at drivers from inside the soundproof cocoon of my car, but I know we also do when we're accustomed to being around people who try to do the right thing as a rule and we come across someone who doesn't share the same notion of the right thing to do.

As for me, I am still grappling with the question of whether it is moral to earn my living by creating violence in fiction. People have a hunger for violent stories, true or invented, and I don't know whether it's a hunger for resolution, or a confirmation that yes, Virginia, there really is evil in the world. But I think there might be ways to work with it, ways to show that violence doesn't actually kill and stop but only makes its survivors more determined to live. Now I just have to figure out how to translate all of this into my story. So for my own sake and the sake of my writing I am so glad I went to the conference and heard interesting people speak. (And now I have another goal in life: to be one of the panelists.)

In my research for this blog entry, I found the following quote from Dr. Stanton Samenow, author of The Criminal Mind: "The perversion of confession is that you empty the cup of evil so you can fill it up again." That is a topic for a whole 'nother entry, as is the talk Joe Wilson gave at the conference.

Little wisdom

Some things my daughter has been saying lately:

On your body's instincts when you see lots of gum, she said, "Your tummy smiles at you if you don't eat it. It says, 'Thank you for not eating all that!'"

***

Me, describing a book I was reading: "The hero is the kind of guy who thinks he's smarter than everyone else."

Daughter: "I'm smarter than anyone else."

My sweetie and I crack up silently.

Daughter: "No, really, Daddy. I'm the smartest person in the whole world."

***

She's been talking about her life at the orphanage. "The massis used to take us on field trips to the zoo. We saw elephants and tigers."

She recently told me and her godmother this: "My birthmother couldn't keep me because she couldn't feed me. She didn't have enough food. She only had three cans of soup."

She'll say, "I know the Bengali word for orange. It's 'ora'." And she'll perform the same operation on a bunch of other words, translating each one for me.

***

Me: "Aliens couldn't live on the Sun. It's too hot!"

Daughter: "Radio aliens could live on the Sun."

Little friend: "Or there are robots that come from fire!"

Chickenhawk's favorite meat

I was chuckling earlier about the randomness of what I get het up about: this time it was calling ski passes "pass products" on a resort web site. I was drafting a withering e-mail to their marketing department in my mind when the phone rescued me from that futile alley of thought and action. Silly, no?

But the phone call has me thinking about identity theft, spurred by my dear heart's, "Hi, honey, you didn't just try to change our security code on our bank account, did you?"

"Why no, I didn't." (Actually it was, "Nooooo, I don't thiiiiink sooooo.....," with much more uncertainty.) And I can so easily imagine ways in which we are vulnerable. It's a good thing my sweetie is meticulous in his accounting.

Someone not so long ago stole a card from us (and we suspect our vacation opportunities: a desk clerk at a hotel with our imprint? a guy doing data entry for a car rental outfit?) to subscribe to an online porn site. We canceled the card, but you just never know what's out there.

Now I'm at the FTC's Identity Theft site, with the hey-everyone-let's-pretend-we're-in-a-thriller title, "Deter. Detect. Defend. Avoid ID Theft." It is clearly time to check up on our numbers to make sure no one's using us for their nefarious purposes. It's like walking around as a woman and worrying about rape: it sucks to think about, but you must sooner or later.

So I'm looking up my credit report, easy as pie, and it's amazingly detailed. Fortunately, I see only what I would have expected to see, which is a relief because six years ago I had a wallet stolen at a movie theater and have always wondered about that ever since, even though we cancelled that credit card immediately. I scanned down to the bottom of the report to see who had looked me up, found a long list of credit card services, and then this in its own little category: "Account Review Inquiries":
INLAND MTG/MARKETING SER
1800 EXIT 5 PKWY
FISHERS, IN 46038-7938
(phone number not available)

Hmmm, which boiler-room operation is this? One of those real estate deals where you get a free vacation if you listen to a two-hour, high-pressure sales presentation? A travel "promotion": "Mrs. X, you've won a vacation to Las Vegas, Nevada, or Orlando, Florida!" If those offers sound too good to be true, they usually are. "Just say no" is an fine strategy for dealing with anyone who tries to sell you on anything over the phone. I find "No, thank you, not at this time, and please take me off your calling list" works pretty well, and now that I'm on the no-call list, I only get calls from the charities. (And that slimy, pesky Fraternal Order of Police has let up on their charity calls, too, thank goodness -- I think I finally did get myself off their list. I never liked them because some outlandish percentage of the money went to overhead and not directly to the services they claimed to be championing.)

Information can be a good thing, but I do think my DH is right that a privacy-management tool is the next killer app. Just think, you could manage your financial records and medical records -- it's just that making it hack-proof is a tall order; it's also hard to convince all those big agencies and private corporations to play nice enough to standardize the kind of information that can be shared across agencies. My sweetie suggested that being able to trade on your data would be what made it profitable: you could then sell what you're comfortable with. You could release information about your spending habits in exchange for a privilege or some income. Integrate it with the Mail Preference Service and you could also say things like, only charities get to ask me for money. Opt-Out of Credit Card Prescreenings is what I was really looking for; I don't mind a few catalogs and local coupons in the mail (otherwise we would not have received that free dinner for four at a new local restaurant, for example). But I might as well get the credit card offers to stop before having to pitch one to three a day on average into my recycling bin.

And it will be interesting to check my credit report again in a year to see if getting off that list reduces the number of inquiries about my history by the credit card merchants.

An Extremely Brief Entry

There's always something interesting happening in my world. Right now I'm grappling with when to say yes and when to say no so that I can get my work done. It's surprisingly challenging and now it's time to stop dithering and go do the work.

All We Need Is Love

I started to respond to a Gomez forum post about quitting smoking and my response got so long I realized it was a blog entry instead.

Around the time I went to an Isley Brothers concert with my godmother a few years ago, I was off the wall -- jagging between raging and sentimental weeping. My Godmom said my liver was probably detoxing and it turned into the joke of the evening: "Don't make me unleash my liver on you!" But I think there's something to that. Getting through a transition like that is hardest because of that rage.

At least one person I know has a doctor who has advised them not to quit smoking, because the mood swings are too much for their brand of mental illness. So it seems like folks have to tread carefully and take extra care of themselves when quitting some habit. Addiction theory these days also says you must have something with which to replace that ritual and energy that the habit has occupied in your life.

I would add that having someone look after your health frequently during times of stress is a powerful source of healing in and of itself, no matter what the specialty -- as long as you have some faith in the practitioner. In more recent years I have been aided by my chiropractor, the first person I have ever met who is a true healer. He just sees, which helps him actually help you move through things and help to heal yourself. Truly amazing. May you find someone like that in your sphere when you need them.

The biggest obstacle I wonder about for my own self is truly believing in my whole self. "Is [insert self-destructive behavior here] a kind of self-sabotage?" is the question that is still banging around in my brain. Would I live differently if I didn't behave in this way? Or as Katie says, "Can you imagine who you would be without that belief?" But I know I haven't zeroed in on what the belief is yet.

I do feel I haven't embraced the notion that my body is a temple as fully as I would like to. I've been noticing how not caring for myself can be a kind of violence toward myself that makes me a little bit violent at the core, keeping old habits that I learned when I was small alive in me.

At the same time, I'm wrestling with the violence in my story, with the amount and need for it, with the use of it and what it means to use it, which connects to these elemental questions about how to replace what I have believed in the past with new ideas that I can use to bring myself into my own present and future.

Yesterday I dashed up the garden path after my daughter to see what she and her dad had brought home from the park. She opened the door of her little house and proudly revealed her "trifflinks," some chunks of red sandstone that might have been sitting in the pail outside for months and are now mottled with dark algae, with one smaller addition: a bright white rectangle, a "trifflink's tooth." Moments like running up that path, riding up to her school to pick her up with the trail-a-bike on the back of my bike, taking her skiing, I feel so healthy, and I know my instincts are healthy. It makes me strive to build on that instead of just testing my ability to stay healthy to its limits.

Ultimately, it's having people around me I want to get old with that is the best thing for my body and soul, the best carrot-and-stick combination. I hope to cradle my great-grandchildren in my wrinkly old arms some day (and won't it be amazing to see what colors they are!). From that perspective, of course I want to do everything I can to keep all of me alive as long as possible. Who would not want that love and warm embrace?

Look! It's my first You Tube appearance!

My best friend got it all on her digital camera (which makes me think of the line about "telling my jokes to the OPEC leaders and getting it all on video" from Moxy Fruvous' charming song "King of Spain").

Unifying theories

I understand the impulse to find a theory of everything, to find faith, to find the thing behind what everything appears to be, the wizard behind the curtain. I try to find meaning through writing, often feeling I am sending out tendrils in the dark. I perceive an importance to living inner life out loud and trying to find my path that way. It feels like groping my way down an unfamiliar and dark hallway. Perhaps the hardest thing is not judging this process but letting it unfold.

So I am picking stories to tell and questioning why these ones and how can I tell them best and to whom do I want to tell stories, anyway? I admit I harbor this secret fear that writing fiction is just another little drop in a big bucket of words that few people are interested in. At the same time I have this singer-songwriter just clamoring to get out. I guess I want to sketch out little stories that way.

And yet I feel the pull to go to my novel's main character's dark side, to let her fall badly and have to pick herself up again because there's no one who can do that for her. I suppose I believe that is some of the thread that binds us. Falling down, getting up again. So I write, and at the same time prepare story pitches for articles about film festivals, people who create their own restaurant spaces, and epiphanies inspired by Indian dance performances and Barbie magazines. It's all I can do.

Getting busy, one step at a time

It's not just a literary crush or something along those lines. It's one of the reasons I like the music I like: It's accessible to me. I get it, I know it, I carry those rhythms in my bones every day. That's how I feel after reading a little of the writing of Orhan Pamuk, who as the Nobel Literature Prize winner, "in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures," according to people who would know. He also seems quite down-to-earth in his writing. He is someone like me, in other words, someone I could see chatting with at a party.

So after reading that, I wrote myself a little note on a Post-it: "If you're ever going to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, you'd better get busy." I know I may not ever be recognized for my prowess in literature specifically but perhaps will accomplish something else entirely, but it's still true.

For example, one profound idea I am turning over in my mind lately is that there is some kind of revolution in thought in store for us. I saw a film about space that made me ask myself what is the next frontier that has the capacity to unite all of humankind. I believe it will be something internal, interior, something that takes us deeper into a collective consciousness than we have ever understood we could go, just as mapping the world and going to the moon have done for our vision of our selves in the world.

In the meantime, there are so many stories to tell in this big wide world. Yesterday I was coming out of a store and heard a man crying for help. I ran for the sound, toward what looked like an older guy in the process of being run over by his own car. I pushed the car as hard as I could and rolled it back up the slope and off of him -- it had missed crushing his foot and leg by millimeters, as far as I could tell. Long story short, he was okay, more or less, but I stuck around for a while and talked with him, in part because he was older, in part because he was trying to minimize how close he just came to losing his leg or worse. I thought he could go into shock.

So as I listened, he told me about himself. About his job in the Merchant Marines as a radio operator from 1943-1948. About being a professor of English literature. About living up on the mountain with an incapacitated wife and doing their errands -- and not wanting to be sent to a nursing home. About not caring for a wound on his leg and having to visit a doctor twice a week. He was on his way to a doctor's appointment, "At 2:45," he assured me with a little moue and a direct gaze like a child's, perhaps checking my eyes to see if I really believed him). It was ten before two and I did have more to do, so we went on our respective ways. But I did leave a slip of paper with my name and address on it. And I took his license plate number, just in case.

I'm going to try to get him a little help, because I see someone who might be falling through the cracks and would like to see what I can do. The man is terrified of losing his autonomy, and in retrospect it all adds up: his reluctance to call anyone to come to his aid, or to call 911. My guess is he thinks his days of living independently are all but over and he's doing whatever he can to postpone that inevitability. That must be frightening.

I looked him up on Google, however, figuring a retired Merchant Marine and English professor would be easy to identify, with a few specific dates and places. But no: his personal data is clearly pre-Google information. (Will we one day sort eras into B.G. (Before Google) and A.G.?) So I have a call placed to someone in the English Department to help me come up with a name for the guy (or find out whether he was feeding me something else). And when I called, the woman on the phone at the English department said, "So you think he needs what, a welfare check?" She just called back with his name and phone number, so I can perhaps alert Social Services to send someone to look in on him. As my doctor friend told me, there are much better drugs and therapies available now to help him keep his mind sharp and live autonomously longer, if his doctor is given the opportunity to discover that he needs them.

My friend the doctor then suggested that I try to come to a doctor's appointment to advocate that they do a thorough mental and physical workup, rather than just caring for his leg injury. I have mixed feelings about trying to involve myself further because of some of the things he said about himself, so I am sitting with that idea for a while.

Time to go for now. If anything new develops in this thread, I'll keep you posted.

Princess of the Air

What a thrilling evening right here in my town.

I feel so lucky to live here, now; people come to me and offer me experiences that absolutely make my day, my month, my life! I am high on the peak of my friends' film festival, and tonight I really became a part of it, made myself known. It was amazing.

Zzzzwwwp! Rewind.

Today I was at the film festival listening to a group of filmmakers discuss their work. I am volunteering to work as an assistant for the discussions and workshops this year, which basically means showing up, doing a little work, and getting to sit in on the films or discussions. This really is one of my favorite things to do in the whole world; it is so exciting to get all these movies and people who make them in one place. They seem like my people, all of a sudden, in a way they didn't before, perhaps because I'm immersed in my own creative endeavor this time around.

The people visiting town and here volunteering for the festival have reminded me of the ultimate importance of doing the work, getting to the creation; that's what makes all this other stuff tick. Without that, we'd have so much less to talk about. These folks have given us the gift of a launching point: something to consider together. So no wonder I love these events. They bring together so many collaborators in creative endeavors, which inspires me to collaborate -- even if I'm still awkward at it, usually more comfortable sitting at my desk writing alone, as I am now. Shouting into the void.

But tonight I got onstage!

Not as me, perhaps, but with soul.

But rewind a little again.

Tonight's premiere screening of The Astronaut Farmer, the perfect marriage of mainstream film and indie filmmakers, was followed by the Rocky Mountain premiere of Air Guitar Nation, a popular documentary on the festival circuit about some performers with no instrument except themselves. An air guitar contest was scheduled to take place after the film.

I had come prepared for this last event. This afternoon, when I left the house, I collected black high-heeled boots, velvet pants, velvet duster, and a high-necked, long-sleeved, white blouse to wear underneath. Before it started I told two people I would do it, both so I could back down and so I couldn't. At five this evening I was debating driving to a thrift store to see if I could find a ruffled blouse, and maybe a curly black wig, but I decided that didn't matter. When I was putting on makeup after donning my costume, I had the brilliant idea just before the contest began of using paper towels for the ruffle down the front of Prince's shirt in Purple Rain, which is the song I chose to sing at the "Aireoke afterparty." I stuffed paper into the neck of my blouse, got a friend to help make sure it looked right, and went up to the stage and wrote my song request on a chit of paper along with my "stage name," "The Artist Formerly Known as Princess," and I waited to see what happened next.

There was a blur of decent air-licking by women and men in about equal proportions to 80s metal and pop: AC/DC, Metallica, The Cars, The Who, and some Smashing Pumpkins, the Sex Pistols; World Air Guitar Champion (I believe that deserves capitalization) Zac Munro came on and played a 90s metal song I didn't even know but was perfectly good fun. I cheered on the other contestants until a couple of women got onstage and started doing a striptease but got booed off the stage (I was one of the boo-ers) because they weren't playing air guitar (to "Cherry Pie" -- when the DJ couldn't find the song, "By Warrant, you idiots," bitched MC Bjorn Turoque (geddit?), subject of Air Guitar Nation. After they left the stage there was another blur of 80s cock-rockers and some Queens of the Stone Age.

It was almost the end of the night; our MC warned us that we only had another fifteen minutes to make noise at the theater. I started to brace myself for disappointment that I wouldn't be called onstage after all. Just when I had started to think it was over, Bjorn announced my stage name. I firmly donned my persona and strode quickly up the stairs and onto the stage (I'd been getting in character strutting around in the audience near the front of the stage, as well as just dancing and doing my best groupie impression -- and I've had some practice, honey! just ask my closest friends!).

As soon as I heard the sweet, soft, reverberating strums that open the song, I knew just what to do. And I did it! I put some soul into it, and pointed at someone in the audience when I pretended to sing the line "and that means you, too." I wish I had been given a little more of the solo, but it was a long song, and I got to do a lot of it before it got cut off, so I was happy when I left the stage.

Next Bjorn invited the women back up to rock out together, inviting not just the women who had already performed but all the women who wanted to come up, and so I hopped back onstage and rocked out some more, giving a big hug at the end to "Betty Chronic," the performer who got the contest off to a great start. Then everyone got up onstage and it was fun to vamp around and play with people.

After it there was a blur of compliments and praise for the "bib" as everyone kept calling my paper-towel ruffle (which I got Bjorn Turoque to sign) and then a drink at the bar with people, and I met up with "my" filmmaker, the one I picked up at the airport after his ten-hour flight from London. People said this was the most fun they'd ever had at a film festival. It was great fun to participate, and to be recognized for something -- I saw why those guys go all the way to Oulu, Finland to compete in the World Air Guitar Championships.

And I can't resist drawing a conclusion or two from the way I feel now. I feel I've been on this sort of personal "ropes course." Did you ever do those? I worked at a company at which we took a day out and went to this place where we were challenged to do trust exercises. I found some of them easy (I climbed up a fairly tall pole and then jumped off it onto a net, but I was harnessed and roped the whole time so felt quite secure) and some of them were quite difficult (learning to fall back on someone and really let them catch you). But even after the ropes course, our boss remained a dickhead (oh, let me count the ways). But I digress. I've been challenging myself, really working on my confidence lately. Tonight was an example; writing my novel has been huge in every way. Going to England and interviewing my favorite band, Gomez, was one of my first big self-dares.

I've been doing wacky stuff for a while, though. At a radio show taping years ago I deliberately made sounds to participate -- once at a Del McCoury show when I did a perfectly high-lonesome aa-haaa sound at a key moment (and even made Del laugh), and another time during an Ozomatli segment, when I danced and did this percussive shriek along with their song that I thought sounded great, like it was supposed to be there. (I couldn't hear it on the taped version, though....) Then there was the time I was Mick Jagger for Halloween (but at age ten I was a little too shy to do justice to "Satisfaction" -- and I knew it).

Just a few days ago, a little circuit that had never closed in my life finally did when I saw someone I had briefly worked with over the summer. She gave me a DVD and on it was this wonderful video of a man speaking about the Tao, what it is and what it means. It's the kind of thing I've been thinking I'd like to copy and have to look at (being such a verbal-visual person and all). One of the things he said was about "answering the call." Tonight felt like that. Like I assumed a greatness I don't usually let myself have.

It wasn't until I sat down to write this that I realized what a gift I got in getting to do my number when I did: Bjorn Turoque let me help close the show. There were lighters and people swaying and everything when I was up there. It was fabulous. And the way he ordered the songs was artful in retrospect -- he knew just when to let someone shine on an obscure song and when to bring back an old fave like AC/DC's "Back in Black." So thanks, man. "Airing" Prince in front of a crowd absolutely rocked my world!

p.s. I really do rock. I not only gave the cute little reporter from the campus paper a quote after it was all over -- but I also gave her the promo card for the book Dan Crane (aka Bjorn Turoque) wrote, to make sure she got its title right: To Air Is Human. It's a good book (silly me: I told him I though so, adding I'd "read the whole thing").

The church of what is happening now

I feel this little cloud of sunshine has come over me -- isn't that a funny way to think of it? But there it is. I've been reading this nice book a friend recommended, and now I feel all happy. I watched Michel Gondry's out-loud dream, The Science of Sleep, the other night and I felt such love and sorrow for that character, Stephane, little piece of putty that he was, despising himself and taking it all out on the people around him. And of course I saw how I've done that and how much time I have spent railing against what is.

Supposed to, my foot! It turns out nothing is what I had thought, and I'm only just now really noticing that. No one ever said life was supposed to be ____ [fill in the blank with your issue du jour]. Life just is. People are who they are. I can't just go around making and imposing rules and conditions and expect that to take care of things. I have to be who I am, and they absolutely have to be who they are, whether they are my closest friends and relatives or driving around on the roads with me.

Here's an example of the kind of dialogue that is helping me rethink -- and refeel -- things:

Something that troubles me is when people don't look out for each other. I feel disappointed and sad and frightened when people around me aren't paying attention to who is around them. So an underlying belief of mine is that people should take care of each other all the time. Do they really do this? Is this true? No. People take care of each other sometimes and don't at others. Who would I be without this belief? I would be more trusting and freer around people, more relaxed. Can I see a reason to drop this belief (and I'm not asking myself to drop it, just whether I can see why I might)? Yes. I would be more relaxed, more present, more attentive to what is really going on around me than fearful of what might happen if I don't watch out for everyone [because no one else is paying attention is the story, and in that story I think I have to do that for everyone else]. Can I see a stress-free reason to keep that belief? No. It's all about fear. Now, turn it around. I am afraid I'm not taking care of everyone all the time. I am angry at myself for not taking care of everyone. I'm afraid I'm not taking care of myself all the time. Can I absolutely know that is true? No. And so it goes on, this dialogue within.

Funny, because I always point at some bugaboo in others first, which now I see points right back to me -- but suddenly I am not feeling the need to point at myself or anyone else anymore. I realized that in my work for some folks last year I was trying to do a job blamelessly, which was such a strange way to look at it. I have been so hard on others and therefore myself in so many ways I can't even count them. And I wonder, How can I make amends for that? And another beam of sunshine pours through that little hole and down onto my world. I can't help how simple it is; it just is, and I am left with nothing but love for myself and everyone I've ever wronged. I have to make some amends, today, too; I'm getting all teary just thinking about it. It will take work and humility to repair this, but I know the loving is healing my soul.

And as I experience all my midlife questions and seek answers from everyone around me without looking to myself, I see how I learned somewhere not to trust myself or others and that was the story I carried around with me for a long time. But that story is just a story from then; now it looks and feels to me like a heavy bag I can set down and leave behind for good if I look at it a little more closely. Ah, this is what they mean by the examined life.

So thanks for sharing your midlife transformation, Katie. It's a wonderful thing, like a blooming flower in my life. I feel like a blossoming flower again. It's been a long time since I could say that.

In other news, I have discovered that I did indeed get the E ticket to the Boulder International Film Fest for my loving labors as a volunteer; this is all one of my ideas of heaven. Having the big ticket means I get to go to all the films and the parties, so I'm gonna see some interesting stuff and do it up, girlfriend!


And I am secretly preparing to "play" a Prince song at the air guitar competition at the film fest this weekend, so I gotta get busy. Stay tuned....

Archiving as a service to others

I am enjoying the way this new business idea is making me feel, and like my novel I want to give time to it. Both are very positive and forward-looking. I like it because it is stoking my interest in people in this elemental way. The pictures above are from a holiday card, some free stickers that came in the mail of butterflies, number/letter stickers from the dollar bins at Target, pictures of kids at a summer camp, and scraps of my grandmother's tattered silk scarf. Just putting pretty papers under glass pebbles and gluing magnets to the back wouldn't be worth it; helping keep the things we like to preserve present in our lives is. For an example, I just copied London street maps from a set of cards I have depicting city walks and punched out circles for pebbles of the places my mother and I visited on our trips. In gathering the locations, I realized how much ground we covered in our two visits there.

On the desk in front of me happens to be an invitation from someone my husband works with to his graduation party. He moonlights in a card shop and is about to jump ship from corporate life to go pursue becoming an English professor. His graduation announcement is gorgeous, with beautiful graphic blocks and the ink color matched nicely. All I can think when I see it is that I want to make him some magnets out of little circles from the various designs and words. And I know he would love to have that small but visible keepsake, as much as he'll treasure his diploma in a simple but elegant frame up on a wall in an office some day.

I went to a friend's lingerie shower and took photos that I'll make a few marbles out of and glue magnets to the backs. Last night we were talking with friends about being a magnanimous magnet magnate. It just seems like the thing to do!