What Rejection Means

I remember reading a short fiction piece in Seventeen magazine (when I was fourteen, of course). In it, our hero goes to the mailbox to check for a letter from the college he applied to and finds a small, thin envelope decorated with official school insignia.

At the end of the fifth week of compulsively checking my mailbox daily, sending up little prayers to the mail gods that something, something would be there, I turned my key in the lock yet again, almost on a whim. It had been nearly three months since I turned in my application, and not a word. I started to imagine wild possibilities -- maybe they never lost it, maybe they think since I turned it in late I actually meant to apply for next next year's program, maybe my letter got lost in the mail, the way emails disappear into an internet void - only this was a dead letter closet or worse, simply the wrong mailbox.

But yesterday, when I swung back the little gray door of my mailbox, there was a letter. A real, tangible, school-insignia letter, and the words of that short story ran through my mind the moment I saw it:

Too thin to be an acceptance letter. Rejection.

It was indeed too thin, a single piece of paper folded business style inside the envelope. Even so, I held my breath a little as I opened it, then unfolded the paper. Maybe grad school doesn't send big giant acceptance packets; maybe I got in after all.

Nope.

Music Videos and Silent Films: A Match Made in Movie Heaven?

If you haven't already figured it out, I'm a pretty big fan of music videos as a genre - when done well, they have all the entertainment value of a feature-length film distilled into three minutes of sold gold goodness. They also, more often then not, bear a certain resemblance to ye olde silent films of yesteryear, telling stories that exist outside the lyrics and allowing the music to become an accompaniment to the action of the film.

Unsurprisingly, some videos have taken this comparison even farther. Two examples stand out in my mind immediately, the first being the video for "Tonight Tonight" by the Smashing Pumpkins.



A fun story, right? Boy and girl go up in a rocket ship to the moon, beat some aliens with umbrellas, take a dip in the sea to hang with mermaids, and live happily ever after. Seems like I've seen some of this imagery before . . .

"Voyage a la Lune" by George Melies is the first-ever movie made with an actual plot - before that, it was all movies of people sneezing, horses running, sunrises, trains, etc. Here, we see true theatrical mastery: a storyline and special effects, with lots of women in short pants thrown in for kicks. I believe they call it "cheesecake."

A final note: My apologies for the distracting voiceover, it was better than some of the ridiculous soundtracks I found out there, but still it's very distracting.




From the more recent end of the musical spectrum, we have "Living Dead Girl" by Rob Zombie. In the video, the mysterious Doctor reveals the 'Living Dead Girl' to the carnival-goers, to varying degrees of horror and amazement. When she escapes, the townspeople chase him out of town.



Pretty old fashioned looking stuff -- so old fashioned looking, in fact, it shouldn't be a surprise that the video's imagery is taken almost verbatim from an original silent film called "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" directed by Rober Weine. The highly stylized sets seen in both films come out of German Expressionism, an art movement that sought to manifest psychological moods in environment. The film is nearly an hour long, but if you have the time to watch it, I promise you won't be dissappointed -- but if you don't and just want to see the carnival scene, the fun starts around 7:56.





Good times, right?

Everything I need to know, I learned in Master Class

When I started college, I wanted to major in three things: Creative Writing, Art, and Vocal Performance (singing opera professionally, for those who haven't wandered into the world of music degree titles).

Sadly, that was not to be - I realized that although singing will always be something I love, I simply do not love it enough to give up everything else. Yet even as I've left the world of professional singing in my past, the lessons I learned there continue to resonate. The most important of these lessons came from a guest speaker in my master class.

Pop Music Contemplates God

I like music, and I like religion. No necessarily for the same reasons, but there is some interesting crossover. Particularly when music contemplates religion without preaching it, as in Regina Spektor's song, "Laughing With."

Between the M.C. Escher -style backgrounds and the (as always) truly lovely vocals and piano, this one never stays buried in my YouTube playlist for very long.

Another favorite, a little older (okay, more like a lot older, in pop years): Joan Osborne's "One of Us."



Interesting how Ms. Spektor and Ms. Osborne both use the close-up face shots - maybe to show off their luscious lips? Maybe it's just me, but it certainly seems like there may be a trend in lady musicians with prominent mouths singing about religiosity (okay, yes I know that's too specific to be a trend) -- after the jump, consider Tori Amos, with her song "Crucify."

Tucson's Own

I waited a while before making this post. I wanted to let myself process things, let the emotions play out a bit, get some distance from what happened Saturday.

I'm referring to the shootings in Tucson on January 8th, 2011. We were driving back from a ski trip, and my husband turned to me as we walked back to the car at the rest stop.

"Did you hear Gabrielle Giffords is dead?"
"What?!"
"Yeah . . ." And then he made a sound like a laugh, at the shock of it all.

Thankfully, that turned out not to be true. Gabby Giffords survived being shot in the head and was taken to UMC. Her truly incredible recovery and the outpouring of support from all over the country and the world has been inspiring and a comfort to me over this past week or so. Whether or not she'll ever fully recover is unknown, but there is good cause for hope.

Not everyone there was as lucky as Gabby, while others were far luckier. Nineteen people were shot in all, and six of those people died:

U.S.District Court Judge John Roll

Christina Taylor Green

Gabe Zimmerman

Dorwan Stoddard

Phyllis Schneck

Dorothy Morris

Thirteen others survived: Susan Hileman, Mavanell Stoddard, Pamela Simon, Ronald Barber, James Tucker, Kenneth Veeder, George Morris, James Fuller, Randy Gardner, Mary Reed, Kenneth Dorushka, and Bill Badge. 

The twenty-two year old gunman was Jared Loughner:
 

A yearbook photo.

On the U of A campus.

Being booked for the shooting.

How does one begin to process this? How does one young man -- the same age as my sister, a friend of a woman I work with -- undergo such a horrific transformation? What does it mean for those who were there to be a survivor, to be a victim? What does it mean to see my city and my state receive national wall to wall press coverage - to recall the newspaper I saved when I was twelve, its pictures and headlines telling of a massacre at Columbine and see the parallels - what can one possibly pull from this? Why do I stay away from my favorite news websites - is it to avoid more news of the tragedy or to pretend that the world hasn't nearly forgotten it, moving on to another day, another tragedy somewhere else?

In my coming posts, I'm going to attempt to answer these questions, if only to add my voice to the already hashed and rehashed version of events we've heard echoed across these last eleven days - if only to try to make some sense out of the non-sense that was Saturday. Please, feel free to add your comments, questions, suggestions for where this discussion should go - this should be a community thing.

How to Drive in Snow

I live in the desert, where we're lucky if we get snow once the entire winter. Other places are quite a different story.

Take a place like Spokane, Washington for example. You'd think with all that snow people would be better at driving in it, butI guess that's not always true (still, before all you snow bunnies kill me, allow me to point out that I, as a desert rat, have no idea what I'm talking about).



My favorite is the guy who closes his car's door before running out of the way of the oncoming sliding car. It's like a train wreck, you just can't help watching.

Rhymes with Smushmortion

I try really hard to not be a militant activist. Strident, sometimes, maybe - I mean, we all have those moments, right? When we get just a little bit too caught up in some debate and all of a sudden we're chaining ourselves to the Thanksgiving table screaming, "You'll never take me alive!" while Great-Aunt Edna looks on in in utter horror before fainting into the mashed potatoes . . . Just me? Well, what I'm attempting to say is I try to keep it toned down - not militant.

That said, this post is going to be a little controversial, so if you are easily offended or don't like reading opinions different from yours, I might recommend reevaluating whether you really want to read this pro-choice woman's blog post. Nope, you're staying? You sure? All right then - just be prepared: I'm happy to discuss at length any aspect of the abortion discussion in the comments section, and would in fact LOVE to see people from different viewpoints drawn in and talking to one another. But flaming, trolling, name-calling, and any other childish behavior will not be tolerated. Let's all take a deep breath and remember, it's just a comment thread!

Do not feed the trolls.

Okay, now that's out of the way, let's get started.

I tend to seek out abortion articles like a pig snuffing for high-end truffles - I pass by a lot of them because they're either old news, too superficial, or so outrageous that the only way to make them die is to ignore them (NOTE: see above). Like I said, I'm pro-choice -- which means I'm pro-every-woman's-choice. Carrying a pregnancy to term, terminating the pregnancy, keeping the baby, putting the baby up for adoption, these things are all fine by me. Sometimes, I may question the reasoning behind another woman's decision regarding her pregnancy, but hell no would I ever take away her right to make that decision.

So, that's where I stand. And here's where the American abortion debate stands: at an absolute standstill, because we've gotten caught up in our sense of moral obligation to protect the lives of others and our God-given* right to personal liberty (I'm thinking T. Jefferson's take on this bit). So what to do?

William Saletan, one of my favorite writers at Slate.com, wrote a couple articles covering a recent meeting of the minds: the pro-life camp and the pro-choice camp got together and hugged it out. Well, technically they didn't hug it out -- they talked abortion policy in America and how to get the debate moving again, and the representatives for the pro-life camp got ostracized by their own groups for fraternizing with the enemy, and the representatives from the pro-choice camp got blackballed for sacrificing the party line.

Extremism: It's not just for the crazies anymore

Basically, not a whole lot happened -- superficially. But as Saletan points out, there were some real concessions made, by both sides, and some real common ground discovered, that could help to move us forward. The main points to take away after the jump, as laid out by Saletan: