the hills season 4, episode 2, “drama follows them”

tangents:

• another repetition that i should have included in the video but didn’t was lo’s long walk across the yard into a dramatic confrontation with audrina in the first episode of this season which was a clear repetition of lauren’s long walk across the yard into a dramatic confrontation from last season’s finale. again, the newer version was much weaker. also the previously discussed “whitney is good at work” scene.
• robbe-grillet probably would have liked the hills: “But the new realism that Robbe-Grillet advocates with the nouveau roman is not the rendering of the “lifelike” and the “typical.” “In this new realism,” he writes, “it is therefore no longer verisimilitude that is at issue. The small detail which ‘rings true’ no longer holds the attention of the novelist . . . ; what strikes him . . . is more likely, on the contrary, the little detail that rings false.””
• this season, though, for all its repetition and lack of emotion, is striking me as less nouveau roman, less l’ecriture feminine, and more…uh…clip show? “Clip shows today tend to offset such criticism by trying to make the frame tale surrounding the clips compelling, or by presenting clip shows without any framing device. A show might also diffuse the awkwardness by indulging in self-parody, explicitly acknowledging or intentionally over-playing the device.”
• still, even if the art of the hills isn’t as cutting edge as it once was, the commerce is totally avant garde. from media week: “As MTV’s flagship hit, The Hills functions as a laboratory of sorts for the ad sales and marketing people, a venue where MTV can experiment with pod structure and an array of pod-busting initiatives. “
• (related: the salary thing which everybody has posted already)
• i haven’t seen last year at marienbad. i really really want to. netflix doesn’t deliver to korea so i wish people would stop uploading divx cam copies of the house bunny and get on that, please.
• a french role playing game about the hills. i’m not kidding. (via HLJ)
• my favorite book about repetition and reenactments
• did anybody else hear an echo of mccain in the doug-lauren “yr house/yr laguna house” exchange?
• also on politics, a correspondent sent in this very entertaining comparison of speidi and the clintons. not to horn toot, but i still feel that i set the standard for this sort of thing (also).
• notes on lo
• there are few things i dislike more than improv/sketch comedy. cats, fake cheese, joy. i like janeane garofalo, though i much prefer rush or sean to air america.
• i just don’t know what do with overdosin. i just don’t. i feel much more comfortable with the fake virgin thing since i basically already covered it in my madonna/the madonna fake family planning discussion.

the hills season 4, episode 1, “we’ll never be friends.”

meh.

tangents:

• a bit that got cut from the monologue: “if lauren and heidi are feminist heros, spencer is definitely some sort of existential hero. he’s stuck in this land of women where he is not in charge and can’t be, but he’s smart, he recognizes his situation and recognizes that he’s not in charge, that the old style of masculine posturing and action won’t do anything for him. therefore, he rebels by inaction, not by bowing up his chest or waving around his dick or shoving his hand up skirts, but by doing absolutely nothing. he rebels against his powerlessness by reveling in it, by embracing it, by spending all his time on the couch, growing out his ugly facial hair like some homebound Samson, playing XBOX and sleeping till noon.”
• cause everybody knows / she’s a femme fatale.
• i love justinbobby eternally for wearing a leather jacket to a pool party in los angeles in the summer.
• the interface seems kind of retarded to me but i still think this is a very smart move (here’s a thought, mtv: most people who buy online music do it through itunes. in order to spend their money on your site, they will want to be comfortable with it. one way to make them comfortable is to give them something they are familiar with. so, how about ripping off itunes instead of giving me this confusing, laggy broke-ass wheel-carousel shit?)
• this site, meanwhile, continues to be a total letdown. it makes nonsociety look good.
• do i even have to draw the connection?  we can rebuild her, we have the technology, blah blah blah.
• this report makes me almost as happy as when i heard that anecdote about michelle obama being able to recognize brady bunch episodes by the opening shots.  live every week like it’s shark week.

anniversary

“A typical week begins with producers calling the core cast members on Sunday and getting intel on what’s happened to them over the weekend. An e-mail update is sent to the staff that night so everyone can prepare for Monday’s ”story meeting,” in which the producers and story editors sit around and dissect the Hills girls’ personal and social lives. From that, they determine whom to film during the week. (On average, it takes editors four to six weeks to cull through the footage and put together an episode.) Lauren and her costars are forbidden to attend these meetings. ”I would love to sit through one of those,” says Lauren, ”because it’s really them being like, ‘Yo, did you hear what this person said?”’

OMG DREAM JOB!!! this is a really good article, maybe the best one i’ve ever read about “the hills.” there is a lot i would like to say about it but i am trying to avoid burning out and using up all my material before the season even starts. (unless someone wants to quote me in something that i can add to my sad, flimsy resume since i spent this year writing a blog about “the hills” instead of submitting stories to small literary magazines like i was supposed to and so now i have to build a portfolio and do tedious grad school applications at the exact same time that i am writing obsessively and at great length and hopefully with video illustrations about this (possibly final) season of the most important show on television.)

on a related note, today is my one year anniversary! thanks so much to everyone who read, commented, or wrote or linked to me, especially virginia heffernan, rex sorgatz, michael newman, and also crypto who i never ever link to but who is always writing the nicest fucking things about me.

117 posts (favorite #1,2,3)

126,000 words (roughly) (favorite #1,#2)

196 comments (favorite)

6 chapters of fan fiction (favorite)

50 songs (favorite)

8 videos (favorite)

75,844 hits (favorite)

siskel and ebert review “the hills” season 4

i know this is crudely done, sorry. my brain is broken.

tangents:

• siskel and ebert review “kids” in 1995.
• whitney’s ex-boyfriend, ben lyons, is the new ebert.
• wyatt mason on fitzgerald on reviews (one post of several)

dear heidi, part 7

“I’m an American artist, and I have no guilt.
I seek pleasure. I seek the nerves under your skin.
The narrow archway; the layers; the scroll of ancient lettuce.
We worship the flaw, the belly, the belly, the mole on the belly of an exquisite whore.
He spared the child and spoiled the rod. I have not sold myself to God.”

dear heidi, part 6

tangents:

• cindy sherman at fashion week, lauren conrad at fashion week
• cindy sherman for balenciaga, heidi montag with a balenciaga, heidi montag and sarah jessica parker in balenciaga
• cindy sherman is the subject of a weird obsessive movie by a troubled person, heidi montag is the subject of a weird obsessive movie by a troubled person.
• i couldn’t find one of kanye’s hundreds of posts about murakami to neatly tie this together, but here’s a picture of jay-z backed by a giant projection of the damien hirst skull at glastonbury.
• also, from last sunday, kanye giving marc jacobs bunny ears.
• also, HE DESIGNED THE LEGO BALENCIAGAS!
• off theme but really great: audrina discusses the funny side of “the hills,” including a deleted scene involving a shaved cat. there is an incredible wealth of this kind of material on this site which i will surely have more to say about in the future (for example, whitney notes that she is more than just facial expressions). the audio commentaries are my favorite.
• “In 6th grade I wrote a really sweet letter to Jonathan Knight, because I always thought he looked sad (those puppy dog eyes!) in pictures, and I decided it was because he didn’t get as many letters as Jordan or Joey. I told him he was my favorite, even though he wasn’t. This pretty much set the pattern for many future pity-dating scenarios. Sadness.?”

dear heidi, part 5

tangents:

• one of the earliest motion picture cameras was a gun
• “the photographer loads his camera, aims it, fires…and makes a snapshot.” (pdf)
• today, we have the pistolcam
• “Still, there is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as the camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a sublimated murder – a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.” – suze
• still, let us pray for soft murder, that all plots don’t lead to death
• old, but i never saw it: jason wahler plays russian roulette
• there goes my gun

dear heidi, part 4

tangents:

• considering miley cyrus
• 10 things you don’t know about country music (from a good book i read in college)
• better quality stereo mix mp3 of my “achy breaky heart” cover (seriously youtube, no stereo?)

dear heidi, part 3

tangents:

• rampant speculation
  
• great monologue about actresses who play joan of arc
• are there people crazier than me? maybe.
• two quotes from the book i just read:
  1. “in accounting for our love of story-filled lives, escapism seems too brutal a word, suggesting that these stories have nothing to do with us, rather than that they reflect dormant fragments of ourselves. the drama that oedipus lived is not any less our own because we married well and live in a leafy suburb. the extremes of biological lives are fuller articulations of ourselves which the environment has curtailed. the life of nelson may be fascinating to someone who would not dare to row across the serpentine because, containing in a fully developed form so many of our half-formulated fantasies, it constitutes an exercise in self knowledge.”
  2. “…one may suggest a connection between attachment and the biographical impulse, that is, an impulse to know another fully. every attachment involes a more or less conscious process of biography [as one works out dates, characteristics, favoured wash cycles and snacks…], much as a true biography demands a more or less conscious emotional relationship between author and subject. what else could account for the gargantuan energy required to finish such a book?”
• “For me it was a lot like creating the Sims,” she explained…”

dear heidi, part 2

tangents:

• the horrors of iconoclasm
• new season of laguna beach?
• do you believe in something beautiful? me and mia do.
• “style can therefore be invisible,” davenport continues, “blending with our ignorance.”
• gabe wins