In Which All Of This Has Nothing To Do With Sex

Self-Credited

by SUMEJA TULIC

The way it goes for not that pretty girls with freckles and wavy hair is to adopt a survivor mode that enables anticipations associated with pretty girls. And that is exactly what I did. I chose rich and to some extent delusional interpretations of my reality and coupled that with curiosity and outspokenness.

Of course, if you are raised in a confused patriarchal family – where your mother is your father and your father is a mother with short outbreaks of bad temper – this will get you into lots of trouble. For instance, the first time I was punished for my curiosity was when I asked why Jews and Muslims wear small hats and should one give it up? Had I not had my own interpretation of the slap that surprised both me and my father, I could have gone through life blaming him for my subsequent lack of courage, sense of adventure and maybe even lack of academic ambition, but I took pride in the fact that I felt fear and anger in my father’s eyes more than the warmth that seared my cheek. I just knew I had to.

Luckily, amongst the decomposed layers of things, ignorance and fear that made my 1990s, fragments of narratives slipped in. I never got the whole story or the accurate chain of events. All I knew was fueled by the excitement that rushed in while realizing that I had nowhere to go with my questions. My mother was a sad beautiful woman trapped in a desert, my father was tired and worried and most he could do was to explain verses from the Quran in a puppeteer sort of a way. Our school textbooks were the well-implemented thoughts of a poorly educated submissive male.

My knowledge on sex came from few completely different formats and sources. My school friends and graffiti could give speculative information on the subject in form of nervously written "Fuck." However, in one of the houses my family lived in, the former attendant left a stash of Van Damme movies and what I later in life figured out was a porn collection. I never got to the porn, but the action films that my parents kept contained a few riddling scenes. Some disturbed me, others – such as the one in which a man literally bakes an egg on women’s chest – made me confused.

Later, while visiting a friend, I stumbled on One Thousand and One Nights. Strangely, my parents didn’t mind me sitting by myself on a green couch in their friend’s house; reading soft erotic tales dipped in a sea of adventures every time we visited. Up to this day I don’t really know how did I learn what sex technically meant. Actually, when I think of knowing about it, it is sort of a memory. A defused and blurred collection of cinematic fragments starring random people I knew, places and walls in dusty towns I lived in.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that intertextuality doesn’t only come to the well read amongst us. Of course, well read people can line up few legitimate footnotes beneath their claim. Others can't. I hope I don’t come off as a completely ignorant and smug, bragging about one's self-credited genius, because, in all honesty, I'm not trying to. If anything, this is inspired by acute depression and envy that I regularly feel when reading and listening to some of you, dear peers from other places.

The drama of it all is that I can divert myself from my own fault by rightfully blaming few dictators and warlords along with my teachers and parents. All those were members of a gang that crippled the education and wider academic upbringing of entire generations. And it was so easy: they took books off shelves and put nothing instead. Literally nothing.

During the lunch breaks at school, I would sneak out and cross the highway. I would run very fast to a newspaper stand. The vendor was used to being confronted by angry fathers demanding a refund, so I lied, telling him my parents gave me money to buy a kids' magazine. Once I was back at school, beneath my blue school uniform, the colorful pages of the magazine would be glued by sweat to my body. I knew I did my part. The rest was up to somebody else.

Coming back to not that pretty girls with freckles and wavy hair: when you grow up to be a not that pretty woman with very cute freckles and God knows what kind of hair, you realize that your survival mode fails you badly when you are talking to that attractive guy who seems very smart. But this is something completely different and I am not comfortable talking about it just yet.

Sumeja Tulic is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer and photographer living in Sarajevo. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about her childhood in Libya.

Photographs by the author. You can find more of her photography here.

"Paddling Out" - Miike Snow (mp3)

"Devil's Work" - Miike Snow (mp3)

"Black Tin Box" - Miike Snow & Lykke Li (mp3)

In Which We Are The First To Leave The Party

Last Dance

by BRITTANY JULIOUS

Party Girl
dir. Daisy von Scherler Mayer
94 min.

The most iconic Party Girl moment for me is Mary's walk of pride post-jail. Things happen to her. Life is something that happens around her parties, outfits, and friendships. A night in jail is just another event in a long line of events, but it can't define her. She is too much her own girl for that.

I say girl instead of woman, as Party Girl is a film about an emotional late bloomer's transition into adulthood. Mary (Parker Posey) may scrape by on rent parties to keep her spacious Chinatown loft or parade around the East Village in Chanel, but she is no more grown in her actions and choices than any other member of the underground party scene that frames the narrative.

I first watched Party Girl in college during my film boom dedicated to post-collegiate happenings. Paranoid about a future that increasingly appeared bleak and rife with stress, I took to films featuring "hip, young things" or just "young things" as a way to seek solace and comfort before the party of sporadic classes and little responsibility ended.

With its charming outfits, spastic supporting characters, and rampant early-90s Manhattan romanticism, Party Girl was a personal favorite. In particular, Parker Posey's talents – the way she needs only a facial expression or two to dominate and escalate the comedy of any given scene, her voice that is simultaneously Valley Girl and know-it-all pretentious – created a lasting impression. Watching it again recently further cemented the film as a modern, independent classic for the girls and women who view "a good time" as a translatable goal from work to play.

For the casual viewer, Mary's transformation from Downtown It Girl to library student is a radical one. But director Daisy von Scherler Mayer subtly hints at the necessary skills of a librarian that Mary possesses throughout the film. She is able to get along – or at least communicate effectively – with different types of people. She has a general curiosity for the world around her and approaches each person she meets with an eagerness to help, or just bring them into her fold. And her closet – organized in a methodical system that only she truly understands – speaks to the Dewey Decimal System, a source of anxiety followed by pleasure for the heroine.

Mary ditches a date with young, dreamy falafel seller Mustafa to learn the Dewey Decimal System, all the while transforming the space into a party-like space of her own. She dances atop the table in her shorts and combat boots. She gets things done (“things” being a knowledge of a system she had been unfamiliar with upon taking the job at the library) while still maintaining a connection to her old self and her true self.

Later, Mary organizes temporary roommate Leo’s record collection based on this same system she spent a long evening trying to understand. Mary honestly described the evening as, “The wildest night of my life.” Understanding the system was further solidification of the connection between her burgeoning interests and her love for organizing the people, places, and things that are a part of her life.

Leo (Guillermo Díaz) is visibly upset by the order that disrupted his chaos of more than 1,000 singles and LP’s, but Mary remains unfazed by the potential problems in her unwarranted organizing project. For Leo, it is a challenge to his lack of a system and the potential catalyst for losing a paid gig as a DJ. For Mary, it is a way to more effectively provide the world to Leo. Like telling Leo earlier about Rene, the owner of the bar that Leo is auditioning at as a DJ, organizing his set of records is a means of helping a friend and bringing him more closely into her fold.

This method doesn’t always prove to be beneficial. A party thrown at the end of the second act turns disastrous for Mary who no longer has her library clerk job. Unlike her work in organizing Leo’s record collection, Mary’s party is another task to make rent. Inviting friends to DJ or Mustafa to sell his food is less a method of helping a friend succeed and more a means of making things better for herself. At 24, Mary’s growing sense of purpose feels familiar, but it is her quick emotional descent once that newly-found career path is taken from her that is disturbing in its truth.

Thus far in this decade of personal development, I have realized people are unhappy or dissatisfied, that it is not just an internal frustration, but also a universal, generational worry. I’ve also realized that people have many goals and aspirations, and the older they get, the more hesitant they are to admit them. Goals begin to feel like things that young people do and accomplish, and now one’s goals should be simpler: fall in love, get married, have children, live in comfort. I remember how my friends talked about what they wanted to do, but now they talk more about what things have been done to them. There is a loss of control. Career goals are still exciting, but the ability to hold on to them as reality loudly asserts the difficulties of The Way We Live Now, can crush even the most starry-eyed party girls.

Mary eventually triumphs as friends and coworkers believe in her and it is this moment that makes the film so memorable. As a viewer, I come back to Party Girl for the fashion, the dialogue, but also the "happy ending." There is a comfort in seeing one’s life not end in a similar way to how it began: confused, jumbled, and floundering.

Brittany Julious is the senior editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. 

"Peter Piper" - Run DMC (mp3)

"Mama Told Me Not To Come" - The Wolfgang Press (mp3)

"Burning (Vibe mix)" - MK (mp3)

In Which We Paraphrase Our Ribald Memoir

Dial Tone

by MOLLY O'BRIEN

Are You There, Chelsea?
created by Dottie Zicklin and Julie Ann Larson

In the mid-90s, during the early stages of filming a pilot, NBC president Don Ohlmeyer had a little problem. The embryonic show in question had a script wherein one of the main female characters was to sleep with a man on the first date. Ohlmeyer worried this would negatively color the audience’s perception of the character; he was concerned that she would appear promiscuous, and promiscuity was not an appropriate trait for what was supposed to be a highly relatable character. After taping the pilot, producers handed out a questionnaire to the studio audience members, most of whom did not mind the character’s sexual behavior. The plot stayed intact.

That pilot was the first episode of Friends, and though networks like NBC probably still include questionnaires in their screening methodologies, the idea of gingerly surveying an audience’s reaction to a one-night stand is almost too quaint. At least it is in the context of the current crop of network comedies, whose pitches might have read, "Women who keep it real, have sex with their bras on and make a lot of dick jokes." Whitney Cummings wouldn’t bat an eye at Monica Geller’s first episode tryst with Paul the Wine Guy – she’d applaud it.

All of this hoopla — the hoopla about women who burp and fart and fuck and swallow the tequila worm on a regular basis — really started in earnest with Bridesmaids and now seems to be culminating in NBC's Are You There, Chelsea? starring Laura Prepon as a young Chelsea Handler and Chelsea Handler as Sloane, Chelsea Handler’s more responsible elder sister.

Are You There, Chelsea? is an evident paraphrasing of Handler’s ribald 2008 memoir Are You There Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea; the erasure of the word “vodka” from one title to the next reflects the clumsiness of the translation, as Are You There, Chelsea?’s writers have amputated all of the grimy charm of the book and replaced it with jokes about redheads and dull sitcom platitudes.

Handler is a fairly funny woman, both on her E! show and in her memoirs. Her compendium of sexual encounters, My Horizontal Life, isn’t explicit in the way a Cosmo Red-Hot Read would be, but it is autobiographical, tart, picaresque and optimistic, like a promiscuous Great Expectations. One chapter depicts Handler as a reluctant cruise ship passenger, tossing back vodka and Kool-Aid in Dixie cups, then vomiting over the side of the ship and having a man named Rico carry her back to her room "like a scene out of The English Patient." Later on the vacation, she has sex with an acrobatic young man who turns out to be a cruise ship performer. Embarrassment ensues.

A TV adaptation of Handler’s stories would seem ideal: her anecdotal style would convert well into 30-minute segments; her sex life is absurd enough to be comical, ample enough to be appropriately “edgy” for younger viewers, and still not explicit enough to merit much censorship; and her fan base would follow her from late-night to primetime without difficulty. After all, Chelsea Lately snags more young female viewers than Jimmy Kimmel Live.

The reasons for the terrible quality of Are You There, Chelsea? is threefold. First, there’s the writing. Chelsea works at a bar in New Jersey; a flashback reveals she has attempted to mate with her semi-boss, Rick (Jack McDorman) only to discover that both she and Rick enjoy being on top too much to make things work. This joke, already a bit of a stretch, is repeated three or four times throughout the pilot with different verbiage. Chelsea makes fun of a ginger hookup ("Maybe I should go out with someone like that, even if he does look like Kathy Griffin") and her virgin roommate ("She is a rare and beautiful creature. We need to keep her the way she is, and then stuff her when she dies").

Her best friend (Ali Wong) plays the sidekick to excess, and that virginal roommate (Lauren Lapkus) is an ectomorph who scurries around her apartment like a Rachel Dratch SNL sketch canned before the first dress rehearsal. Chelsea's father is crass and cheap (a flashback shows him buying a "Lettuce Leaf Kid" for a kindergarten-aged Chelsea) and the bar employs a little person (a notorious Handler fixation) who at one point explains his yen for "seniors": "She was 64. And the osteoporosis brought her down to my size."

The writing well may be symptomatic of the show’s second ill, the format. Every stale joke only grows staler in the context of multicamera shots and Ye Olde Laughe Tracke. Falling back on weary television formats seems like a cowardly recession-era impulse for comfort and reassurance. It's the equivalent of plying woman to buy chocolate by showing the same old adverts: chick cuddled up on the couch, warm and snuggly, slowly devouring a one-inch square of processed cocoa product. The most successful shows on television right now, besides those that involve warbling neophytes and panels of smug judges (a.k.a. “smudges”), establish substantial stories and employ formats that feel contemporary.

The only saving grace of Are You There, Chelsea?, Ms. Handler herself, wastes away in the fruitless older sister role. Handler parlays her trademark bitterness into playing Sloane, the evident moral compass (you can tell by the mousy brown wig) who in the first episode gives birth to a baby whose father is in Afghanistan. Sloane plays the married and monogamous foil to Chelsea and her many conquests. The portrayal of Chelsea herself is loose and relaxed, as if perpetually three drinks in, but it lacks Handler’s acidity. Like John Belushi when he removes his sunglasses near the end of The Blues Brothers, Handler can convey plenty of meaning through a single look, except Belushi’s gaze was puppyish and Handler’s is withering. She doesn't show up nearly enough in the show, and one wishes 36 weren’t an age that Hollywood deems unfit for providing suitably youthful television.

In a recent interview, the artist Josh Kline called actors "surrogates." To him, television shows are substitutions for the parts of life you don’t have time to live, and television characters as people with whom you can maintain a "low-maintenance relationship." In other words, "you know them, but they don’t know you." What makes such a one-sided relationship possible is the desire to know those ostensible actor-strangers, the people who begin as foreigners and end up as friends. Theoretically, Chelsea Handler’s popularity arises from the simulated intimacy of her talk show and books; she speaks to you, she regales you with her embarrassing stories, she is on your level, even though she’s on E! and you’re on your couch. But even that low-maintenance relationship between viewer and character becomes laborious in the context of Handler’s sitcom. There is no desire to make the foreigner a friend when the foreigner’s punchlines smell like mothballs. You don’t need a questionnaire to know that.

Like the other female-centric shows of the moment, Are You There, Chelsea? suffers from maladies of form and content. It isn’t as if Laura Prepon and Whitney Cummings and Kat Dennings aren’t funny. When Cummings dresses up as a naughty nurse and forces her boyfriend to fill out hospital forms, when Kat Dennings says "I’m dead inside" with a pouty poker face, when Prepon tells her roommate her cat’s name is Assface: this shit is completely capable of drawing laughs. But the laugh track, so useful in the 90s as a tool for underscoring the most quotable lines of Friends and Seinfeld, now murders humor with Dexter-like efficiency. Women are funny, and there’s no need to devote one article after another to that astounding fact, but in order to move forward, ladies need to ditch decaying sitcoms in favor of something that serves them better.

Molly O'Brien is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Burlington. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about Pulp Fiction. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Mothership" - Enter Shikari (mp3)

"No Sssweat" - Enter Shikari (mp3)

"Labyrinth" - Enter Shikari (mp3)