My problem with Lena Dunham’s “Girls,” and all the criticism of it

Let’s get one thing out of the way quickly: I do NOT believe that Lena Dunham’s “Girls” has an obligation to “diversity.” I am of the mind, which I’ve seen written about elsewhere, that if “Bored to Death” didn’t have that obligation, then “Girls” doesn’t have it either. What is that, anyway? That a show about Women is defined as “other,” and therefore it has to represent every population that is ever “othered”? I think it’s almost more progressive to have a show about rich white girls that doesn’t try to be universally diverse, where that’s not its raison d’être, because then we’re one step closer to women not being “other.”

However, the whole debate about diversity, and whether “Girls” is obligated to have more of it, is limited to boxes on a diversity checklist (does it have a person of color? check; gay person? check; disabled person? check), and I guess I am opposed to that checklist view of humanity, not only because it promotes tokenism, but also because it isn’t humanistic enough, holistic enough. It reminds me of people in relationships who have a Conversation about whether they’re going to be Exclusive, and if they aren’t Exclusive, it means they’re Free to date and sleep with other people. What about the emotional tenor of your relationship? What about the implicit promises you’ve made to the other person by confiding in them, by acting as if you care about being with them? I’ve always been wary of people who treat other people like a checklist, who need a contract to have a relationship.

But if “Girls” wanted to acknowledge the diversity of the human experience in a more holistic way, it might do so in a less lazy approach to the main character’s central problem. Hannah, the protagonist, suddenly gets “cut off” by her mom and dad, who have been entirely supporting her for the two years since college, during which time she’s had an unpaid internship at a publishing company and started writing a memoir. And as much as I bristle at people who get to do unpaid internships in glamorous industries rather than get the first job they can find the minute they graduate from college because they need the money, I understand that some people are like that, and if Lena Dunham wants to represent those people, that’s her prerogative.

But then Hannah is all, “What am I gonna do, work at McDonalds?” and that’s when my heart sinks. Because “working at McDonald’s” is such a lazy cliché of a worst-case employment/career/future scenario. It’s such a lazy cliché that if you DID end up working at McDonalds, you could mitigate the horror of it by being self-consciously twee about it, like, Look At Me, I’ve Really Hit Bottom Now. The symbolism of it would be heavy enough to carry you. And being carried by symbolism is actually a comfortably familiar way to live for someone like Hannah.

I would like to see Hannah get a job as a customer service representative at a car insurance company, or something like that. She should get the job by looking at a bunch of want ads and responding to all of them and taking the first job offered. And she should NOT be comically bad at the job, but rather perfectly competent at it even if she hates it, because then she wouldn’t even be able to fall back on the image of herself as a flaky fuck-up.

And then she would meet people at her job who were totally unfamiliar with the type of lifestyle she used to lead. People who had gone to college, yes, but maybe they went to CUNY while living with their parents in Queens and working at the same time, rather than a four-year stint on an idyllic quad where people had dorm-wide meetings about cultural hegemony. People whose favorite band was Maroon 5 and had no idea anyone thought there was anything wrong with that. People who don’t understand those little boots Hannah wears. People who don’t even USE the word “hipster.” People who don’t watch “Girls” but do watch “American Idol.” People who would peg Hannah as “artsy” and use the word “funky” to describe her outfits and then get it all wrong when buying her a birthday present, maybe they’d buy her some goth thing made of crushed velvet because that’s what they associate with the idea of “alternative.” Women who think French manicures are beautiful and have never met anyone who didn’t agree.

Because that’s the population that you work with when you just have a job because you have to support yourself. In real life, it isn’t a question of publishing internship or McDonald’s. It isn’t about symbolism of despair. It’s the way the rest of the world works, and diversity would be a natural by-product of that scenario. You’d definitely get racial minorities there in addition to middle-class (as opposed to upper-middle-class) white people, maybe not so many out gay people because homophobia runs super rampant in environments like that, but that idea too might be eye-opening for Hannah. That Republicans aren’t just freaks you see on the news, they’re also the people in the next cubicle at your unglamorous job that is too mundane to even offer the comfort of being a symbol.

“But wouldn’t that be boring? It’s a TV show; it has to be fun,” some might say. No, it wouldn’t be boring. Hannah’s JOB would be boring, yes, but I’m not saying we should watch her do data entry for eight hours. Her being in that environment would be anything but boring. Especially if she still held onto dreams of “being a writer” and led her former lifestyle in the off hours. I mean, you could still live in Greenpoint with a roommate on a customer-service salary. What kind of conversations would she have with that horrible guy she has sex with, about her job? Would he encourage her to switch to woodworking because it’s more “honest”? What if she went and had sex with some Republican guy from work who had a thick New York accent and unironically showed off his giant flat-screen TV to her but was better in bed than that guy? (Which wouldn't be difficult.) What would be more offensive, hearing his opinions about illegal immigrants or having the woodworking guy say “let’s play the quiet game”?

That’s just one example of what could happen. What I’m trying to say is, if you let her work at McDonald’s for comic effect, you’re playing it too safe. If you let her be a “day hostess” at a fancy restaurant where her only coworker is a hipster, as Lena Dunham’s character did in her movie “Tiny Furniture,” you’re still playing it too safe. You’re indulging the upper-middle-class mindset about what the possibilities are for how a person can survive and build their adult life. Which is a much bigger implicit insult to the viewers than anything the critics are saying about checklist diversity.

why 1996 REALLY IS the sweet spot of women-fronted rock music and not just because I'm a compulsive maniac

One of my less compelling qualities is that I'm obsessed with 1996. This is partly because some of the biggest and most positive changes in my entire 37 years on earth happened during that year. If you don't already know about these changes, I'm not going to tell you about them here, because this blog is a public place, but when we get home, or maybe in the car, I'll fill you in.

But really I think the utter bestness of 1996 transcends my navel-gazing. This was proven when I read the first few chapters of Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music by Marisa Meltzer.

She starts by going into the history of Riot Grrrl, followed by what was known as "foxcore," which meant Hole, L7, etc., followed by Alanis and Fiona and a bunch of angsty one-hit wonders like Heather Nova, Tracy Bonham, Patti Rothberg, Leah Andreone, and Poe. Also Garbage, with the album that had "Stupid Girl" on it and the song from Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (amazing soundtrack overall). Then after that, of course, we had the Spice Girls and the Lilith Fair ('97), and Meredith Brooks and Natalie Imbruglia ('98), which was when things really started to go south, and then Britney ('99). The way she narrates this trajectory shows that it reaches a high point in '96.

I was in college during Riot Grrrl, and my feelings (not my opinions, but my feelings) about Riot Grrrl were always that I liked it, I liked the music and the message, and I'm indebted to it for everything I love that came after, but it is not and has never been my most favorite thing. It didn't speak to me the way that, say, Fiona Apple's first album or Tracy Bonham's hit ("Mother Mother") spoke to me. The book presents the main difference between Fiona, etc. and her predecessors as that Fiona, etc. were pretty and nonthreatening and marketable, but that's never been the way I see it. I might even go as far as to say that Fiona, etc. were MORE THREATENING than their predecessors because they presented seeming paradoxes that threatened people's ability to put people in cliched boxes and their honesty made them vulnerable in potentially dangerous ways. And the fact that this was "marketable" was a miracle that only lasted for eight crazy nights, or thereabouts. (This is not to say that the book isn't fantastic, because it is, and just the very idea of having a retrospective of how 90s female rock artists influenced the future of music is something I have needed in my life for Quite Some Time, and the chance to mentally engage with these topics thrills me.)

You had to have riot grrrl first, obviously, but what always blocked me from feeling fully connected with it was that it was lacking in personal vulnerability. Riot Grrrl was angry and rebellious and we're-not-gonna-take-it-anymore and defiant and nigh-invulnerable. And me, I was vulnerable. I was angry, but also sweet. And my sweetness was not borne of chauvinistic ideas about how women should be quiet and deferential. I was raised (a) by feminists and (b) in New York, so I never internalized any ideas that women should be anything except pushy and loud, which sucked because I wasn't really pushy and loud, especially not in childhood. I was sweet, by my very nature, and sensitive, but also angry. Can't fight the seether.

So it was kind of frustrating to me that, until the mid-90s (as opposed to the early 90s) Chick Rock basically went two ways: (1) angry, pushy, invulnerable; (2) sweet, sentimental, saccharine. The first glimmers of a shift came with Liz Phair's "Exile in Guyville" (1993) and Hole's "Live Through This" (I've always related more to this album than to its predecessor, "Pretty on the Inside"), in which the artists did not shy away from all their own personal failings and fears and weaknesses and disappointments, and not just the ways they had been unfairly oppressed by other people. They took on the rather dicier proposition of taking a hard look at themselves rather than blaming others, but not in a maudlin "woe is me" way, in a complex, upfront, and somehow tough admission of their own fallibility.

Then Alanis Morissette's "You Oughta Know" came along in the summer of '95 and further changed the game (unfortunately, the rest of that album didn't live up to the promise of that song). Jill Sobule's hit "I Kissed a Girl" led me to get the whole album, which is WAY more brilliant than that song would imply, and made a lifelong Jill Sobule fan out of me (she's had plenty of other albums since then that are all excellent, and fuck you Katy Perry). One of the best songs on that Jill album was "Karen by Night," in which the narrator follows home her beautiful, cold, mysterious, icily friendly boss at work and finds that she moonlights as a badass motorcycle-riding drug dealer (or something). Suddenly, you didn't have to be the badass biker girl. You could be the somewhat less badass girl who wonders about the badass biker girl, and that could be interesting too. To use a 90s analogy, you didn't have to be Rayanne, you could be Angela.

And then in '96 there was a full-on explosion of these vulnerable chicks. Who wanted to go out into the world and have adventures and prevail, but most often what held them back was their own self-destructive tendencies and horrible secrets and doubts and unstoppable drive to do potentially harmful things that had some twisted logic behind them. And certainly it took into account the entrenched cultural oppression of women that led them to be in these situations in the first place, but it was always taken on from an introspective standpoint that had been missing before. It was an inner psychological battleground, as opposed to an outward, political battleground, and personally, my battles have usually been fought in the former place and not the latter. I'm hungry, I'm dirty, I'm losing my mind, everything's fine ("Mother Mother").

Now Bitch Magazine is saying the same thing about Tori Amos, who's pretty much a grande dame of this phenomenon, and whose best album, "Boys for Pele," came out in '96.

In 1997 the sweet spot started to devolve in two different directions: One, into the sugary pop of the Spice Girls (which, yes, I enjoyed, but not as much) and two, into the treacly ululations of Lilith Fair–style pop feminism (when Sarah McLachlan started to suck). After that you had your fake angry-sad girls, Meredith Brooks ("Bitch") and Natalie Imbruglia ("Torn"), and I've grown to enjoy those songs in more recent years in a kind of mindless nostalgic way but when they came out I felt stabbed in the gut by them. There was something really disingenuous and manipulative about the so-called pain or complexity expressed in those songs that was like taking real feelings and pretending to have them because now it was trendy and sexy in a Suicide Girls way. "Bitch" had a surface rebelliousness but was really about being the kind of slippery chameleon-girl who is anything but honest; "Torn" came across as a way of cloaking the one-dimensionally sexy line "lying naked on the floor" in faux angst.

(I also gotta say that in '96 I enjoyed Natalie Merchant's hit "Wonder" and considered it part of the same canon, but that was because I thought the lyrics were "with love, with patience, and with pain, she'll make her way." But later I found out that it wasn't "with pain;" it was "with faith," and ugh. The Lilith let me down.)

That same year, '98, Alanis let me down, with her new album about wondering whether she's pretty enough. The '96 girls' central worry was never about being pretty enough; it was other, darker things. And Courtney let me down too with "Celebrity Skin," another song I like now but at the time I felt lied to, as if Courtney was trying to make people think that these were her real problems when they were just what People Magazine was writing about her. And Woody Allen let me down too, while we're at it, with that movie "Celebrity." And then Britney happened and it all went to hell. It was no longer trendy and sexy even to pretend to have problems. Problems didn't exist.

But for that one brief fleeting moment, the culture was at that sweet spot, and it wasn't just me, it was 1996.

"lovemaking on the go"

This girl is complaining in the New York Times about how gross it is that she has to constantly watch people making out in public in New York City. More than anything, I'm surprised.

I'm surprised because I personally have noticed a great decline in the amount of PDA I see. Before about 2001, yeah, it was all over the place. But nowadays when I see a couple making out in public, it makes me feel sort of nostalgic for when you used to see it all the time, and sort of proud of the couple in question for their bravery.

I think what's happened is that it's no longer trendy to make out in public. This prudish piece in the Times reads like a throwback to 1994, when the culture at large thought PDA was sexy and edgy and "uninhibited." There's a paragraph in the essay about how, when she glares at the makers-out, they smirk at her, all "Jealous?" I feel like the last time anyone was jealous of someone who made out in public was 10 years ago. Nowadays they strike me as more "not caring what anyone thinks" in an actual, genuine way, not in a "Look at me! I Don't Care What People Think! I'm a Rebel!" way.

When onlookers can see your tongue going into another person's mouth, when you're all heated and flushed and passionate, you've pretty much lost any claim to insouciant sangfroid that you might have had. You might as well be the "lovahs" on Saturday Night Live, that embarrassing aging academic hippie couple played by Rachel Dratch and Will Ferrell who assault unsuspecting acquaintances with icky TMI about their sex life. Perhaps this has to do with another annoying '00s trope: The policing of PDA based on how conventionally good-looking you are, and the problem with "the lovahs" is that they're not. (Note that the Times piece is also devoid of references to that; the writer is skeeved out by your smooching whether you're a supermodel or a schlub.) I might not be able to go as far as saying that love is out of style, but "passion" sure is. To grope your partner with wild abandon while the two of you are on the subway is an act of terrible self-exposing earnestness, and earnestness invites ridicule, not jealousy.

I haven't been single since 1997, but it's also my understanding that in this day and age, it's no longer a marker of high social status merely to have someone to make out with, so people aren't that eager to shove that status in strangers' faces. Isn't it all hookups and threesomes and "friends with benefits" now? If you're making out with a new person for the first time, that I can see, but established couples are much more modest than they used to be, and I think modesty conveys status now in a way it didn't in the past: You aren't cool enough to witness us groping each other; it's by invitation only.

For the record: I don't really consider bars and clubs "public places," so much. I mean, they are public places, but they're specially designated for, you know, carousing. So if you're not there for an unhinged, probably sexualized atmosphere, I don't know why you're there. And since being drunk lowers your emotional connection to whatever you happen to be doing, drunk people making out don't seem as achingly earnest as sober people making out, so they're not risking as much by doing it in public. Same goes for drunk people making out on the subway at night. That's the only subway PDA I ever see anymore. The bar/club atmosphere makes PDA seem much less noteworthy and more just part of the overall scenery.

But what about the disgustingly cutesy-poo brunching couples? you may ask. Surely they're an argument that it's still a status symbol to be part of a couple. And yes, it is, but what's different is there's no PDA. Maybe some hand-holding or the stroking of hair while waiting for a table to be properly festooned with gingham napkins, but nothing that's in-your-face sexual. It's more about being good-looking, about how each member of the couple is sort of a fashion accessory to the other, in a very controlled and self-possessed manner. Which is the antithesis of abandon.

a modest proposal

Can we please just de-stigmatize the word "hipster"? It's so pointless how it has to be an insult. I hate it that there's no other word to describe (in a neutral fashion) any of the zillions of decent, non-offensive people who nonetheless are culturally oriented that way. You know: who like things that are "indie" and "organic," who are oriented toward "design" and living/hanging out in thoooose parts of Brooklyn and doing yoga, who go to rock shows and art shows, who are versed in "Target yay, Wal-Mart nay" and ideas about what it means to be "ironic." I am one of those people, and if you're reading this, you probably are too. And there needs to be a name for it that isn't a pejorative.

It's just annoying how you can't go, "I hated working on Wall Street because I was the only hipster," or "Let's have brunch in Park Slope; there are lots of good hipster places." I'm fond of talking about the period of my life "before I was a hipster," i.e. when my favorite foods were full of high fructose corn syrup and I went to every Meg Ryan romantic comedy and my idea of alternative music was stuff like No Doubt and the Smashing Pumpkins. But referring to yourself as a hipster is tantamount to writing a novel and calling it "chick lit." I say, it doesn't have to be.

There are hipsters and there are non-hipsters. Like the people who ask me what kind of music I like and when I utter the word "indie" they don't know what it means and think it has to do with India or Indianapolis. I would even go so far as to say that if you ever use the word "hipster," you are a hipster.

Shut up. It isn't a bad thing. People who aren't hipsters don't think about or talk about hipsters, and most of them wouldn't even know a hipster if they came mustache-to-ironic-mustache with one. They can't tell the difference between those mustaches and the ones sported by insurance salesmen.

Gawker is having people vote on a new word to replace "hipster." I think they're mainly doing it because the word is overused, and not because of the complaint I'm raising, but I'll take it. I voted for "doucheoisie," and was pleased to see it was the most popular choice (although now they're having a runoff vote and the rather less ideal "fauxhemians" is in the lead). I like "doucheoisie" because it does not have to be explained. Anyone familiar with the lore of "hipster" and the notion that it's an insult will get it. I also like it because it's so obviously negative. So now anyone who uses "hipster" to mean "pretentious, superficial snob" can use "doucheoisie" to mean that instead, and the rest of us innocent, unpretentious hipsters can have our word back and use it in totally unloaded ways that simply describe the cultural milieu that we gravitate to. That cultural milieu is a real thing, and it needs a name. "Bohemian" sounds like it's from another era. ("Fauxhemian" sounds like someone who's trying and failing to be a hippie.) Ditto "counterculture." "Artsy" sounds self-aggrandizing and self-denigrating at the same time. "Alternative" and "underground" make it sound like a fringe movement, or something that's defined by its opposition to the mainstream, which it isn't quite.

Also witness the battle between Salon and Slate over the article on Salon about "hipsters on food stamps," in which young, artistically-inclined, unemployed or underemployed urbanites whose tastes in food hew more to the organic chicken side of things than the Little Debbie Snack Cakes side have found they're poor enough for food stamps and are using them in ways socially incongruous with the stereotypes of food stamps. There was a "puh-leaze" overtone to the piece, a chiding oh you're just so precious, with all your highfalutin food "tastes" even when you're broke and an implication that these people must not really be broke enough to need food stamps, despite being officially eligible for them.

Slate (rightly) objected, pointing out that just because someone is steeped in the trappings of cultural privilege doesn't mean they're also financially privileged. And isn't that, at its root, what the insult-ization of "hipster" is really about? The idea that anyone with cultural privilege is obnoxious for having it? (Despite that people who use the insult also have the privilege and thus can recognize it when they see it?) I know we're all fond of talking in the shorthand of "trust fund," but you don't have to be remotely that rich to end up, as an adult, culturally oriented that way. And if your parents don't have enough money to support you, and you want to pursue a career in the arts or publishing, then yeah, especially now, you're going to be poor. It sucks. Should you instead pursue a career in some less precious, more lucrative sector, like, say, insurance sales? See if your colleagues there know the word "indie."

Do you know a better word for the concept? I'd like to hear it.

artificial flavors

I went to Starbucks on the way home from work the other night and got a piece of coffee cake as a snack. But I felt like it didn't taste that good. I had a feeling that a homemade piece of cake would taste better, and that the Starbucks version was a consolation prize because I didn't have time to bake one at home.

But I'm not sure these feelings are authentic. I'm not sure whether the cake really tasted bad or I just thought it did because I have new ideas about Starbucks that suggest their food tastes bad. I used to have pretty much the opposite ideas about Starbucks, and during that time I always thought their baked goods tasted great.

To put this in context, let's look back at the evolution of Starbucks. The first time I ever went to Starbucks was in the summer of '94, in Mount Kisco, NY. At that time the Mount Kisco Starbucks was one of the only Starbuckses in all of Westchester County. Maybe THE only one. I was 21 years old and not really a coffee drinker. I got a Mochaccino because I didn't really know anything about coffee and thought a drink that combined chocolate and coffee was probably good. It was the summer, so most likely it was an iced mocha. The idea of "coffeehouses" still had to do with Seattle and open mike poetry readings. I had never been to Seattle or to an open mike, and not being a coffee drinker, the entire idea seemed mostly abstract and exotic, a symbol of something cool and progressive like Nirvana and Juliana Hatfield.

In 1996-97 I had graduated from college and was working in New York City. By this time there were a lot of Starbuckses, both in the city and in Westchester, and I was a coffee drinker, having become one at my first office job because drinking the free coffee in the office kitchen was one way to avoid working. I "graduated" from mochaccinos to hazelnut lattes and then regular lattes.
There started to be a lot of other, Starbucks-esque coffee places around the city, like Timothy's World Coffee (does that still exist?). The whole idea of a "coffee shop" now evoked these Starbuckses and imitators, while in the past it meant more of a diner. Starbucks was considered an "upscale" establishment, a place where wealthy, rarefied, highly educated people went instead of, I guess, Dunkin' Donuts or a diner.

From 1998-2000 I really, really enjoyed going to Starbucks. I liked their drinks and food, yes, but I also just liked being there. It made me feel more like the kind of girl who was always perfectly groomed, whose possessions were always shiny and new, who sailed down the street in her immaculately clean car with the windows open on a bright sunny day. It made me feel like my edges were all smoothed out. It made me feel like I was less weird and less misfortune-prone. I was just a beautiful, breezy suburban girl relaxing amid the green, brown and orange modern decor of Starbucks, with that ubiquitous emblem of privilege, the green and black Starbucks logo with the mermaid, stamped on the cup I carried down the street on my way out, as I sashayed down the street in my Banana Republic brushed cotton twill capri pants. In 2000 the Christopher Guest comedy "Best in Show" came out, in which a yuppie couple say they met at Starbucks, "but not the same Starbucks." She was in one Starbucks, and spotted him in the one across the street: Yuppie love. Basically that was it: Going to Starbucks made me feel like a yuppie.

Then sometime in the last decade it went downhill. The idea of two Starbuckses across the street from each other ceased to be a joke. Starbucks was everywhere. There was absolutely nothing rarefied about it anymore, even in that suburban yuppie way. It was just THERE, a banal fact of life. You went to Starbucks because you wanted coffee and it was there. It became hard to find a place to get coffee that wasn't Starbucks. If you felt like getting a snack, Starbucks was the default place to get it, not because their snacks were the best but because they were good enough and available. And of course if you were in Barnes & Noble, if you ate anything in the cafe there it was Starbucks.

And the backlash happened. First it was, Dunkin' Donuts coffee is better because it's cheaper and not as corporate-obnoxious. Then it was, Dunkin' Donuts coffee is better because it's cold-pressed. And that's when everything started to change.

I was still as aware as I ever was of popular ideas of what made someone elite and sophisticated. As advertising-driven as those ideas might be, I think it's bullshit to dismiss them just because of that, even though I know it's part of appearing elite and sophisticated to act as though you are impervious to advertising. And maybe in 1999 Starbucks was associated with status, but now we've reached a saturation point with the Locavore thing, to the point where those ideas are the ones that inform my social feelings about stuff like Starbucks.

The Locavore thing dictates that homemade food is more luxurious than store-bought food. Anything with additives, anything "processed," is the domain of the uneducated masses, the underclass, and if you want to maintain your elevated status, you have to avoid all that stuff. Even the supermarket is considered a bit of a déclassé place to shop, now that everyone's read the Omnivore's Dilemma and knows that chemically altered corn and disgustingly maltreated cows are the source of almost everything in the ordinary supermarket. You have to be like Jack in "Into the Woods," whose best friend was a cow, and if you eat a cow or any of its milk, it should be a cow who was your best friend, as sad as that might be. Prepared foods from chain establishments, especially if it's a huge corporate chain like Starbucks, are assumed to be full of contemptible material. As "bad for you" as these chemicals might be, the underlying message that, to me, gets communicated most loudly is the message that if you want to fit into an elite social category, you cannot pollute your persona with the additives found in a piece of Starbucks coffee cake. If you must eat baked goods, you should bake them yourself, without using white flour or sugar. And this is chiefly for social reasons, not for physical/health/moral reasons. You have to have that moral code mainly because it's required for membership in the group you want to belong to, and you obey those rules because it makes you feel good to feel as if you're part of that group. Just like it made me feel good in 1999 to buy something at Starbucks, to take my money out of my cute little wallet and overpay for coffee. The overpaying felt good, like a smaller-scale version of jumping on the bed in a Vegas hotel and throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars in gambling winnings in the air.

Also, there's been a gradual social trend away from viewing "upscale" corporate chains as at all elite. A book, Trading Up, came out a couple years ago, not too long before the real estate industry imploded, about how "luxury" versions of mass-produced things are now the standard to which the masses aspire. That is, it's no longer good enough for the average Middle American person to go out to dinner at Applebee's; now they have to go to the Cheesecake Factory, with its "international" menu and closer adherence to the idea of decor. With this shift, of course, came the need to have a McMansion and an SUV, not just a regular car and a regular house. Those people, the ones who love the Cheesecake Factory and SUVs, are the most disdained kind of "masses": the masses who think they are elite. Therefore, the elite had to do something else to distinguish themselves. This still remains true even now that all the people who bought McMansions and couldn't afford them are out on their asses. Maybe another backlash is in the works but it hasn't happened yet. The word on the street is, it's now passé to view money as the ultimate luxury. More luxurious still are the commodities of time and inconvenience.

So the other night when I ate my Starbucks coffee cake, it tasted sort of chemical to me. I had had this same coffee cake countless times, and it never tasted chemical before. I have been gradually altering my diet to include more wholesome, less processed food, so maybe my tastes have legitimately changed, but I don't completely buy it. I suspect that I've tricked myself into believing that the Starbucks coffee cake tastes chemical because I'll be socially rewarded if I think so. It's been tainted with the whiff of social undesirability, and that might account for that metallic, artificial flavor it seems to have.

And I resent it. In one way, it's my own fault, for "Caring What People Think," which is something that no one with High Self-Esteem (TM) is ever supposed to admit they do. You are supposed to hold fast to your claim that you're avoiding processed foods because it's Better For You, because you care about the health of your body and it doesn't have anything to do with what other people are doing, ohhh no. But in another way, I don't believe the people who claim it has nothing to do with social forces, and I think the social forces affect everyone in a way that's taboo to admit. It's annoying that it's taboo to admit it, and it's annoying that it's happening at all. I don't want the way foods taste to be governed by ideas about which opinions about food I have to have in order to belong to a certain social class.

But weirdly, I wasn't annoyed by it during the years that I loved Starbucks. I didn't complain about "pressure" to like Starbucks. The idea that there was ever pressure to like it seems laughable. It never seemed to come from a place of pressure. It seemed like more of a guilty pleasure than anything else, a way to flaunt your privilege and elitism without admitting you were doing it. But isn't that also what the anti-chain-snobbery is? Isn't sniffing, "Ew, Starbucks is so gross and chemical, that stuff is so bad for you" just code for "I'm better than the people who buy food at Starbucks"? It is, it's exactly the same. So I think I'm annoyed by this because it forbids, rather than promotes, something. When I loved Starbucks, the thing to do was eat it; now, the thing to do is not eat it. And I always prefer a directive TO do something than a directive to abstain from it. Because it's not as though I ever felt I had to go to Starbucks a certain number of times per week to meet a quota. It was more of a bonus, a little extra sparkle. Now not only do we not get to have extra sparkle, but the thing that used to provide the sparkle now provides a demerit. Something good was replaced by something bad.

But now what's good is to buy grass-fed meat at the Farmer's Market and use it to make a flavorful stew in your crock-pot. And I do this. And I greatly relish doing it, and it feels good in some of the same ways as going to Starbucks used to feel. And in other ways. It feels nourishing and comforting and homey. But the parallel is that overall sense of "Life is good." In 1999 you watch yourself prancing out of Starbucks with that cup with the green straw in your hand, and put on your sunglasses and flip your hair and feel, Life is good. And today you inhale the herbs and spices of your lamb stew with lentils and whole grains, you are aware of the cuddliness as you cuddle up in front of the fire with a handknit blanket around your shoulders, a one-of-a-kind handknit blanket that makes you feel special because it's one-of-a-kind, and you feel, Life is good. And you get these ideas of what a good life is from social images and advertising and all that stuff that's not supposed to affect you.

And I just wonder, is it possible to have ideas about what a Good Life is without watching myself, without these social barometers? Is it ever possible for me not to see them, to choose a path without awareness of what group it makes me fit into, to defy those rules without being aware that I'm defying them? That seems like the best life of all, and also the most elusive.

all anthropologie apologies: what else should I be?

I've been alerted to a TV show called "Man Shops Globe" about the guy whose job it is to travel the world in search of wares to duplicate and sell at Anthropologie. Racked, Jezebel, Salon, the Washington Post, the New York Observer, and Effortless Anthropologie have all written amusingly about it, and about the kind of person who admires Anthro stuff (wants to be Zooey Deschanel; would name her baby Emma).

I didn't know, before this, what machinations led to the production of the stuff at Anthropologie. I knew they weren't the literal items found at flea markets in the French countryside, but it also seemed unlikely that some designer in New York was just sitting there dreaming up this stuff, whole cloth, based on an inner understanding of what antiques from Provence, or whatever, look like. So it makes sense that how it happens is, this guy finds an actual ceramic ear of corn in China, he brings it back to HQ, and developers develop ersatz versions of it to sell in the stores for high prices.

So the main difference between you and this guy is he gets paid to travel the globe and look for this stuff, but you would have to take time off from work AND pay to go on the same kind of trip, which isn't really feasible for you, so therefore you would maybe deign to buy something at Anthropologie. This is true even though the dude claims you can get a ceramic ear of corn for $1 in China, and you would probably pay $40 for it at Anthropologie, so in that way, if you bought enough stuff, the trip might save you money. Ultimately, Anthro is the closest you can conveniently get to the real thing.

It's widely looked down upon to buy mass-produced copies of one-of-a-kind, "authentic" items, as illustrated in the episode of Friends (which itself is undeservingly looked down upon, just by virtue of being a sitcom with a laugh track) where Rachel buys a coffee table from Pottery Barn and pretends it's from a flea market because Phoebe would be horrified if she knew it was from Pottery Barn. And yet, it isn't considered quite as gauche to have faux-authentic things decorating your living room as it is to have things from a chain store that don't even attempt to look like they're from a flea market (for example, the perfectly serviceable Room Essentials 6-Drawer Dresser from Target). One would think that if actual authenticity were the goal, and your authentic life didn't give you enough free time to tour international bazaars, then the not-even-trying, mass-produced stuff would be like the pinnacle of awesome, but sadly, it just communicates that you don't have as good "taste" as someone who would recognize a good copy of an authentic coffee table when she saw one. (You will always be safe with Ikea, however, because although it's both cheap and mass-produced, Ikea stuff has a contemporary-design look that keeps it in the realm of "taste.")

Two cultural tropes associated with elite liberalism always dominate this discussion of authenticity. One, that those who seek "authenticity" seek it because they want to imagine themselves connected to the calloused, leathery hands of "indigenous peoples" who wrought (not just "made," but "wrought") the original stuff, because then they can feel worldly and also philanthropically supportive of these "peoples," who are defined by how underprivileged they are. Two, that buying stuff (especially at a store, but also just in general) is stupid and meaningless, and only those neanderthals who have been duped by the corporate ad industry think that there's any meaning in the act of buying anything, implying that a well-educated, urbane sort of person would never decorate their living room with anything that can be bought in a store, whether hand-wrought by indigenous peoples or factory-made. You can maybe make things yourself, but if you're not a talented artist, displaying those things in your living room might not meet the demands of taste. (see also: Regretsy.) Utilitarian stuff, such as a wine rack, is exempt from this ban. As are gifts bestowed upon you directly by indigenous peoples after you stayed for a week in their village, if you have the luxury of taking such vacations.

(This is linked to using the word "find" as a noun. "It was a real find" implies that you just found it on the side of the street, and isn't your life marked by an enviable sense of childlike whimsy and wonder unmarred by the daily slog of adult life, indeed like Pippi Longstocking when she declared herself a "Thing-Finder." It implies more serendipity and experience-orientedness (rather than commerce-orientedness) than even a flea market. But whether you find a "find" at a mall store, or a one-of-a-kind-handicrafts store, or a flea market, or an antiques shop, or eBay, or on your travels to distant lands, you didn't just find it, you shopped for it. There is just no way around the fact that you shopped. Sorry.)

But let's leave aside, for a moment, that people are aiming to look like they're (a) worldly philanthropists and (b) somehow above buying things in stores, and let's focus on the psychology of why we love things that have the qualities Keith Johnson, the Man Shops Globe guy, is looking for in his travels. After all, he doesn't come home with just any item from the Avignon Fair; it has to be the right item. From Salon: "Johnson wants 'things that let people know more about this very
extraordinary country' and 'things that have real resonance' but not
things that are in every craft market or import store in New York City,
but 'just the right thing has been eluding us.'"

So what provides that resonance?

I've been rereading Little Stalker by Jennifer Belle, a great novel about a 33-year-old New York City woman obsessed with a 60something neurotic Jewish NYC film auteur named (heh) Arthur Weeman, who comes out with a new film every year that she ritualistically goes to see at the Ziegfeld the day it opens. Rebekah, the woman, has no furniture in her apartment, because she hasn't found any furniture she likes. But then she gets wind of an Arthur Weeman prop and costume sale, filled with furniture that was used in all his movies! She hires a van to take her to the sale and spends $22,000 there to furnish her apartment with things like a gondola. She rationalizes, "You would pay that much for a few ugly things at a horrible store like Crate & Barrel."

Rebekah's shrink tells her she's "obsessed with symbolism," that she needs everything, including furniture, to symbolize something: "You want the couch to represent something else. Sometimes it's okay for a couch to just be a couch." The stuff from Arthur Weeman's movies is perfect, then, because they reference the movies and symbolize her obsession and decades-long identification with them. The furniture is about her life story. She's also obsessed with the idea of a life story, or "timeline," like the timeline she made when she was a kid, for a school project, of the important events in Paul Revere's life. "What's his timeline?" she asks another woman who tries to set her up with a guy. When the woman responds, "You mean his schedule?" Rebekah quips that she and the woman have nothing in common.

This made me feel like I had everything in common with Rebekah. How many times have I expressed some abstract, meaning-laden concept to a person who interpreted it as something flat and banal because they just didn't have the depth or whatever to get what I was talking about? I think Rebekah is an N, like me. N for iNtuitive, as defined by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality test, as opposed to S ("Sensing"). S people are concerned with the facts, the schedule, what is said; N people are concerned with what is meant. If something doesn't mean anything, an N considers it worthless. The kind of resonance that N people are looking for in a home decor item is some sort of personal meaning, that it's tied to something from your life story. If it's just some square-shaped plain old thing from Target or even Crate & Barrel that anyone could have, it's too random, too impersonal. So when something seems special, beautiful in just the exact way you like, poignant (or at least evocative of something else that's poignant), it has that resonance.

The first time I went into an Anthropologie store, in 1998, I didn't know it was owned by Urban Outfitters or that the company donated money to anti-choice politicians or anything. I knew it was a corporate store, because it was in the Third Street Promenade mall-thingy in Santa Monica, CA, but the feeling I got from it was that everything was so beautiful. Just so rich in details and sweetness and poignancy. It spoke to me. I bought a skirt. Actually I became obsessed with the skirt that day and waited till I got home to New York to buy it at one of the Anthropologies there. I still have the skirt, 11 years later, and I still think it is beautiful.

What the beautifulness (as opposed to beauty) of Anthropologie says to me is, YOUR life is better than all the fast-fashion-eating-disorder-cube-farm drabness of the everyday. Life can be fanciful! Like a movie! Like Amelie! And as insufferable as it is to listen to people rhapsodize about that feeling, actually feeling the feeling feels great. Twee aesthetics make me feel happier about my circumstances. As if actual life were more about the things that make your heart go pitter-patter than the mundane limitations that your circumstances place on you. And I'm also shameless enough to buy something from Anthropologie instead of the original antique or indigenous artifact that it is a replica of, just because it's beautiful in the same way. The fact that it's a fake, mass-produced copy just doesn't trump the beautifulness factor. Objects from that store make me feel like I have a timeline and everyone else just has a schedule.

However, it's not just that I'm a romantic, sensitive, poetic, semiotics-crazed, insufferable solipsist. There's still an element of class-conscious one-upmanship going on here. Because not only does the Anthro fantasy make you feel elevated above mundane concerns, it also tries to make you feel elevated above OTHER PEOPLE who are mired in those concerns. They all have to wear suits to work and I can wear a big fluffy skirt festooned with pinwheels! They are ordinary, while I am special! Those who decorate their homes in the manner of Anthropologie, then, could be cultivating the mythology of being special rather than ordinary, having an interesting life. If these people were merely interested in owning things that were nice and appearing rich, they wouldn't go the Anthro route, they'd be more attracted to "luxury" items from purveyors even more expensive and snooty than Anthro. If you go to any wealthy suburb of New York City, you'll find that most of the houses are decorated more in this "luxury" way than in a way that tries to convey brilliant, frothy whimsy, and the owners seem to be cultivating a mythology of wealth rather than of specialness. And wealth is intertwined with specialness (Anthro costs more than Target; a life of serendipity and beauty implies not being overworked and poorly paid at an unglamorous job, unless it's a type of unglamorousness that can be glamorized, like bartending; the matter of "taste" is wholly bound up in class/education), but each of these two mythologies is a separate subculture.

So I guess the answer that Keith Johnson is looking for, in my opinion, to the question of which things are the right things that provide the right resonance, is: Things that suggest the owner's life is an aesthetically gorgeous, lush one replete with breathtaking interestingness. And that the owner has to have a certain type of elite education, a sensibility, that has to do with foreign travel ("worldliness"), in order to recognize the wonderfulness of the objects—they're not some Ugly American who thinks the height of sophistication is a pastel metallic patchwork Coach handbag with little C's all over it.

Still, any act of buying something at Anthropologie involves shopping in an engineered, corporate store—a mundane, unsophisticated, unwhimsical act, to be sure. Wouldn't it be better just to focus on living the most aesthetically exciting, serendipitous life of mind-opening cultural experiences that you can? Is it a problem that I feel like that experience would be incomplete if I weren't wearing the right outfit for it?

the Facebook disconnect

A couple of years ago, I participated in the Cringe Reading Series, an event where you get up and read your diary from when you were 14 years old to a bar full of strangers. It was great fun and I have happy memories of it; the only reason I stopped doing it was that I ran out of material. I have a handful of screamingly funny diary entries from my adolescence and hundreds more that are just depressing, and not in the "so bad it's good" way either. When I first read about the event, I had an unstoppable desire to participate in it, and the interviews I did with Paste Magazine, NBC News, and the LA Times were also fun.

But I didn't mention anyone's first and last names when I read my diary out loud. Two of the three entries I shared, in my three appearances on the Cringe stage, concerned a boy I'd been romantically obsessed with who had a very uncommon first name, and I didn't say his name aloud when it was mentioned in those entries—I shortened it to just his first initial. The last time I talked to this guy was 20 years ago, and I felt like there was something unkosher and creepy about saying intimate things about him while naming his name, especially since one of the diary entries was filled with colorful epithets condemning both him and the girl I suspected of making out with him (though I knew only that the girl had made out with someone on the gym steps, and I was afraid it might be him because he often hung out at the gym after school, but had no evidence that it was). If he heard about it he might think it was funny, because he had always been a good-natured sort, but I still felt uncomfortable with it.

Lots of the other people who read at the Cringe Reading Series were a lot more forthcoming with the first and last names of the people they were in love with as teenagers. And I didn't understand it. Those first and last names could have ended up on TV, in news articles, and in the Cringe Book, a compendium of scans of people's real diaries with ironic commentary.

Of course, the ideal situation is that you're still friends with those people, and the two of you have grown into such angst-free, well-adjusted adults that you can just laugh and laugh and laugh about it together now, plus you have the miraculous good fortune of still being enough the same kind of people that you can speak to each other as adults and understand each other. Like when Stephanie Klein, author of the fat-camp memoir Moose, appeared on a talk show with the guy who had been her boyfriend at fat camp 15-20 years earlier. Or when one girl at Cringe gave a shoutout to one of the very guys she was reading about, who was sitting in the audience that night. But a lot of us aren't still friends with the person we were obsessed with. Too often, we kinda NEVER WERE friends with them, which means that if we wrote a memoir about them and then contacted them to be on a talk show with us, they would be like, "Jenny WHO?" and possibly even be skeeved out. Maybe we had had one conversation with them, which we analyzed to death, but knew in our heart of hearts was completely meaningless. And, maybe even more to the point, that shit from age 14 was painful, even if the diary entries are funny now. A lot of us have no desire to laugh with the person we scribbled anguishedly about, in the days when our self-esteem and taste in music and clothes were not as good as they are now. The past is in the past. Moldy old first and last names, forever etched in black and white on the Grecian urn that is your eighth-grade yearbook.

So my suspicion is that most of the people who name names are not still friends (if they ever were friends) with those named. And this goes not only for the tiny cross-section of the population who has performed at the Cringe Reading Series, but also for the much larger group of people in early-to-mid-adulthood who blog about their adolescence using the first and last names of people who loomed large. In fact, their current lives seem so many lightyears away from that era of pegged acid-wash jeans that it almost doesn't seem like those people are real. They achieved a sort of folkloric otherworldliness during the era in question, one that can be bestowed only by an overwrought teenage girl given to dramatization, and this status as more mythological character than just, you know, some guy has only grown more stable in the years since you've seen the person and the memory of them becomes ever more mysteriously hazy. This idea is reinforced by movies about people who used to be teenagers, who moon up at the ceiling and go, "Bobby Riley...oh, he was so dreamy..." and maybe there's a time-travel plot involving bobby sox. (I'm thinking equally of Peggy Sue Got Married and the sock-hop episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.)

My other suspicion is that it's easier to imagine that the people aren't real if the coastal, cosmopolitan city where you live now is very far away, both geographically and ideologically, from wherever you grew up. If you grew up in some work-at-the-mill-until-you-die town where you were the only person in your high school class to go away to college, and everyone else had babies and found Jesus the second they graduated from high school, it's easier to imagine them living in a totally separate universe from you where they couldn't possibly Google themselves and find something you wrote about them (because in their world people don't use the Internet?). I grew up in the New York City area and am still here. People who grow up here don't tend to leave. They are alive, doing their thing, and you might run into them anytime. Even if they moved away, they're in touch with plenty of people who are still in the area. And plenty of them grew up to inhabit the same cultural milieu as you, where marriage is optional but college is not, where it's considered normal for someone in their 30s to spend a weeknight at a bar reading out loud from an old notebook, where the irony of such a practice is understood. They might even be at the bar on Cringe night.

But what's extra strange is that, concurrent with the upsurge in blogs and stories that name names, Facebook has grown to such proportions that, if you wanted to find someone from your past there, you probably could. There's a page where you can look up the entire graduating class of any high school in any year. Not everyone in the whole class will be there, but most of them will. And even if you choose not to actually contact any of them, lots of them will have contacted each other, and you will feel tempted to join in. You'll be able to look at most of their pictures and see which of them are friends with each other. It will all seem real again, both in the same way and in a different way than before: It'll seem the same in the sense that all the clique ties that were so important are in evidence again now, when you look at the friend lists. That the juxtaposition of certain names with one another conjures memories that you thought were long buried. That if Jessica and Nicole are friends on Facebook now, you should probably be friends with them both or else it's like getting excluded from their party just like in sixth grade. But it's different too, in that the folkloric quality that the people have come to have, in your mind, is shattered by the receding hairlines, unattractive spouses, flat-footed status updates. (If you hear every other day that the person you once kissed during a game of Spin the Bottle is "tired," you too will become tired.) You start to feel like the girl in the Meryn Cadell song "The Sweater" who realizes "love made her temporarily blind" when she reads the label in the Sweater Belonging to the Boy of Her Dreams: 100% Acrylic.

If you're especially unlucky, your old crushes may use your Facebook connection to proselytize their religious beliefs to you or try to sell you Amway products. It'll appear in hideous HD how much wittier and brighter your current, real friends are than these shmoes. You'll make the connection between your erstwhile worshiping of them and the fact that, at that time, you also worshiped the song "Against All Odds" by Phil Collins because it was so beautiful and sad.

I'm in a better position than average, with respect to the uncommonly-named boy. For one thing, I know he's still a nice person. He was visiting his parents in our hometown one weekend four years ago, right before my wedding, and saw my parents outside when he happened to drive by their house. He stopped to say hi to them and ask after me, which was sweet in the same way he always used to be. (Of course I had a zillion questions for my parents about how he looked/seemed; it was semi-exciting that they'd told him I was about to get married.) For another thing, I actually was friends with him for a time, before I went and ruined it by making him my "boyfriend" for two months in seventh grade. (Then he dumped me, and I pined after him for years.) In childhood he spent lots of time at my house. So at least there'd be no "Jenny who?". I could still send him a Facebook friend request. It's not out of the realm of possibility.

But I still kind of prefer to think of him as not quite real, and this goes double for the countless other crushes I had who I wasn't really friends with, who never came to my house or met my family, who I barely talked to but thought about constantly. And I think I have plenty of company in that, based on all the bloggers and performers who name names so cavalierly that it's as if they were talking about a soap-opera character. Facebook is shattering all that. I don't know how we're going to reconcile those two realities. In the future, will we all be privy to the mundane day-to-day trivia of everyone we've ever known, in their dull adult lives? Will the phrase "I used to know him" become obsolete, because now a classmate is forever? Will there cease to be any distinction between the past and the present? And how will this impact the angst of future teenagers if they know they will never, ever really be able to leave their hometown?

Earlier this year I went to a talk by Chuck Klosterman, one of my favorite pop-cultural writers/speakers, where he put forth the theory that "people believe that things are going to happen that aren't really going to happen, and the reason for this is technology." He meant that technology lets you very clearly see unrealistic things happen to other people, on the Internet and in movies and on TV, and it starts to seem likely that those same things will happen to you, even though they almost definitely won't. Like maybe you'll cover Michael Jackson's "Black or White" before a national audience, like Adam Lambert did on American Idol, or Clinton and Stacey will make you throw out all your harlequin-print stockings and replace them with structured cotton twill blazers like on What Not to Wear, or you'll slay vampires like Buffy or carjack cars like the guy in Grand Theft Auto or blow up enemies like in any action movie or maybe get whacked by the Mob. People think fantasies are closer to reality than they really are because they seem so real on video. Right now I'm fantasizing that Chuck Klosterman will see this blog post and respond to it. I'm probably friends on Facebook with someone who's friends with one of his friends, so maybe someone will pass along the message.

So I wonder how Chuck would apply this theory to the Facebook disconnect. Are we to conclude that the Facebook connections we make with people from our past aren't really real, we just fantasize that they are, and that Facebook is sort of a video game about our own life where unrealistic things happen? There is some truth to that. If the only connection you have with a person is from junior high, you're kind of kidding yourself if you think you really know them. The type of interactions we have on Facebook—"liking" people's status, etc.—are so trivial and 2-D that they don't really constitute a relationship all by themselves. But on the other hand, Facebook resurrects these people. It puts you back in touch with them, either directly or just by virtue of your being listed with your high school class. All you have to do to talk to them is hit "send a message." And if you do, you'll soon be brought unceremoniously back to earth from your fantasy-driven perceptions about them. You're uncomfortably aware that these people still live and breathe, and if you spoke in public or blogged about them by name, they might find out and have a reaction that you don't like. Does Facebook coincide with Chuck's theory or oppose it?

I think the answer will lie in how memoirists and bloggers evolve into this new reality where everyone we've ever known is available online, neatly catalogued, reachable with a click. Maybe it'll become the norm that if you're gonna read old diary entries about someone in a public forum, you have to message them, and interview them, and have a whole horrible conversation about what went on between you all those years ago, and consider their point of view as well as your own, and hope they think it's as funny as you think it is, and invite them to come hear you read as if you felt nothing but affection for them and no dread. I hope that doesn't happen. Or maybe people will just start using pseudonyms more, or first initials, or nicknames, or just "he," because they're wise to the fact that dreamy Bobby Riley is alive and well and owns four delis in the Pittsburgh area, so they're not as carefree with the naming of names.

Your story is your story, it's a piece of creative writing about how you feel, informed by your memories. A pseudonym may be a lie, but so are your memories. They are fictionalized by the passage of time, as a story you tell with ironic distance.