When I first heard Whit Stillman was making another movie, I didn’t believe it. After years of Mitch Hurwitz promising to make an Arrested Development movie (which is finally happening!), I was very skeptical of things I love coming back to me. After 13 years of Stillman’s absence, after hearing that he was and then wasn’t working on that Jamaica movie and then was and wasn’t adapting Christopher Buckley’s Little Green Men, I couldn’t hope anymore. I threw in the towel. And then after his new movie premiered at Cannes, I told myself that if it actually came out, it wouldn’t be any good. Because of that long hiatus from film-making, he’d be off his game. I refused to get my hopes up, to kick at a football I knew Whit was just going to take away when I got close to contact.

But the film premiered last Friday in Chicago and after almost a decade of waiting, I finally got to kick that football, and it felt so good. Damsels in Distress isn’t Stillman’s best movie. It’s uneven and sometimes unsure of itself, because it’s trying out so many ideas, a problem oddly befitting of the insecure undergraduates Stillman documents. As in Metropolitan and The Last Days of Disco, Stillman’s characters are of the self-described Urban Haute Bourgeoisie class, also known as pseudo-intellectual preppies. Many other directors might look at this stratum of folks as merely a target for satire, but like Christopher Guest, Stillman’s touch is much lighter. He empathizes with these girls and their romantic distresses as much as he riffs on their post-adolescent pretentions.

His first film, Metropolitan, is the best example of this, a semi-autobiographical film about the people he met during his first Christmas break from Harvard. Metropolitan is completely driven by dialogue and what those words say about the person that says them, and UHB speech relies heavily on the sort of self-conscious archness reminiscent of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Remember Daisy from the ill-fated Coppola adaptation of The Great Gatsby? Imagine a movie where everyone kind of talks like that, but less incessantly irritating.

The Last Days of Disco, his last film before the comeback, perfectly encapsulates the idea of Stillmanspeak. The film deals with recent Ivy League graduates trying to make their way up in early 80s New York, a time tentatively defined by the rapidly declining disco scene. To gain status and prestige, the characters understand that it’s about where you are seen and who you are seen with. In the same way, the case of Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale) shows that, for these people, it’s not just important what you say; it matters how you say it. Beckinsale’s Charlotte is something of a Captain Obvious, prone to making inane observations like, “One of the things I’ve noticed is that people hate to be criticized,” but saying it as if it were the most profound things she had ever heard.

Part of the reason for this is that Stillman consistently documents characters whose social orders are in a state of transition or decline, and in order to maintain one’s makeshift status, the characters must constantly display their class worth and intellectual prowess—which are always intertwined. In reviewing Stillman’s newest film, Roger Ebert noted that Stillman’s characters are so absurd that his world could “only believe in itself.”

I think part of the reason is that—in documenting social transition—Stillman’s characters are an anachronism of an anachronism. Metropolitan is based on the 1970s but seems oddly set in the present (then the 1990’s), and the life they aspire to — of debutante balls and cocktail parties — is already a fantasy of the past. As Ebert states, “they are carrying on a tradition that was dead before they were born.”

Because of that, something to me always felt off about the Whit Stillman universe, even as I admired his skill at creating dialogue. His universe never quite made sense to me, because it’s artifice about artifice. However, Damsels in Distress’s real subject is that façade, the effects of living in your own fantasy, and the Stillmanesque artifice somehow makes more sense when he is dealing with the 21st century.

As Stillman’s Metropolitan is both ahead of its time in the canon of 90’s independent films and behind its time, his biggest influences are Woody Allen and Preston Sturges, the film seems chronologically adrift, as if you were watching an old movie that happened to be about people you knew. But after a decade and change of other directors picking up where Stillman left off, the Stillman universe makes more sense than it ever did. Rather than being the sole auteur of the upper-middle class WASP, Stillman’s UHB set is now part of a community also populated by the characters of The Royal Tenenbaums and The Squid and the Whale. Although some might accuse Noah Baumbach and Wes Anderson of ripping off Stillman, I think their films refine and flesh out Stillman’s narratives. They make his world real, something that feels like it exists in the now.

And Stillman himself, in dealing with the 21st century, finds its preoccupations and obsessions more conducive to his treatment than even he might have imagined. In Damsels in Distress, Greta Gerwig’s effortlessly affected Violet perfectly encapsulates the post-Wes Anderson hipster girl, a kooky cousin to Zooey Deschanel.

Once again, Stillman’s characterization of Violet is completely driven by his influences, and in addition to Preston Sturges, Stillman clearly borrows from the zesty farces of P.G. Wodehouse. (The film’s title is even a spin on Wodehouse’s own Damsel in Distress.) But rather than allowing these referents to chain him to the past, Stillman is doing something he never has before: looking forward. Damsels in Distress is a film unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, and now that he’s been unleashed on the 21st century, it makes me so excited to see what he does next. Let’s just hope that it doesn’t take another 13 years.

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Dear you,

Look, I love you. We’ve been friends for so long now, and you know you’re amazing. There is no one I could have more fun with, no one who will so reliably hold back my drunk hair and then tell me it’s okay to wear sunglasses indoors at brunch the next day because my eyes feel like despair. We’ve been through so much together that, at times, I can take you for granted. I assume that you are a constant in my life, and if that has led me to treat you with anything less than the love you deserve, I’m sorry. You are the greatest friend anyone could ask for, and there’s no one I want happiness for more. No one. So when I found out that you were dating someone, I could not have been happier. I thought, “This is it. We’re all finally going to be happy and get what we want, and we can all run off into the sunset together linking arms, singing that song from the end of Grease.” If only I knew then how wrong that would prove to be.

It starts off innocently enough. I call you, wanting to do something, and I don’t hear back from you for a while. A text or two goes unanswered, and when I finally get a hold of you, you mumble something about being “really tired,” and not feeling up to going out. I can hear your lover in the background, trying to pry the phone away from you from all directions like a many-tentacled squid, but I ignore it. You’re in love, and there’s nothing wrong with spending some quality afternoon time in bed.

But then it gets more worrisome. You start missing out on things you love, your social appearances become so rare as to elicit a “Woah! Look who crawled up for air! Hope no one is pregnant.” every time you show up. Your hobbies and interests start morphing, slowly, to adjust to those of your new love. Your affinity for bowling has been switched out for a serious vested interest in wind surfing, and the fashion magazines you once pored over with glee you now refer to as “banal.” Who taught you that word? My friend would never seriously refer to something filled with free cologne samples as “banal.” But I digress.

The point is, I can see the “you” that makes you who you are evaporating in front of my very eyes. Aside from the new interests that seemed to appear overnight and replace all the things you used to love, is the strange assertion that this is nothing new. Come on now, let’s be real. We all know that your long-standing, passionate interest in Greek philosophy is about two weeks old, tops, and is inspired more by the fact that you’re getting laid on the regular by someone who likes to read than any interest in understanding mankind. I mean, I get it, but let’s just be honest with ourselves. And I don’t begrudge you this new persona! On the contrary, it’s fine to see someone grow and develop. I mean, it would be nice if this were a little more self-motivated and less based on making yourself the ideal mate for someone you are unhealthily attracted to, but I suppose the ends justify the means.

However, there are certain things that irk me more than others. For example, last I checked, you were a single unit — one person, no more, no less. As I understand the English language, that would mean that you would use the first-person singular nominative case personal pronoun, known in some circles as “I.” You would say, as you used to, things like “I went to the store,” “I really liked this movie,” or “I picked out this scented candle that makes my house perpetually smell like chemical pumpkin pie and suffocation.” It seems though that now, whatever it is you participate in, enjoy, or experience, is being fed through a second set of nerve endings and sensory receptors, because I have yet to hear about something that doesn’t involve “we.” “We went to the new exhibit, it was bourgeois.” “We used to really like Woody Allen, but Midnight In Paris was like watching him dance for pennies from the everyman at your local multiplex.” “We decided to arrange the apartment to get more south-western light in our living room.”

I don’t recall being friends with a two-headed hydra who can’t stop talking about the concert it’s going to next week, but then again my memory’s never been great.

Look, I’ll reason with you here. You and I both know that this relationship isn’t going to last forever. Feign your outrage, talk about moving to Vermont and having barefoot children, and then let’s get back to reality. At some point, you’re going to find yourself hating all of the pretentious and uninteresting things you pretended to do to participate in this farce of a commitment, and that’s okay. Come on, we’ve all been there. I once learned about everything there is to know about modern banjo playing with a foaming-at-the-mouth urgency to impress this guy I ended up breaking up with in a month. (True story.) But you know what was awesome? When I regained consciousness and realized how much of an utter circus that whole thing was, and I regretted how quickly I had tossed aside my friends for what I imagined was tru luv at 1st site, you guys were there to take me out and remind me how much fun it is to be myself. And I want to thank you for that.

But now it is your turn. So have your fun, ditch your friends, lose your head. Just remember who was there before, and remember who will be there after.

Love,
A Friend

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Last winter, I officially broke up with my dad. Our relationship had been terrible for years, and it came to a point where I had to be honest with myself about the fact that it just wasn’t working anymore. It hadn’t worked ever and it wasn’t going to. For a long time, I’ve put up with a lot of bad relationships in my life, and I knew that putting up with him hurting me was just going to make it easier to get hurt over and over again by other people. Like Vietnam, my dad is F-cked Up Beyond All Recognition, and I could keep fighting an unwinnable war or get out and cut my losses. Rather than continuing to occupy a land I wasn’t really wanted in, I went home to be with those I knew loved me: my friends, my grandparents and my mother.

Since then, I’ve been doing a lot better than I ever have emotionally, but I still feel like something’s missing. My mom and grandparents are great, but it’s not quite the same. Don’t get me wrong. I love my Nana, and we talk on the phone almost every day. But she can’t throw a football for crap, doesn’t understand why baseball butts are God’s gift to man and has stubble in all the incorrect places. And my Pops and I share an intense love of The Wire (and almost all HBO programming), but he’s usually asleep on the couch before we get past an episode. How am I supposed find out if Kima pulls out of that coma if you go into your own, gramps?

So, I have proposed a solution: I have decided to cast a new father, and I have made my choice: Ira Glass.

I feel like having a secret Jewish dreamboat for a father would be good for my self-esteem. Rather than descending from the philanderers, rapists, bootleggers and mafia prostitutes of of my Ohio-tucky lineage, I would descend from Glass royalty. Get togethers would be like Hannah and Her Sisters, if Woody Allen were more endearing and prone to giving me noogies. Dad and I could talk about Proust, kvetch about Mike Daisey and catch up on whatever wacky schemes cousin Philip is up to now.

However, I imagine cousin Philip probably wouldn’t be invited to family get togethers anymore after forcing everyone to listen to Einstein on the Beach, and so we may have to speculate. But if he does show up, we still won’t actually want to converse with him, as talking about him behind his back is more fun. Instead, we’ll just calmly come up with an excuse as to why we are snubbing him, like that it’s a Monday and he’s wearing track pants. Sorry, Crazy Cousin Philip, you can’t sit with us.

Dad doesn’t seem like the type that would be into tossing the ol’ pigskin around, and so we can just fling copies of Russian and Czechoslovakian literature at each other on the lawn instead. For our family’s annual Thanksgiving game of flag football, we can use a copy of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (because of its lightness and versatility). However, for practice and strengthening before the big game, we’ll arm ourselves with Anna Karenina —- as long as no one throws themselves under a train afterward.

Now that I don’t have to put up with Christmas anymore —- since I’m now Jewish -— we can spend December 25th doing all the things that are really important. This will include finally finishing the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle, gossiping about Diane Rehms’ sexual escapades and figuring out if Derrida is for serious. We can watch Shoah, The Sorrow and the Pity and Curb Your Enthusiasm, as one should do on Christmas, and cap it off by reenacting our favorite scenes from Yentl, complete with wigs and hats. I’d make a great Amy Irving, but I don’t have the pipes for Barbra, and so we’ll have to bring in David Sedaris for that.

After cleaning up the puke stains Aunt Sarah Vowell left on the carpet over New Years’, we can jog past Valentines’ Day, St. Patrick’s Day and Easter, which we mercifully don’t bother with. Instead of trying to figure out exactly what pagan fertility eggs have to do with Zombie Jesus, we can hold a remembrance for the history of our people by attempting to stay awake during Passover. Dad can explain to me what matzah balls exactly are, while I spend the holidays fighting off a hummus coma. (I suspect it’s a lot worse than turkey coma is.)

Dad can teach me how to spend holidays like Memorial Day, Independence Day and Labor Day not dancing under the fireworks like Brazilian football hooligans, and instead spending them in the time-honored Glass traditions. I imagine these days are either spent in dark rooms somewhere, thinking about the devastating quagmire of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and mapping out a peaceful two-state solution. If not, we can all just go get drunk at Chinese restaurants and sing classics like “You Oughta Know” by Alanis Morrisette or “Milkshake” by Kelis, while slamming back shots of Asian bamboo whiskey. I’m open to either.

As far as the summer months go, the Glasses probably forgo the Hamptons, because they aren’t Whit Stillman enough or Madeleine Stowe enough for that. This is not the Glass way. We can just go vacation wherever Bergman shot The Seventh Seal and contemplate despair for the summer. We’ll stare at shadows and talk about how Kierkegaard changed our lives, like we’re undergraduates at NYU who have just discovered what marijuana is.

And then when the summer ends, I’ll have to go back to my last year at graduate school, my last year before I have to grow up and go do real adult things. Dad will stand next to mom, with a look of pride on his face and that mischievous Ira Glass-twinkle in his eye that either means that he’s happy, that he put Terry Gross’ stapler in jello again or that he just farted. He won’t say it exactly, but from that look, I’ll know that he’ll know that I know how much he cares about me. With my backpack packed and my khakis perfectly ironed, I’ll smile and wave and promise to email or call every day, or at least text him pictures of strangers on the “L” train doing the darnedest things.

And I’ll promise to come home soon, especially for Rosh Hashanah, whatever that is. I think it’s a 5K run? Whatever, I’ll figure it out. My new dad, Ira Glass, and I will figure it out, together.

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1. Talking openly about therapy and anti-depressants.

Because of movies and TV and Woody Allen and my inherent assumption that everyone is as miserable as I am, for a long time I didn’t even know that therapy had a stigma. Most of America is on pills and it’s my belief that even the sanest person could benefit from a check-in with a shrink.

I don’t understand the big deal in admitting that you’re a little groggy because you’re switching up your psych meds. I don’t understand the big deal in quoting something your therapist said — and citing her — if it’s relevant to the conversation. It took me six months to catch on that the eye-blinking, stilted reactions I got from people when I casually referred to therapy as though it were a nail appointment was because it is a thing that other people think is an intimate and momentous admission. To me, dealing with head sickness is not so different from dealing with body sickness. We’re all a little scewed up in our own ways, just like we all have our own little ailments of poor circulation or back pain. So why don’t we talk about it the way we talk about Zicam and Advil? To me, chill openness about being in therapy or on meds reveals not craziness, but a mature interest in self-improvement, and even better, a bold declaration of a lack of shame. At least, that’s what my therapist told me.

2. Eating Alone at Restaurants

I don’t need someone to sit across from me in order to enjoy my delicious sandwich. Going out to eat isn’t always about being social; sometimes you just want a solid meal and to just sit there and to have it served to you. Being surrounded by people who are laughing joyously in groups while they eat doesn’t strike much envy into my heart, so don’t feel sorry for me if you see me hunched over baked macaroni n cheese, alone and silent, at the corner table of a busy restaurant. I am content. The same goes for seeing movies alone, although I get the sense that society is generally more comfortable with that one.

3. Not Liking Your Dog

I don’t like dogs. I am allergic to them. Plus their slobber/odor/spasmodic eagerness repulses me. Most dog owners believe their dog is Jesus, therefore you are a sociopath if you don’t want to pet your friend’s dog as soon as it maniacally leaps at you when you come over for a barbeque. I used to jump away and murmur-giggle, “I’m kind of allergic to dogs!” as an explanation. Now, I admit it: My aversion to canines hugely transcends allergy. I’m finally willing to brave the passive-aggressive replies: “Well, she’s hypoallergenic, so it’s okay!” and “But she’s not like other dogs! She’s more like a cat/baby/wolf!” I hold my ground: I don’t care; don’t let it touch me.

4. Eating Cookies for Breakfast

I live above a Lenny’s and when I walk through the door, by the time I get to the counter, the girls at the register have a black and white cookie wrapped up and ready for me. I don’t know if I’m the only one who craves sweets immediately upon waking, or if I’m the only one who acts on it. All I know is that I once overheard them call me “cookie girl” and I was not ashamed.

5.  Starting the Night Before Midnight

This is more of a call for change than a social rule that I actually violate because to try to violate it would be logistically impossible. You know how the Facebook event page for a party always says it starts at ten, but you’re not actually supposed to show up till midnight? I want to show up at ten. When the sun falls I am ready to party; I want to rage hard. And then be asleep by one or two. If we started our nights as soon as it was dark out, we would be able to party on weeknights more often. This call for change is a result of the combination of being too excited and impatient to get out there and start having fun, and of being in early-onset old lady mode. Black skies are for partying; why does what’s on the clock matter?

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I have heard it asked in the classrooms of my childhood. I have heard it asked in the halls of my college. I have heard it asked on the subway to work, in bars during happy hour, in my own classroom. I have heard it, and it is this: “Why the hell do old (and/or dead) white men still matter?”

I have thoroughly pursued an answer to this question, attempting to wayside my own predilections of the literature of white men that I so deeply admire, entering dialogues with students clad in skinny jeans and non-optical Ray-Bans with copies of On the Road and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas tucked securely in their armpits, suppressing the urge to point out that Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson are, in fact, old and/or dead white men too. But no, apparently: there is only one category of old, dead white men who have become outmoded and irrelevant, the kind that appears in tin-types, the kind whose sentences are not quick and to-the-point, the kind that appear on the A.P. English Top Forty list.

Well, I hate to break it to you, but old and/or dead white men still matter, and this is why: they matter in the way that their works speak to the development of constructs regarding race and racism.

In the case of American literature, one must first examine the purpose of the literary canon. Although American literature is relatively new, it derives from the European tradition. As a country in the 19^th century trying to harness its bearings on a cultural level, with only a handful of jeremiads and polemic religious documentation to its name, the prerogative of Hawthorne, Emerson, and the rest of the bunch was to carve out an identity with the deliberate astuteness of a stonemason who eases out the shape of a brick from raw limestone. After all, the purpose of “the canon” in the first place is to eke out a national identity. Hawthorne did this by illustrating the horrific underbelly of the Puritanical manifest with the aid of inherited familial guilt. Thoreau did this by cashing in on the mythos of the virgin land ethic. Melville did this with water and whales (I’ll come back to this later). Poe did this with detectives and drugs and ravens (oh my!).  It still begs many a question. For instance, where is race in all of this? Where is the antebellum American economy in all of this? Where is the blood of the victims of the slave trade? Has it seeped into the American soil of these stories? Is it merely fertilizer to these canon-makers, and nothing more? And if this is the case, why are these men still relevant?

Toni Morrison has a compelling perspective on this. In her critical book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, she proposes a reading with an “Africanist presence,” a term she coins in reference to not only the depiction of racialized archetypes within the American canon, but the absence of any sort of presence as well. Here’s an example as applied to pop-culture and an old, not-dead white man, courtesy of a graduate professor of mine (thanks, Professor Moustafa Bayoumi!): Woody Allen’s most recent movie, Midnight in Paris.

As is standard in Allen’s filmography, the protagonist of Midnight in Paris, Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) comes from an assumingly white (or Jewish) upper- or upper-middle class background, a member of the American intelligentsia. Throughout the course of the movie, he travels back in time to 1920’s Paris, glorified by types like Hemingway (A Moveable Feast), Fitzgerald, and the rest of the rag-tag ex-pats. The only woman of color to appear in Allen’s movie is the dancer Josephine Baker (Sonia Rolland). Her part is minimal — if not a downright, fleeting cameo — and her depiction is sexualized. Looking over the obvious in this particular portrayal (the orientalist gaze, the male gaze, and so forth), what does it say about Allen using Baker as the only example of a character who is not white? Where are the other, non-white members of the Left Bank, the patrons, or the jazz-men of the cafes, or the African-French citizens themselves? (And notice how I jumped to “jazz-men”? What does that say about my relationship with the Africanist perspective? And where is Sidney Bechet, whilst his tune plays throughout the movie?) And if we’re looking at Woody Allen films in general, let’s talk about movies like Annie Hall and Manhattan. As much as I love those movies, I will ask the obvious: why is Woody Allen’s New York an all-white New York? The questions concerning these topics are not meant to reflect or accuse Allen of racism within his fictive world; rather, they are meant to illicit discussion of cultural context, what part this cultural presence might play in the creation of a narrative, and how this speaks to the national context. To evoke Morrison:

“…in matters of race, silence and evasion have historically ruled literary discourse. […] To enforce its invisibility through silence is to allow the black body a shadowless participation in the dominant cultural body.”

Let’s bring it back to an arbiter of our nation’s literature: Herman Melville. To put it quite simply, Melville is my main man. Melville was also one of those dead white men who cared deeply about the situation of slavery and rampant imperialism in the United States — just read “Benito Cereno,” an inverted take on slave mutiny originally published in the abolitionist journal Putnam’s, or the parable “The Bell Tower.” The reasons to read the works of Melville if one is on the prowl for a dialogic engagement on racism are apparent in this case. But what about sub-text?

(Note: the following example is a part of my graduate thesis. If any readers decide to apply it to their own college papers or what have you, I will hunt you down and shank you. And by “shank you,” I mean your professor will weed you out with aid of SafeAssign, and I will request a hearing with the MLA. Duly noted?  Okay.)

In Melville’s opus Moby-Dick, we’re presented with a post-colonial ur-text, filled with many a sign and symbol indicative of racial conflict in Melville’s contemporary America. The most obvious one is the titular whale himself; as Michael Berthold expounds in his essay “Moby-Dick and the American Slave Narrative,”  whales were used in basic abolitionist iconography, invoking a “prophesized eradication” of the plantation industry and the treatment of slaves. In Moby-Dick, this white whale exists underneath the water, so perhaps we can argue that the world above the water and the world below the water represent a master-narrative/counter-narrative dichotomy when applied to the romantic, white-washed, manifest-destiny-loving, mythic spin of U.S. history. To (literally) illustrate:

Master-narrative

——————————————-

Counter-narrative

Ah, but what about the boat the action takes place on, the Pequod? The Pequod with its multi-racial crew, filled with white Ishmaels and Ahabs. Pacific Islander Queequegs, and black Pips? The boat that rests both on the water and slightly below?

Narrative

———(I’M ON A BOAT!)———–

Counter-narrative

From the graphic visual above, you can see that the boat creates a potential space, one that is used as a tool of subversion and inversion while engaging in a muted discourse on an Africanist presence. We have non-white Queequeg, described as a man with the profile of George Washington (a scandalous thing to compare in Melville’s day); we have the white character of Flask sitting on the shoulders of “his” harpooner, the black Daggoo (symbolic of antebellum economy); we have Pip, who after jumping overboard and witnessing the “colossal orbs” of an indifferent God in the water, emerges speaking in tongues (a spin on the stereotype of “babbling savages” — see: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness – made here to paint him as a character filled with portent). So it seems that Melville — an old, dead white man — has no true answers (as the apocalyptic ending of the book can attest to), but knows enough to present candid facts through an artistic medium, and to make them, all in all, a catalogue of injustice within the canon.

Of course, some can shrug off Moby-Dick, Benito Cereno, and “The Bell Tower” as artifacts from an American antiquity. However, doing so would be like solely dismissing Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as an outdated critique of Marxism. Both novels are not protest novels, but the way in which they speak to matters relating to the subject of race cannot be tarnished by age – indeed, they seem to forbid us to do so.

This, of course, is not to say that old and/or dead white men are the only canon-contributors who matter — far from it. But there is a necessity in entering these old white men into a conversation with texts that not only speak to their respective generations, but ours as well. Some of us like to think that we live in a post-racial society, but our own current events — the Tea Party and the occurrences surrounding the death of Trayvon Martin — speak against this.  By educating ourselves in the cultural paradigms of our past and the presence of race (or lack thereof) within them, we can begin to fully realize the trajectory of our own prejudices, and find ways to someday remedy them. Art, after all, is an imitation of life.

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Katy Perry: First and foremost, you love bright colors. Anything shiny, sparkly, distracting, or generally something a seven-year-old would want at their birthday party, you are all about. The more glossy and unnatural looking, the better. You would love a closet full of clothing and lingerie that would be appropriate for a Strawberry Shortcake-inspired porn. You also permanently have this look on your face like you’re not 100 percent positive what’s going on, but you’re pretty sure you like it. You probably surf We Heart It in your spare time. You may have been a cheerleader in high school, but if not, you were certainly going all-out at every pep rally in the stands. And, let’s be honest, you’d marry a kitchen sponge if it had a British accent.

Color: Fluorescent Pink
Constellation: Lynx

Woody Allen: You have this strange combination of Peter Pan syndrome and Old Soul in which you never grow up, but you’re also never un-self-aware enough to be young. Let’s be honest, you’re probably a bearded guy wearing tweed, living in New York, working on a novel of some kind, and over thinking every single thing he does — from choosing an MFA program to buying a tube of toothpaste. There is an overwhelmingly nebbishy quality about you, one that attracts the “smart” girls who are all incredibly different in their uniform bangs, oversized glasses, and dresses. Also, you would totally bang your daughter, she is so hot.

Color: Muted Rust
Constellation: Mensa

Kanye West: You are confident to the point where no one can tell if it’s a joke anymore, but everyone’s pretty sure that if it isn’t a joke, it’s really, really sad. You make a lot of commentary on various social media outlets, sit back, and think to yourself, “God damn, I’m clever.” People either love you more than their own mother and would fall on a sword defending what you do, or hate you with the fire of a thousand suns and wait patiently for your death. It’s also been debated that you are not yet comfortable enough with your homosexuality to reveal it, so you date bald women as a next-best-thing substitute.

Color: Black, as it is the new black (according to you)
Constellation: Crux

Zooey Deschanel: You know exactly who you are if Zooey is your CSA. I’d go into it, but does the world really need another mental image of you batting your eyelashes as you pretend not to understand how to use a pasta strainer?

Color: Dusty Lavender
Constellation: Ursa Minor

Angelina Jolie: Let’s be honest, you’re probably kind of insufferable. You are involved in some capacity with Amnesty International, Teach for America, or the Peace Corps — which would be fine, of course, if you could only stop talking about it for five seconds. All of your Facebook pictures are you smiling with a bunch of various ethnic children, showing the world how generous and awesome you are. You’re also probably quite pretty, but in a way that’s so intimidating and severe it’s almost not attractive anymore.

Color: Grey
Constellation: Draco

Ryan Gosling: You are, without a doubt, the coolest guy around. You’re the impossibly attractive, interesting, smart, funny guy that somehow doesn’t seem to be a complete ass and therefore attracts the interest of both shallow and “smart, tortured” girls. You’re so desirable, in fact, that people will superimpose their own sociopolitical beliefs on pictures of you to further deepen the fantasies they have about the kind of person they think you are. No one knows this, but in real life, you probably just like eating bacon cheeseburgers, not thinking too much, watching ESPN, and going to bed at a reasonable hour. Shh, don’t spoil the fantasy.

Color: Blue
Constellation: Lepus

Ellen Degeneres: You have, at some point, transitioned into the coolest mom at the PTA meeting. You are the mom that wears GAP khaki clamdiggers and sends all of the funny chain emails with the rapping kittens and dancing Obama GIFs. You are into what the “kids” are into, and you are definitely “hip.” You listen to Justin Bieber just like any cool dude, and you certainly know how to crack a good zinger when the time calls for it. You are a mere 10-or-so years away from saying “jee willikers.”

Color: Sunflower Yellow
Constellation: Delphinus

James Franco: As the guy who is perpetually too cool to be fully involved with anything, but will stop by for five minutes to smoke a cigarette and talk about himself, you’re probably pretty busy. You’ve got a full schedule of class, poetry readings, art shows, concerts, and parties — none of which you care about, like, at all. You often refer to yourself as being “pretty into Hemingway right now,” as well as “looking to take a year off.” You can look forward to traveling Europe, smoking a lot of hash, and becoming an even more self-important douche.

Color: Mauve
Constellation: Auriga

Beyonce: You are the most popular, beautiful, flawless girl in the tri-state area. People are afraid to approach you, so intimidating and far-reaching is your perfection. You’ll probably try to take it down a notch or two by getting with a guy who is several leagues below you, otherwise people will probably start thinking that you’re actually a cyborg designed by the music industry to siphon our remaining disposable income.

Color: Gold
Constellation: Hydra

Leonardo DiCaprio: You are probably pretty hot or whatever, but you will never, ever, ever win an Oscar.

Ever.

Color: Tear-Stained Blue
Constellation: Andromeda

Adele: Your Tumblr is the most righteous of all the Tumblrs, filled with photos of inspiration to get over your evil ex, poetry written by the Strong Women who came before you, and quotes from feminist leaders to remind you that you are better off without the guy. Everyone loves you and frankly, to not love you would be mean. To not love you would mean you don’t appreciate a woman wearing her heart on her sleeve because she has been broken but she will come back like a phoenix from the ashes, quoting The Vagina Monologues and going for happy hour with the girls. You –simply put — go, girl.

Color: Royal Purple
Constellation: Equuleus

Kristen Wiig: You are the funny one who can be appreciated by people with all senses of humor. You are the kind of funny that even people who don’t particularly love what you do can nod their head in approval and be like, “Yeah, that girl is definitely hilarious.” Everyone would love to be your best friend, because you just seem so unbelievably cool and down-to-earth and wonderful and beautiful and OH GOD KRISTEN WIIG PLEASE MARRY ME.

Color: Hilarious Orange
Constellation: Corvus

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Surprisingly, I am not a big Bret Easton Ellis Fan. This is not to say that I don’t admire his writing, or the specific cultural sentiment of the Reagan era his novels encapsulate (excluding, of course, those that don’t — but they’re good, too!) — I just don’t necessarily remind myself when I walk into my neighborhood bookstore that, “I NEED A COPY OF GLAMORAMA FOR REASONS!” But despite a pleasant lassitude toward Ellis’ canon, I may or may not have the appearance of being a huge fan. I have read a number of his books: Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho, Lunar Park, and Imperial Bedrooms. In accordance to the books he has written, this renders my score of Ellisian well-readedness at around seventy-two percent. My percentage is entirely coincidental. Some of these novels were given to me as birthday or Hanukkah gifts (I actually have two copies of The Rules of Attraction – any takers?), and others were on display in the homes of friends while I was visiting from out of town, or extremely hung-over, or both, and seemed like a good idea at the time to read. So, in one form or another, I can perceivably consider myself familiar with the transgressive, deceptively laconic, fictive way of B.E.E. (I apologize for any obnoxious acronyms… now.)

This asseveration lead me to the undeserved conceit of imagining life as Ellis (“…after all, who am I compared to him?” says the Woody Allen sequitir in my head), and thus, to imagining what I would do if I were B.E.E. for a day. The following is what I concocted.

1. Wake up at around noon to my alarm, which plays my deepest, darkest, guilty pleasure: “Tik Tok” by Ke$ha (the money sign in her atrociously-spelled name speaks to my upbringing and the spearhead of Reaganomics, after all). Sing along to the pop hit, substituting the line “Wakin’ up in the morning feeling like P.Diddy” with, “Wakin’ up in the morning feeling like B.E.E.” Proceed to interpret a number of lyrics as directives: grab my Ray-bans (for I will hit this city), brush my teeth with a bottle of Jack, drop-top to my favorite CDs (Huey Lewis and the News, Joy Division, that new band that is made up of half of the members from an old band I once pretended to like), note to self to kick dudes to the curb unless they look like Mick Jagger, and so forth.
2. Apply a clear facial mask to keep my skin intact, redolent of my years at an elite, (very) liberal Northeastern college, despite my roots in California. Wash off with a pricey, top-notch facial cleanser. Everything is minty-fresh.
3. Push-ups.  So many push-ups.
4. Call up my bro Jay McInerney, the other half of “The Toxic Twins;” argue that we should have formed a band. Proceed to speak to each other entirely in the second person, though we are, in actuality, referring to ourselves. End our amiable conversation with, “BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY, BITCHES!”
5. Recall the time during my formative teenage years that I ran over a coyote with my red convertible. Moments of existentialism ensue.
6. Look up clips from the movie version of Less Than Zero, but only those featuring Robert Downey, Jr. (Kiss my ass, Andrew McCarthy. Don’t get me started on Jami Gertz. James Spader, you’re okay.) Curse the compelling, dew-ridden nature of his brown puppy-dog eyes, and the similarity of his lips to the handsome statuary of Greek antiquity. Maniacally laugh when I remember that he starred in Gothika and The Shaggy Dog.
7. Tweet to my thousands upon thousands of followers that, “Yeah… everything sucks.”
8. Ponder if my next book should be a pseudo-memoir or a sequel to one of my early semi-autobiographical works. Maybe a screenplay — it worked for Michael Chabon.
9. Venture out into the annals of the chic Manhattan neighborhood I reside in. Forego my ‘hood and trek to the restaurant Hubert’s. Realize it has been replaced by another restaurateur. Damn that bastard. Walk a few blocks to Le Cirque. Discover that the owners have switched locations. Damn those bastards. Repeat three times. Frustrated and flustered, walk to Au Bon Pain. At least they have free Wi-Fi.
10. Prank call Tama Janowitz from the last working payphone in the Upper East Side. In a cool, pithy tone reminiscent of my writing style, I tell her that it was sad that she wasn’t an upper-middle class white male, or else she’d be wrangling the big bucks. I hang up.
11. And now… drugs. So many drugs.
12. Tweet this.

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image – Name Your Link

After 27 years of agony, I have finally pinpointed the source of my frustration. This took a great deal of introspection and thought. I made many charts, diagrams, flowcharts and PowerPoint presentations to support my thesis. I will not bore you with the facts and figures of this revelation. I will only offer you the fruits of my struggle.

There is one element that all of my failed relationships share. Examining all the many variations of womanhood that I have been familiar with, but a single thread carries through all of these dalliances.

They involved a heavy amount of physical intimacy.

We have to go on dates, hold hands, kiss, make love, see movies, take walks, have meals, go to IKEA, share toothbrushes, figure out the best position to sleep in, agree on an ideal temperature for the room, meet each other’s parents and watch interminable Downton Abbey marathons.

Invariably, either one or both of the participants in the union grows tired of the intrusion upon their personal space, or worse yet, the relationship devolves into co-dependency and passive-aggressive behavior. That’s right, Elizabeth! You gave me that copy of White Noise by Don DeLillo because you know I hate that book. I can’t even sell it, and you also know I can’t just throw it away. I can’t throw away literature, no matter how bad it is. You are cruel and you know me too well!

Pardon that digression. More to the point, I believe that we live in an age where no one has to actually meet to be in a meaningful relationship. I have friends on Facebook I have never met. People subscribe to my YouTube channel in countries that don’t even have English as an official language. Why can’t I have a girlfriend I’ve never met (or one that doesn’t speak English) too? The internet allows people to communicate in a substantial fashion without messy things like ‘sharing a bathroom’ or ‘verbal exchanges.’ We can go on Gchat/AIM/Facebook Chat/Skype/etc. and be just as ‘close’ as we would be in a normal relationship, except we won’t actually be close to each other at all.

It’s not enough to try to meet a real girl via the internet, because most of them end up wanting to be in the same room as me, and as I have mentioned previously, ‘that boat don’t float.’ I recently went on an OkCupid date with a very attractive Asian woman. She’s mature, employed and loves Woody Allen, Ghostbusters and Murakami. We seemed perfect for each other and had very pleasant conversations on OkCupid regarding a myriad of subjects of mutual interest.

Then, we met for coffee.

I almost fell asleep in my macchiato. We spent an hour discussing her parents’ favorite vacation spots, which were, in order,

1)    Japan

2)    Japan

3)    Santa Barbara

4)    Japan

5)    Didn’t get to 5, since I bailed on the rest of the date, but it was either Japan or Guantanamo Bay

I can’t subject myself to the pain and disappointment of human contact anymore. Come on, ‘girl’ (‘girl’ being a general term used to denote my potential online lover). Let’s ‘make it official’ on Facebook. Let’s send each other cute YouTube videos of dogs farting. I have so many E-cards for you, baby.

If this arrangement sounds worthwhile to you, please e-mail me at daveschilling@gmail.com or follow me on Twitter @dave_schilling. We can start slow. We can ‘poke’ each other, maybe follow each other on Pinterest. Nothing major. I do have a few caveats to this, though. Do not apply to be my ‘internet girlfriend’ unless you can accept the following conditions.

You Must Enjoy Listening to Me Say Things Like This:

‘I am eating a log of brie right now. I did not even know brie came in logs. When I saw it in the deli section of Ralph’s, I knew immediately I had to try it. It’s not very good. No flavor, really. I think I am going to eat the whole thing. Is that gross?‘

This is the level of discourse I am most comfortable with on Gchat. This is not to say that I will not engage in more substantive discussions with you, but seeing as the vast majority of my day is spent working, this is usually the most you will get out of me. Your response to this sort of conversation is vital. If you shame me into thinking it’s wrong to eat a whole log of brie in lieu of an actual meal, then I will slowly grow to resent you. I will see you as the Great Oppressor, (aka, my mom, the cardinal sin of any woman). You are better off saying ‘do what you want, but that seems excessive.’ The shame should be subtle, and you should strive to reinforce my need for independence. Mom, if you are reading this, I would appreciate you considering the same plan of attack.

It’s OK for You to Hate Your Body, So It Must Be OK for Me to Hate My Body:

We are not going to have sex. You don’t have to worry about your weight, height, the amount of body hair you have, how you smell, what outfit you wear, etc. Through this arrangement, I have removed one of the biggest impediments to sexual satisfaction for a human being. Do you have a cleft lip? I do not care. How about a limp? Immaterial. That is not to say that this would be a sexless situation. I will leave Skype, FaceTime, and other video chat options on the table, but it is not required. Our bond is more than just a corporeal one. Our love lives in 1′s and 0′s.

Once we begin chatting or sexting or what have you, I would expect you to not mind if I get heavy. You never have to touch me, so it shouldn’t be a problem. I will not mind if you gain a few pounds. After all, both of us will be spending even more time online chatting and leaving funny Gawker stories or music videos on each other’s ‘Timelines.’

You Can Live Wherever You Want:

Long distance relationships are fraught with complications, primarily because most couples require physical contact on a semi-regular basis. Since we would be dating online, we would never have to worry about missing each other’s physical presence. Neither of us would be required to uproot our lives and move for the other person. You wouldn’t have to pay to fly to Los Angeles to see me, nor would I have to pay to fly to Columbus, Ohio or whatever strange place you live. If you keep 17 cats in your basement that you feed Captain Crunch cereal 4 times a day at 10:30 AM, 11:15 AM, 3:45 PM and 11:27 PM, you will not have to change that lifestyle for me. I might pass your contact information on to the producers of the hit A&E reality series, ‘Hoarders,’ but they will be the ones to try to change you, not me.

I Will Be Sad if We Break-Up:

I will listen to Creed’s “What’s This Life For” so much. So much.

I Would Like to Livestream Our Wedding:

The online community will have an interest in our success as a pairing, since we will be living our lives on computers and everyone in our ‘Extended Network’ will see what we do. As such, I believe it wise to give our ‘fans’ something to ‘like.’ They will want to experience this blessed event with us.

Per our agreement, this wedding cannot take place with both of us in the same room, so we will have to simultaneously livestream from 3 locations. Location #1 will be your house, apartment, flat, bungalow or trailer. Location #2 will be a synagogue, church or mosque. Bear in mind that I am Jewish and would prefer a traditional Jewish livestream. Location #3 will be Bar 107 on 4^th Street in Downtown Los Angeles. That’s where I’ll be.

For the afterparty that you won’t be at, since we can never meet.

If you think this is a joke, you are wrong. I am serious about this. I have tried everything. Blind dates, meeting girls at parties and bars, OkCupid, eHarmony, book clubs, friends, friends of friends and the like. I have come up short in all cases. This is my last option.

Send all pertinent information to daveschilling@gmail.com or follow me/DM me @dave_schilling on Twitter. You will find that I am very responsive and sensitive, especially on the internet. I am here for you. Will you stay exactly where you are for me?

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Woody Allen had it partially right with the main characters in “Midnight in Paris.” A lot of us have that desire to live in a historically, culturally relevant place and time. I don’t wish I was alive during the Gold Rush, or the Renaissance, or the Roman Empire. I like living now, but I’m also haunted by the idea that I would be better off somewhere else. That another place would cause me to thrive and use my talents more fully. There are a dozen good reasons to be in Asia right now, some personal, some not. It’s not a “the grass is always greener” feeling, either. It’s that at a certain age you should be living your life in a certain place that’s best for you, for who you are and what you want.

Your 20s are easy to execute. Move a lot. Work different jobs. Meet as many people as you can. Gain rich, diverse experiences. Without the willingness to allow mistakes in your life you’ll live a cautious, and unfulfilled, life. Once you make your mistakes and learn from them it becomes even more difficult. All that learning about the world is supposed to help you figure out where you should go. That’s not how it worked for me. It just showed me that there were more options. Despite that, I’m not looking for my Golden Age. I don’t need to be part of any scene. Even though I’ve heard the rumors, I’m not desperately trying to move to Berlin. If I wanted to feel like I was part of something I would have stayed in Brooklyn. I like living in Korea, but it’s not that culturally relevant to the rest of the world. Maybe China is, but who can stand all that pollution? Do I even need to live somewhere culturally relevant?

This is different from the desire to move. To be in motion, to not let yourself get stuck. That’s just restlessness and an inability or lack of desire to commit to something. I had that for the decade when I didn’t live anywhere for more than a year and a half. When I crossed the big oceans several times and went where I wanted when I felt like it, left when it got boring or hard.

Regardless of how scared any of the big moves made me or the failures that they threatened worried me, I would still always say go rather than stay. But you can’t listen to everything Lou Reed says. Moving some place you’ve never been before isn’t guaranteed to fix things. You might put all your hope and salvation in the idea you have of a place and it might not be what you thought it was at all. Upon arrival, it might seem good and new, then turn bad because it was never the right move to begin with. That might not become apparent for a year or longer. The way we don’t have the foresight to know whether or not our moves are right until long after we make them is what makes it hard to leave. It can make you afraid to abandon a bad choice for another bad choice.

We fear that with all the choices out there we’re spending our lives in the wrong town, or the wrong state, the wrong climate, or country. If you’ve ever lived in the correctly suited place for you at the right time in your life then you know the feeling you’re after. You know its resonance, the feeling of being perfectly fit for your environment. The place you’re in has everything you need. The place, as Philip Larkin says, “mashed you.” Like all good things, it will eventually end, either the place changes or you do, and then you spend the ensuing days, months, years chasing that feeling.

For awhile I swore by the mantra “we’re all exactly where we’re supposed to be.” It’s a comforting idea, and if you repeat it until you believe it you can use it to quiet down your restlessness. But it only really works when you’re actually satisfied. I don’t believe it consistently. We don’t always make the best choices for ourselves.

If you can find the right place for you it can make you whole in ways that nothing else can. People like to say a place is what you make of it. That has a lot of truth to it, and the people in whatever place you’re in matter as much as anything. It’s just that no matter how much you love the openness of Nebraska it will never have an ocean. No matter how easy life is in Korea it will always be crowded. No matter how much fun New York is it will always feel indifferent.

You have to know what you want, who you are before you can choose to build a life. I’m still looking for the right place to stay for a while. I’ve had plenty of trouble, done my share of living, and I’ve seen a few things. Now I’m looking for some peace. Does anyone know where I can find it? Is it even out there?

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Last week, the thrift-hound Brooklyn blog Brokelyn released a video called “Brokelandia” that I helped write and acted in. Someone suggested the spin-off as a fun idea and before we knew it, the video had over 30,000 views (thank you!), receiving coverage in some big news outlets as well as recognition from Portlandia and IFC themselves. We were overwhelmed by the positive response, but then the negative comments started coming in, which I suppose was inevitable.

Aside from the comments about the quality of the video and the ways people enjoy spending otherwise productive time and energy putting down others for doing something, I noticed another trend: many responded, “This is why I don’t want to move to Brooklyn,” citing broadly outlined “hipster” behavior. As a Brooklyn native who was born and lived two thirds of my life here, I found this comment more disturbing than any of the negative feedback about my acting skills. Did people honestly think we encapsulated Brooklyn in under four minutes?

Portlandia seems to have gotten a similar reaction from people, as though IFC green-lit a travel show, and people are meant to get a sense of Portland, Oregon without having to actually go there. At the Portlandia Tour show at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, during a Q & A, Fred and Carrie were getting requests for sketches about other aspects of the city that they hadn’t touched on yet. “You should write about all the sex shops!” an audience member told them. It was a bizarre moment, almost a sketch in itself, to watch people throwing out sketch topics as though they were requesting a song from the DJ. Fred had to awkwardly explain that they’ll only write sketches about topics that they think they can make funny, which probably isn’t something comedy writers often feel driven to clarify.

Yet there seems to be this need to make sure that Portlandia gets the story right, that they cover all the bases. I’m sure there are people in or from Portland who watch the show and constantly say, “That’s not what Portland is like! What are they talking about?” I haven’t spent any time in Portland, but I have a strong feeling that what I would have to say to anyone expressing their hatred for Brooklyn based on “Brokelandia” is probably equally applicable to Portlandia, or any creative work that situates itself in a geographical location.

It’s not hard to understand the backlash that Brooklyn faces lately, with Williamsburg at the center of it all. We have shows like Two Broke Girls trafficking in “Brooklyn Cool,” and daily, there’s a new artisanal store, coffee shop, or toy store throwing Brooklyn in their name to get in on that sweet cash cow that comes from being seen as a “neighborhood store.” This might be something unique to Brooklyn, as I have never heard of an “Austin Cheeses” or “Boulder Meats.” It’s easy to make Brooklyn a target of stereotypes like this within media, but all it takes is a 15 minute subway ride to shatter whatever you think you know about Brooklyn. Believe it or not, there are entire areas of Brooklyn where hipster is not the prevailing fashion. There are neighborhoods where you’re more likely to get by speaking Russian than English, and much like the galaxy we live in, our commentary-filled lives and arguments about how Portland and Brooklyn are different or similar aren’t even on their radar. While Brooklyn is a perfect example of diversity that defies classification, I don’t think it stands alone in that respect.

So what is it that a show like Portlandia is trying to do when it situates itself in Portland? What was “Brokelandia” trying to do, aside from a tribute to the IFC show? Well the first goal is to make people laugh. It’s observational comedy, and yes, it observes its surroundings, but that doesn’t mean it seeks to fully represent its subject. The writers of Portlandia are commenting on trends they see in general, not just in Portland, and the sketches represent their perspective on what they are witnessing. Sketches like “Did You Read” and Brokelandia’s “Did You Eat It” aren’t about hipsters, despite what people would like you to believe. They’re about an outlook toward life — that all experiences are some sort of checklist one must tick off to reach a higher status, that it’s not important that you read, ate, or saw something unless you can brag about it, that one-upmanship in general is insufferable. It’s a universal phenomenon, and I’m sorry to say that hipsters don’t hold the trademark to it, though they may be the most famous for it. People from all walks have the innate ability to be pretentious, name-dropping assholes. Sure, you might easily see this in Brooklyn or Portland, but you can probably find it in Buffalo, NY or Yucaipa, CA.

People make art about the places they live; that’s never going to stop. And sure, they’re looking to reflect what they see, but to expect anything holistic and all-encompassing is unfair and kind of ridiculous, unless we should take Woody Allen down a peg for calling a movie exclusively about the New York intelligentsia Manhattan. Just as we never expected Boston to be full of bars like Cheers or New York apartments to look like Monica’s in Friends, it might be time to remind people that comedy is not meant to be realism, and that a show like Portlandia achieved its current success by producing comedy that transcends geography. To visit the city expecting to see anything close to the half hour you watch every Friday night is kind of missing the joke. Speaking of missing the joke — to the people out there saying, “This is why I won’t move to Brooklyn,” I’m not looking to convince them otherwise. Brooklyn’s been doing fine without them.

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