Masked Mom's Media Monday: Fifty Shades of Snobbery*

"Criticism is a word with blood on its teeth because we know that one definition is 'the act of finding fault.' Criticism's unsavoriness was drummed into us by our parents: 'If you can't say anything nice about someone, don't say anything at all.'

But who obeyed? A person who doesn't have anything bad to say about someone may be a saint, but he's more likely a bore. We define ourselves, in part, by the discriminations we make. The value of what we love is enriched by our understanding of what we dislike."
~~David Ansen, Self magazine circa 1994


"He really is a fine specimen of a man. Looking at him is very, very arousing."

~~E L James, Fifty Shades of Grey

[Blurt Alert: This post contains non-graphic, non-specific mentions of S-E-X and a couple of "bad" words. Also? I say mean things about a very popular book. Read at your own risk.]

Fifty Shades of Grey was a phenomenon before I'd ever heard of it. When I first heard of it, I knew it was only a matter of time before I would end up having that awkward conversation I, as a chronic reader, am forced to have every couple of years when some new Bestseller! attracts the attention of my non-reading friends (they are legion). Because, for many of my friends, I am their friend who reads the most (for some of them I am their friend who reads at all), I am the first person they think of when a book (of all things!) catches their attention.

While I read widely, I rarely read phenomenon-type books for a variety of reasons. I like to say it isn't really a judgment of the quality of work behind many mega-bestsellers--that there is no bad or good writing, exactly--just people with different tastes. I like to say this because I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings and I don't want to sound like the pretentious, snarky bitch I really am deep inside when it comes to reading. There may be no such thing as bad writing, but there is such a thing as writing that makes me feel like scooping my eyeballs out with a tomato corer. And, more often than not, it's that exact kind of writing that sits at the top of the New York Times Bestseller List for months at a time. Worse, it is often that kind of writing that friends of mine fall deeply in love with--so in love that they want to share the joy. And then they ask me to read it and when they ask me what I thought of it, I struggle to come up with something diplomatic to say. (Hint: When said out loud, "The Da Vinci Code has an intriguing plot, but is spectacularly poorly written." is not as diplomatic as it sounded in your head.) 

I've been burned before, obviously. I've learned some stealthy moves to get out of the "Have you read..." type conversations without, I don't know, being too much myself, I guess, but I'd still prefer never to have those conversations at all.

So, when I started hearing rumblings about the Fifty Shades trilogy, I steeled¹ myself against the inevitable dreaded question. It came in mid-June in a text from the friend I refer to as Miss Unattainable here on the blog (here's why). She said, "Have you read the Fifty Shades books?"

I cringed, not just inwardly but all over.

Stealthy move number one: deflect attention. "Nope. Have you?"

"Not yet. Daughter read them and just passed them along. She loved them. Said the sex scenes were amazing."

Keep deflecting: "I've heard that too. Hope you enjoy them!"

"I'll let you know what I think. Do you want them when I'm done?"

Urgh. Stealthy move number two: vague truth. "Not sure. Heard the writing was pretty bad."

"I heard that too. I don't read enough to know the difference, probably."

Stealthy move number three: distract from the original question, while gently strengthening my position. "Saw the author in an interview and she basically said they weren't very good herself. But I'd love to hear what you think of them."

Bullet dodged. Or so I thought.

This past Friday, Miss Unattainable texted me a lunch invitation. After we'd nailed down the time and place, there came another text: "U want me to bring the Fifty Shades books or are u sure u don't want to read them?"

Stealthy move number four: Give up entirely, but still try to manage expectations. "You can bring 'em. I will give them a try."

This conditional surrender was not enough for Miss Unattainable, so she had to whip out the exclamation points: "U have to be a little curious!!"

And she's right, I am curious. I'm curious about why I'm such a party pooper. A buzzkill. A literary snob. Why can't I just enjoy an "entertaining" read on its own terms instead of judging it by lofty literary standards to which its author likely did not even aspire? (Even that sounds sorta snotty, doesn't it?)

Clearly, clearly, clearly I lack the enzyme required to convert clumsy writing into entertainment. Instead, the influx of clunky phrasing and craptastic cliches will cause toxins to build up in my system until they explode in a spewing spray of unstoppable snarkiness.

And here we are.

Fifty Shades of Grey is a train wreck of a book. (Speaking of craptastic cliches...) Of course, I'd collected a heap of evidence against the book before I ever cracked the front cover. Not just a bestseller, it was a bestelling romance. An erotic romance to boot. It is what Little Sister and I used to laughingly call a "smut book."²

In addition to the genre issue, I'd seen the British author, E L James, in an interview in which she admitted being a Twihard and appeared utterly baffled and even sheepish about the success of the book. Not exactly an auspicious beginning.

Still, as objectively as possible, Fifty Shades of Grey is a train wreck of a book. It is the story of the 21-year-old not just virginal, but actual virgin who has never even been "really" kissed, Anastasia Steele and her hot (!) romance/erotic relationship (sealed with a non-disclosure agreement--so chivalrous!) with hot (!) twenty-seven year-old self-made billionaire Christian Grey. These caricatures, er, characters don't just smile, they "quirk" their lips up. Predictably, moods are unfathomable, loins are girded, stares are smoldering, penetrating, unnerving. Two sentences in a row, our heroine is "besieged" and she's not even in the presence of our hero, let alone in bed with him at the time!

Is it just me or are there certain words that show up considerably more frequently in smut books than they do anywhere else? Luxuriate, mercurial, wanton, myriad. I swear I've seen "inexorable" ten times in smut books for every one time I've stumbled upon it out in the wilds of literature. Is there some sort of special Smut Book Thesaurus that's mandatory reading for smut book authors?

The story is told in first person, present tense and we are often treated to Ana's internal monologues which are heavily peppered with Holy cow, Holy Moses, Holy crap, Holy shit, Holy fuck. Holy exclamations, Batman! She also goes in for lots of "Boy!" and "Oh my!" and "Wow!" and "Jeez!"--not only are these particularly empty exclamations, but they do not in any way seem natural when attributed to a 21-year-old college graduate (an English literature major, to add insult to injury).

Futhermore, though Anastasia is allegedly American through and through--she's living in Vancouver, Washington at the time our story opens and, within weeks, moves to Seattle; at one point (as her cardboard roommate is planning a trip to Barbados), she bemoans the fact that she herself has never "left the continental U.S."--she nevertheless often speaks and thinks in a distinctly British fashion. Words like "keen" and "clever" and even the penultimate Britishism "bloody" are sprinkled throughout her speech and thoughts--as are constructions like "a bit of time" and "I do hope" and "you've not..." (rather than "you haven't"). It's a small, nit-picky sort of thing, yes, but it contributes to the overall mess that is Fifty Shades.

Another distraction (though there is little to be distracted from)  is the relationship Ana has with her anthropomorphic "subconscious." Apparently, our narrator and her creator have failed to grasp the significance of the prefix "sub" in "subconscious" as Ana's subconscious is practically a character in the book: "My subconscious taps me hard on the shoulder..." "...my subconscious mocks me." "I think my subconscious has fainted..."

A few times, James seems to acknowledge the absurdity of this device by tacking the words "figuratively" or "metaphorically" on to some action the subconscious has taken: "Stop now! my subconscious is metaphorically screaming at me..." "My subconscious is figuratively tutting and glaring at me over her half-moon specs..."At one point, Ana's subconscious is so appalled she goes to hide behind a couch...any subconscious worthy of the name would've stayed there.

What sent Ana's delicate (yet pushy) subconscious scurrying behind the couch was sex, of course--and not just any sex but the fabled rough BDSM-light sex that helped make Fifty Shades a scandalous international bestseller. The sex nearly sent me scurrying behind the couch, too--not because it was scandalous, exactly--unless, of course, you are scandalized by the travesty of poorly written sex scenes³ in which hollow, exaggerated characters have hollow, exaggerated reactions to one another's every move.

So over-the-top is the writing in these sections (and the book is mostly these sections) that any heat generated quickly dissipates into hilarity and in rapid succession to annoyance. Word to the wise to E L James, and smut book authors everywhere: A little hyperbole goes a long way; a lot of hyperbole goes nowhere.

When it comes to the male appendage, though, James does get credit for her sensible solution to the what-to-call-the-body-part problem. The choices range from excessively euphemistic at one end of the spectrum ("member") to the unnecessarily vulgar at the other (the "c"-word that I am not going to use here--I'm already really pushing my luck in the undesirable search words department) with the coldly clinical in between ("penis"). James wisely settles on "erection" for almost every reference to Christian's, er, doohickey. Not perfect, perhaps, but certainly one of the better options available.

No such luck when it comes to the female genital area, though. In spite of the fact that Anastasia is apparently well-acquainted with human anatomy (she makes no fewer than three references to her medulla oblongota) and has no trouble throwing around the "f"-word, both as an expletive exclamation and as a verb in direct reference to the sex act, she refers to her own, um, nether regions as the absurdly euphemistic and juvenile "down there" (italics hers). She eventually graduates to referring to it mostly as "my sex"--better, but there is still something forced and unnatural about that terminology, especially coming from a college-educated woman in 2011.

So...a train wreck in so many ways. The only way the book succeeds is as an unintentionally satiric commentary on the fantasies of discontented women everywhere (about which, don't even get me started). I feel kind of bad⁴ saying so--but I am confident that the millions of dollars and millions of fans E L James has made (and will no doubt yet make) with the Shades of Grey trilogy will be of great comfort to her in the face of my petty criticisms.

Masked Mom's One-Word Review: Bestselling!


*This cannot be considered a proper review of Fifty Shades of Grey since, as of this writing, I have made it only to page 337 of 528 pages. I will carry on to the end, despite my considerable reservations, because the suspense is killing me--not about what will happen to the paper-doll characters, but about how many more mean things I can think of to say about this book.

1. Ha! Ha! "Steeled!" Get it? That's a pun for all you Fifty Shades fans out there.

2. The fact that we referred to them as smut books did not deter us from procuring and reading as many of them as possible--especially around the time I was 13 or 14. We would read the steamy parts aloud, gasping with hysterical laughter. Once, we tried to make an amateur version of a book-on-tape of one particularly memorable smuttish book, Golden Empire by A.E. Maxwell, reading into a tape recorder a scene in which the lovers rolled on to their sides "still joined." A few sentences later when they walked to the shower, I added "still joined." Sweet lord, I thought one of us was going to require emergency medical intervention (just as our lovers would have if they had, in fact, walked to the shower still joined).

3. It is hard (pun acknowledged though not entirely intended) to write sex well, but it is not impossible. One example that always comes to mind when I get into this conversation (which, blessedly for everyone, is not often) is Scott Spencer's Endless Love. Though the sex is quite graphic, and even disturbing at times, it rings true to the extent that it actually advances both plot and character. That said, it is not necessary to judge E L James's sex scenes by the Spencer standard in order to find them wanting (pun acknowledged though not entirely intended). It's been a long time since I've read a smut book, but I don't recall the sex ever being quite this ridiculous--though it was often close. Two authors who did write decent (though not Spencerian National Book Award-nominee level) sex were Judith Krantz (particularly in Princess Daisy) and Rosemary Rogers (in The Wanton, the title of which is especially hilarious if pronounced like the Chinese takeout staple). I think the primary difference between decent smut book sex and the sex going on in Fifty Shades is that, whether in or or out of bed, the responses of James's characters seem entirely disconnected and out of proportion not only to our reality (which is common in smut books) but to their own.

4. Not quite bad enough to stop me from hitting "publish" on this post, of course. But really? I understand that it takes a tremendous amount of effort and courage to put your work out there and I admire that--whatever I may think about the quality of the resulting product. To the extent that this book (and no doubt its sequels) can be viewed as a failure, it is more a failure on the part of the editors and publisher than on the part of James, who, by many accounts, had no inkling that her work would find such a large audience and, therefore, so much (mean) scrutiny.

Spiral Notebook Sunday: Wednesday, August 11, 1993

 

 

Wednesday, August 11, 1993

 

My life is passing by not minute by minute but a week at a time. It just seems like that I know. And it's probably a very dangerous pattern of thought to fall into--it would be easy to give up whole chunks of minutes, hours, days thinking they can't count for much...



Random Quote Saturday

"She liked to disappear, even when she was in the same room as other people. It was a talent, as it was a curse."

~~Alice Hoffman, "Owl and Mouse" in The Red Garden
                             

Ways I Am Not A Grown-Up, The Eleventh In A Potentially Infinite Series--UPDATED

I have a spectacularly dysfunctional relationship with food.

No lie.

It is 8:56 p.m. and so far today, I have eaten a handful of mini twist pretzels, a ham sandwich on wheat, and frosting. A whole lot of frosting.

Ugh.

 

 

You understand, of course, that every color must be taste-tested ad nauseum. Literally.


 

UPDATE: Lest you doubt that any of the frosting made it on to the cake, here is a partial shot of the finished product.

Random Quote Thursday

"I put on several different outfits. The advantage of not knowing who you are is you can attempt to be all things to all men or women. My mother saw me always glancing in every window, every mirror; in the gleaming blades of knives.

She said, 'Jill is vain.' She did not know I was looking to see who would be there this time."

     ~~Jill Robinson, Bed/Time/Story

Search Party

Youngest Sister asked me earlier today for a recipe I had scribbled nearly twenty years ago in a spiral-bound notebook with index card pages. Tonight when I went to look for my little spiral-bound index card recipe thingy, which usually sits (appropriately, I think) on the cookbook stand in the dining room (behind a prettier cookbook), I found instead Hubby's book on playing darts. I had to ask Hubby where he had moved my recipe book thingy to. For the purposes of this post, it's important to know that this is the only spiral-bound index card notebook in our household. The conversation went like this:

Me: Do you know where my spiral-bound index card recipe thingy is? It was on the cookbook stand.

Hubby: I stuck the cookbooks in the drawer of the hutch.

Me, after rifling through both drawers of the hutch in vain: I don't see it.

Hubby, coming in from the living room: What did you say it looked like?

Me: It's spiral-bound, 4"x6" index cards? With recipes on them?

Hubby: Why do you sound grouchy?

Me: I'm confused as to why it seemed like a good idea to move the cookbooks off the cookbook stand and instead put a book about darts on the cookbook stand.

Hubby: Uh, there wasn't room for everything.

I do not see the point of arguing with that logic. He continues digging through the various drawers and cabinets on the hutch and I sit down in a dining room chair to watch. From one drawer he pulls out a shiny, black 9"x12" folder, which is also full of recipes and he holds it up to me, questioningly.

Me, sighing: It's a 4"x6" spiral-bound index card notebook thingy.

He puts the folder back, but seems to think* my refusal to accept a 9"x12" folder when I'm looking for a 4"x6" spiral-bound index card thingy is pure stubbornness and a moral failing on my part. The fact that the folder is full of entirely different recipes than the index card notebook is, of course, irrelevant.

Next, he finds a packet of individual index cards and holds them up to me. They are all blank.

Hubby: Were you using these?

Me: It's a--

Hubby, proverbial light bulb just this side of literally visible above his head: But this doesn't have a spiral...

He puts them back. I stand up at this point and wander toward the kitchen, where the spiral binding of the actual 4"x6" index card notebook thingy jumps out at me from a shelf in the kitchen. I pull it out and hold it up for Hubby to see.

He says, "Oh that? I could've told you where that was...I didn't know you were looking for that."

*He doesn't say any of this. He doesn't have to. We've been married for twenty-five years and counting. I can not only read his thoughts, I'm pretty sure my testimony as to their content would be admissable in a court of law.

Where Were You?

[This originally ran on Monday, September 11, 2006, as a Media Monday post. I changed one word because it's the only thing that's changed. The original is here.]

On the eleventh anniversary of the September 11 attacks, as we all reflect on the ways our country changed and grew from the suffering of that day, Alan Jackson's song "Where Were You (When The World Stopped Turning)" remains in my mind as the best, truest tale of that day. I still cannot hear it without getting chills--especially today of all days. It is a sincere man's well-thought-out reaction to horrible, horrible events.

I couldn't have said it better than Alan does (and if anyone else could, they haven't yet). So I'll leave you with my favorite lines: "Faith, hope, and love are some good things He gave us/And the greatest is love."

Spiral Notebook Sunday: Tuesday, May 16, 1986

Tuesday, May 16, 1986

 

We're in sociology discussing phobias. Mr. Biddle says there are people who avoid eating in public because of fear of vomiting. There are others who don't eat things that look bad when thrown up (like spaghetti). Jeff goes, "What looks good thrown up?" Martin goes, "Corn chips." That's what kind of day I'm having. "What's fear of Ronald McDonald?"--"McPhobia." Because Dale used to be afraid of Ronald McDonald.

Unfortunately

"Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide."

 

I Like My Lepidoptery With A Dash Of Philosophy On The Side

Do butterflies have caterpillar memories?

What's It Worth To Ya?*

This morning, as I pulled into the parking lot at the bank, I noticed a backhoe parked at an angle in one corner of the lot. A passing thought flitted through my mind: "They just sealed the blacktop last week. I wonder if they're going to have to dig it up for some reason."

But then, I watched as an older couple--probably in their mid-seventies, walked up the sidewalk, having just come out of the bank. She was carrying a big black tote bag--the kind with sleeves for photos, though there were no photos in it. She handed it to her husband, who was right behind her and then she climbed into the backhoe and he handed the bag up to her as she situated herself in a seat behind the driver's seat in the backhoe's open cab. She immediately began digging through her tote bag as her husband climbed into the driver's seat and started the backhoe.

At this point, I had readied my deposit (despite the considerable distraction) and unable to figure out a remotely subtle way to take the photo I was dying to take, I pulled around the bank to the drive-through window, so I didn't see them actually drive this enormous backhoe away--though they must have since they were out of sight when I came back around the corner of the building from making my deposit. 

Not being the sort who is familiar with backhoe sizing, I can't tell you exactly how enormous it was, but I can say for certain, it was not the little rental backyard-sized backhoe you sometimes see. No, this was at the very least a mid-range, two-seater! It was of a size that would not be at all out of place doing road work along the highway. And this seventy-something-year-old couple drove away in it!

I've spent most of the afternoon and evening trying to figure out what circumstances could possibly have ended in a trip to the bank in a backhoe and, to be honest, I've still got nothing. Anybody?

*They say a picture is worth a thousand words. In the absence of what would've no doubt been a fantastic picture, would you settle for 338* words?

*Not counting the footnote.*

*Or this one. And so on...

Have It Your Way (But Only If Your Way Is A Rerun of a Post Originally Run In August of 2005)

Sometimes when I am having a very bad day, I will comfort myself with this thought: "At least I don't work at Burger King." This is nothing against the people who do work at Burger King--in fact it's the opposite. I toiled away many weekends and after school evenings at Burger King in high school and I can vouch for the fact that the job is often vile and horrible and much more complicated than it seems to the uninitiated.

When this thought popped into my head this week, it brought with it the memory of an incident that happened way back in my BK days that has haunted me ever since.

The story involves two guys: SA (whom I did have a fleeting crush on) and PL (whom I did not). In the Burger King kitchen there was a narrow walkway one end of which led to the front end and the other end of which led back into the kitchen. There were two garbage cans on one side of that path which were my responsibility as "dining room hostess." (Yeah, I know.) There were also various supplies stored in that area that were used in other parts of the store. One Saturday morning, PL had walked up the walkway to get something while I was in the middle of changing the garbage can liners. He was trying to make his way back into the kitchen, pushing a waist-high white plastic can on wheels, but was having a hard time navigating between the shelves and me. I was pushed as far against the garbage cans as I could go, even wedged between the two a little. While Paul was trying to push, pull, and jiggle the can through, he caught SA's eye and said, "Lardass." Clearly, clearly,clearly referring to me.

I was deeply wounded. Stunned. Could not understand why PL, who had never had a hostile word for me before, would say something so hurtful directly in front of me. The fact that the remark was made to SA, whom I did have a crush on and with whom I often had long, friendly conversations made the whole thing all the more painful. And SA's chuckle--ouch.

This is something I have dragged out on all sorts of occasions and low moments in the twenty-some years since, which is to say I have thought of it not often, but at least periodically--especially when SA crossed my mind or weight issues were nagging me.

In the context of weight issues, I most often thought of how sad it was that at a time when I was only slightly "overweight" and well within healthy bounds, I allowed such a misguided, narrow-minded, mean-spirited comment have so much space in my head and heart. And in an even broader, more political sense, I saw PL, SA and myself as victims of unrealistic expectations foisted upon us by the media. There were still a lot of times, though, when the memory had the power to make me wince, make me blush, make me squirm in echoes of my adolescent agony.

You get the picture: It has never fallen off my Most Embarrassing Moments Top 10 in all of the years since it happened. And never, not once, did it occur to me, as it did this time, that in the white plastic container PL was pushing was LARD, which was what went into Burger King's fryers until the arrival of vegetable oil in the more enlightened and health-conscious '90's.

So, it had also not crossed my mind that there was a real possibility that PL's intention was not to comment on the size of my ass but to make a silly little pun relying on the proximity of my ass to a 30-gallon container FULL OF LARD. The container was (not surprisingly) not spotlessly clean and there were smears of the white stuff visible on the lid and handles of the can so I may have actually had lard on my ass--which means I may have paraded around Burger King that afternoon with a shiny white substance on my (average-sized) ass, but I can live with that.

Lest you think I'm wholly delusional--I do realize that the other explanation, the conclusion to which I jumped and to which I've clung all this time, is still a possibility. In either case, I'm sure PL thought my ass and much of the rest of me was big--I was never an itty, bitty thing and PL was exactly the kind of guy to whom that kind of thing mattered in terms of picking girlfriends, but his making such an overtly cruel remark was out of character. In fact, PL and I went on to forge a fairly warm buddyship that was only mildly overshadowed by the nagging memory of the Lardass Moment. I have never really been able to fit the lardass incident into the context of every other experience I had with/of PL, but that never stopped me from holding tight to my original interpretation of events.

Regardless of the "true" meaning behind PL's words, what the hell is wrong with me? How foolish is it to be haunted by the words spoken by a person who was, at the absolute outside, a peripheral person in my life? A person whose opinion of me should've mattered little even in that moment and progressively less as time went by? An incident I should've dismissed if not that day, then surely that month, that year, and definitely in that decade!

Of course, if I'd done that we'd have never had the singular pleasure of this post and then where would we be?

Random Quote Tuesday

"With your gift comes a duty, in both senses of the word: an obligation and a special tax levied on something of value brought in from afar.

 

 

There is no escaping this, so you might as well accept it now. If  you turn away from your creative gift, it will not go away. It will fester, and you will become depressed.

 

You may have a modest gift. Still, it is a gift. It is not yours; it is entrusted to you. It is something beyond you, something you didn't cause to come into being, but something hat was handed to you. It is a gift, and with it comes a duty. Carry it lightly, but carry it."

 

~~Cary Tennis, "Citizens of the Dream," The Sun, June 2012

 

 



Masked Mom's Media Monday: Here Comes The Sun Again

[Generally, on the first Monday of the month, I run a review of my "Book of the Month" for that given month. The way I choose the book of the month is by looking over the books I read in the preceeding month--I usually have at least five or six to choose from. Imagine my consternation, then, when this month, I went to my "Have Read" notebook and discovered I had read only one book in the entire month of August--and that was definitely not the kind of book I'd be likely to review here. When I started trying to figure out how I had read only one book all month, it hit me that I had spent a lot of time catching up on magazines--including reading the five issues of The Sun that had stacked up on my nightstand.

In tribute to the magazine that so absorbed my attention in August, a rerun of the review I wrote in January: ]

I eagerly await The Pushcart Prize anthology every year. It's subtitled The Best of the Small Presses and showcases literary fiction, non-fiction and poetry from a variety of small magazines and other venues. It is a thick volume full of amazing work--the kind of stuff I would probably never otherwise have the opportunity to read, living as I do in a teeny, tiny town in a rural county with the nearest "newstand" likely to carry literary magazines of any sort hundreds of miles away.

Each year, I get a little crazy imagining all the work I'm missing by not being able to afford subscriptions to the magazines that originally published the work in the anthology's pages. One year, I did something about it and took $36 out of my tax refund money and splurged on a one-year subscription to The Sun.

That one-year splurge has turned into an every-year splurge (except the one year that Youngest Sister sprung for the renewal as my Christmas gift--thanks, again!). Occasionally, money has been too tight to renew on time and I have missed an issue or two, but I keep every issue I have received in a tub within arm's reach of my computer desk. More importantly, I carry photos, phrases, and revelations I've found in its pages with me everywhere I go.

It is difficult for me to speak of The Sun in terms rational and sensible enough to really capture its amazingness (see?). The Sun carries no advertising. The black-and-white photos sprinkled throughout each issue are simple and often breathtakingly evocative. Though Hubby doesn't read the magazine, I have often come upon him holding an issue, intently studying the cover photo. And when I got out a few old issues today for reference, I was repeatedly distracted by the amazing photography both inside the magazine and on its cover.

The writing within its pages is raw and gritty in its intimacy while often touching on strikingly universal themes. There is an interview at the beginning of each issue, usually with an activist of some sort or someone otherwise on the fringes of society--psychologists, physicists, artists, environmentalists, shamans and so on. January's interview was with Ina May Gaskin, "the midwife of modern midwifery." These interviews are always informative and often enlightening.

After the interview, there are fiction and non-fiction pieces, with poetry tucked in at the edges. And at the center of the magazine is several pages of a column called "Readers Write," which shares true stories readers have sent in response to prompts (this month's prompt was "Boxes."). The subjects are as limitless as the human imagination and the one thing the pieces all share is writing of the highest quality.

Here a few snippets from past issues:

"...Love

is the the thing you

press your face against,

trying to figure out how

to get inside without breaking it."

~~from "Lost Keys," a poem by Tony Hoagland, The Sun, June 2011

"'Do you think we'll ever be friends?' I say. 'You and me?'

'We're sisters,' Eileen says.

We could be friends--if you would change every single thing about you, I don't say to her; she doesn't say to me."

~~from "Final Dispositions," a short story by Linda McCullough Moore, The Sun, February 2009

"I am broken and my mother's old age is what's breaking me, I think, standing naked in my bathroom, one foot propped up on the sink, clipping my toenails. The bathroom is dirty: hairs everywhere, beads of mold in the corners. Cleaning has become a luxury. Someday I will spend one afternoon a week scrubbing my bathroom, but for now I wipe the sink with a dry Noxema pad, scrape some loose hair from a corner, and hurry out.

My next thought is: It is not a bad thing to be broken. When something's broken you get to see what's inside."

~~from "At Her Feet," non-fiction by Pat MacEnulty, The Sun, May 2008

"Raising three children is like fording a swift, waist-high stream whose stones are covered with moss: it's possible, but move heron-slow and measure each step, or you'll topple and end up who knows how far downstream."

~~from "My Anti-Zen Zen," non-fiction by Chris Dombrowski, The Sun, August 2011

Some of the things I read speak mostly to my mind, others mostly to my soul. The Sun is one of those things that consistently speaks to both.

Masked Mom's One-Word Review: Priceless.

Spiral Notebook Sunday: Friday, December 3, 2004

Friday, December 3, 2004

It's the little things in life that make all the difference. What was it that brought this tried and true lesson home to me in an all new way? Was it a glimpse of a gorgeous sunset? The lilt of a baby's laugh? The shadow thrown across a sleeping child's face by his eyelashes? The latest antics of Sachi, Ferret Princess?

No. A pebble stuck in a door frame was what so clearly illustrated the importance of little things in our lives. Monday evening, I was all set to lock up the flower shop. I turned the key in the lock, heard the bold start to slide--and it stopped in its tracks before it slid into place. I repeated this action (or inaction) several times. I jiggled the door in its frame to try to figure out if/why the door wasn't hanging properly in its frame. Exasperated beyond measure, I tried calling Cranky Boss Lady to see if she'd had any trouble with the lock when she'd opened that morning or, alternatively, if she had any suggestions from prior experience. Perhaps fortunately, Cranky Boss Lady wasn't home. I then called Hubby and practically begged him to come down to look at it. (Not that I really had to beg much--he was only too happy to have me ask for help-especially in that bordering on hysterical helpless female tone I had been driven to by frustration.) After I had secured Hubby's promise that he was on his way, I returned to trying to lock the door myself.

I was actually bordering on outright disbelief at this point. The door looked exactly as it always has--seemed to be lining up perfectly, but somehow, the bolt part of the lock was not sliding into the hole that had been cut for it in the metal frame. Minor in the scheme of things, but somehow all the more baffling and, well, menacing for its ordinariness. It's the damned door I lock and unlock six and sometimes seven days a week. If it can stop working--and in such a diabolical and undetectable way--everything's up for grabs. It's like the laws of gravity being suspended without warning or explanation.

As melodramatic as that no doubt sounds, I'm alarmingly close to sincere. I really was staring open-mouthed at the door and shaking my head in disbelief.

In a final act of desperation, I dropped to my knees to see if something was wedged in the edge of the door. Still, nothing was visible until I leaned down even further--on all fours, now, just to fully complete my demoralization--and there in the ridges of the metal threshold, shoved against the door frame, was a teeny tiny pebble. It was just large enough to hold the door open an undetectable hair width--exactly enough of a hair to keep the bolt of the lock from sliding into place.

The pebble was a tenth the size of a dime and a silvery gray color that blended perfectly with the metal of the door frame. In other words, not only was it a little thing that made all the difference, it was practically invisible, perfectly camouflaged--waiting all afternoon to teach me the valuable lesson of the importance of little things.

So taken was I with this learning opportunity that I actually picked up the pebble and set it on the credit card machine with the intention of saving it--sticking it with glue to a keychain or tucking it into a locket to carry with me everywhere as a talisman.

I left it there overnight--intending to share the wisdom of the pebble with Cranky Boss Lady before preserving the pebble for posterity. Before I had a chance, the next morning, Cranky Boss Lady had a credit card sale and must've flicked the pebble away without a thought.

The little things make all the difference in life, but they're dang hard to hold on to and not everyone appreciates them when they stumble across them.

Ways I Am Not A Grown-Up, The Tenth In A Potentially Infinite Series

Back in June, Sleepy Joe tagged me in a bloggy game and in answer to one of her questions, I mentioned that I'd always kind of wished I was the type of person my mother-in-law seems to think I am. Her four-day visit this past week reminded me of just how true that is.

My mother-in-law is so unlike the stereotypical monster-in-law style mother-in-law that she barely merits the title. She was raised in a very small town in New Hampshire by parents who were old-fashioned even by the contemporary standards seventy years ago and she is very much a product of that time and place. She is so soft-spoken and unassuming and self-effacing that I become a better person in her presence: I don't swear or raise my voice, not even a little. I organize family outings and never leave behind essential items. I never go to bed with dirty dishes in the sink--shoot, I never even sit down on the couch after dinner with dirty dishes in the sink. I am patient and loving and treat her son with bemused kindness even when he's annoying the crap out of me.

I don't even say crap in her presence. True story: we were playing Upwords one night during her stay and Hubby played the word "dungs" and was casually mentioning that he didn't know how correct the word was, not knowing if "dung" would be appropriately pluralized with an "s." And I said, "I have no problem using it in an a sentence: 'Of all the animal dungs I've smelled, elephant's is the worst.'" At the word "dungs," my mother-in-law covered her mouth and her eyes got wide and she even giggled a little uncomfortably as though I had said something deliciously naughty. It was adorable.

While I have reason to believe that my mother-in-law's got a solid steel core, her outer appearance is of a delicate woman easily startled and shocked by the world around her. So, though I don't actively pretend to be someone I'm not when she's around, I do try to be the best possible version of myself.

And, you know, I really like that version of me and sometimes I wonder why I can't be that person all the time. Then, my mother-in-law comes for a visit and I remember.

Being the best possible version of myself takes an enormous amount of effort and energy. And so, she goes home, and after a day or two of struggling to maintain these self-improvements, I throw in the towel yet again.

Flag Waving

[The following piece was written in 2003--two short years after the events of 9/11. For a variety of reasons, it seems kind of appropriate to run it here now as the Presidential election season is heating up.]

During my Army brat childhood, the only color I saw more often than the red, white and blue of the American flag was the olive drab of my father’s uniforms. My first flag-specific memory is of standing with my Brownie troop in front of the central fountain at the local mall, waving mini flags to the rousing accompaniment of “Stars and Stripes Forever.”  While my racing pulse could easily be dismissed as stage fright, at the time it felt like the swelling of patriotic pride.

The following year was 1976, the Bicentennial. The Independence Day parade that year cemented my love for the flag—forever linking those stars and stripes with prancing horses, booming cannons and, perhaps most importantly, to popcorn, cotton candy and dripping ice cream cones.

In the decades since, my relationship with the flag, like my relationship with cotton candy and ice cream, has grown considerably more complex.  A flag flapping in the wind still has power over me, but that power is now tempered by concern over the state of the republic for which that flag stands.

I believe that the values symbolized by the flag—liberty and justice for all, just for starters—are goals we as a nation often fall woefully short of. I don’t believe the Pledge of Allegiance, without or without the contentious “under God,” should be mandatory because I question the value of reflexive, unquestioning loyalty. And, whether I personally find it effective or merely obnoxious, I absolutely support your right to make a political statement by burning or otherwise defacing the flag.

In light of that last fact, it probably seems all the more contradictory that very little upsets me more than the sight of a flag being displayed well past its prime. The sight of a flag hanging in tatters distresses me in a way that the deliberate defacing of a flag to make a political statement does not. When an activist sets an American flag alight, it’s the expression of a passionate belief. When a flag is left to disintegrate in the elements, it is, at best, a sign of good intentions defeated by neglect.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, America’s on-again, off-again romance with Her flag was rekindled. The display of pride and solidarity was heartwarming, but now, years after the attacks, it seems as if many of those very flags are hanging still, much the worse for wear.

Around our town and county—and around the rest of the country, I’m sure—there are flags that have gotten snagged so that rather than hanging regally, they are all corners and folds, like some sort of accidental origami. Others have wrapped themselves around their poles, looking like sloppily wrapped burritos with a corner of red, white and blue tortilla left to flap in the wind. There are flags falling apart at the seams—including one I’ve seen whose stripes flap independently of one another. It seems I can’t leave the house without noticing yet another tattered flag.

All my stewing about the neglect of the flag got me wondering about what our flags say about our love for our country and what passes for patriotism. As upsetting as these abandoned flags are to see, maybe they are sending a necessary message.

In times of drama and tragedy—like September 11—we are out in legions, flying flags, raising money, loving our country, making a stand. When it comes to day-to-day living, though, to the issues that profoundly affect the lives of millions of Americans—poverty, inadequate health coverage, unemployment, lack of affordable housing and a host of other issues of quiet desperation in the lives of so many—most of us can’t be bothered. While there are organizations and individuals making valuable efforts, the majority of us remain steadfastly uninvolved. Not only are we rarely motivated to contact our elected representatives, pathetically few of us even show up to choose those officials. And fewer of us still are thoroughly educated on the issues we expect our elected representatives to handle on our behalf.

The events of the past several years have shown us that the barely noticed workings of our nation deserve our attention as much as the dramatic moments. Until we’ve learned that lesson, perhaps the hung and forgotten flags are an all too appropriate symbol of our patriotism and citizenship, of the privileges we take for granted and the rights we regularly fail to use to our nation’s full advantage.

Somewhere...

 

 

 

The Hard Way

One fine spring day, Daughter-Only asked First Great Nephew (two-year-old son of First Nephew) if he would like a lick of her ice cream cone...

 

 

 

 

 

 

And thus did Daughter-Only learn an important life lesson: never relinquish your ice cream cone to a two-year-old.

 



Cost Benefit Analysis

Replacement toilet seat: $12.98

Zebra print duct tape: $2.00

Zebra print duct tape on your broken toilet seat when your mother-in-law comes to visit: Priceless

 

Masked Mom's Media Monday

Masked Mom's Media Monday is taking today off. We will return next Monday with our usual pithy and pointless commentary.

Spiral Notebook Sunday: Monday, September 30, 1985 & Wednesday, November 20, 1985

For tonight's Spiral Notebook entry, I am digging deep(ish) and putting my true adolescent angst (or a sliver of it) on display. First, a little present-day context. Tara of the brilliant Faith In Ambiguity* mentioned on last week's entry that I sounded "relatively wise" for a seventeen-year-old and I promised her that I would post some authentic vintage teenaged angst this week. (What I did not tell her is that it will probably not vary too much from my authentic middle-aged angst except there'll be more crayon.)

Next, a little 1985 context. The entry this excerpt is taken from is my first after returning to the town where Mr. High School lived. Those of you unfamiliar with the Mr. High School saga need only know that I met Mr. High School in eighth grade, developed an insane crush on him over the summer between eighth and ninth grade and then I moved away mid-way through ninth grade only to return (partly because of a lingering, um, let's call it curiosity about him) at the beginning of our senior year of high school. This excerpt details my first sighting of Mr. High School upon my return to town.

After this melodramatic entry, it was nearly two months before he and I actually spoke to one another. Following the excerpt, there is a snapshot of the actual page from my journal on the evening of that momentous occasion. Perhaps this snapshot will give further insight into why I was drawn to the literary and not the visual arts.

One more thing: there are a few swearish words in this entry. I left them in for authenticity's sake.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

Monday, September 30, 1985

 

 

Being madly in love with someone who doesn't know you exist is not fun. Ok, that's a slight exaggeration. Mr. High School does know I exist. However, it seems quite obvious that he doesn't much give a shit whether I do or not. And in all honesty, why should he? It is unreasonable (but very creative) to think that the things that happened (or should I say didn't happen) between us would have haunted him the way they have me for the past two years. I have seen him only twice over that time and once he actually waved. However, this time 'round he was not in that kind of mood. I saw him last Wednesday at the Bloomsburg Fair. He freaked totally out of his mind when he saw me. Knowing him, he took it personally that I had come back to intrude upon his life. The thing about the Fair is that he didn't say word one or wave or even acknowledge my presence beyond the way his eyes nearly bulged out of his head and the way he nearly gave himself whiplash doing the double-take he did when he saw me. Maybe that's a good sign, the way he risked physical injury just to see me.

(The eternal optimist. Let's look at the bright side of this--so what if we have to bend over ass-backwards to find it?)

 

(That's going to be it on the subject of Mr. High School. At least until my stomach settles down. That's not to say that he makes me sick to my stomach. What he does do is get my nervous system in a panic. Not to mention the rest of me. So I think I will lay off the subject for a few minutes.)

 

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

Wednesday, November 20, 2012

 

I'm really not at all sure what's going on here. The original caption says it's "creative elation." From this distance, it looks more like a travel guide into a severe hormonal disturbance. There's a watermelon, a banana, a purple smiley-face-thingy with a gigantic rainbow exclamation point down the middle of it (the stand-alone sun is the dot for the exclamation point). There is a flower on the right and then a rainbow with a stem on it on the left. The heart is the pot of gold at the end of a whole other rainbow. As to what's going on down in the lower right corner, I'm not entirely sure--a pink chocolate chip cookie getting ready to land on a bright red flying saucer with flashing yellow lights, maybe? A petri dish moon rising as double suns set behind a red mountain? I have no clue. I shudder to think what a Freudian would make of it all...

 

 

 

 

*Seriously, you're better off reading any random post of hers than you are reading what I'm about to post here--I'll forgive you if you wander off.

The Sky Is Falling...

...okay, so it's not. But there is a very frantic Chicken-Little-like voice in my head going, "My mother-in-law is coming! My mother-in-law is coming!"

And while I'm not off to tell the King, I must go and clean and clean and clean.

Random Quote Friday

"Working with language is a means by which we can identify the bullshit within ourselves (and others). If we learn what a truthful sentence looks like, a little flag goes up at a false one."

 

~~George Saunders, "Thank You, Esther Forbes" in The Braindead Megaphone: Essays

 

One More For The Wisdom's Where You Find It File

At the halfway house dinner table the other night, the 22-year-old resident responsible for the spectrum* question  completely out of the blue offered the following thought-provoking words:

"Actions speak louder than words. You know what speaks louder than actions? All those thoughts in your head that you keep to yourself."


*I almost typed "spectral" question which would be an entirely different type of question.

I'll Let You Know When I Get There...

One of the intangible* rewards of my job is daily being immersed in a human nature laboratory of sorts--so many personalities shoved together in a situation that lends itself to intensity and intimacy of a sort. I have seen deep friendships form between people who likely would not have spoken to one another in another context. I am endlessly fascinated by all the variety of thought and feeling and just being that I am exposed to on a daily basis. Some days, it's a bit overwhelming and I fight the urge to run screaming from all the messy humanity on display there. Most days, I revel in it.

One day at the beginning of this month I was in the van and checked the transportation sheet that helps staff keep track of who needs picked up where and when. Scribbled across the top, I found this:



Granted, he spelled "cynicism" not quite right, but it's the thought that counts. And I kind of like this thought. (Click for larger view.)

*Where intangible is just a fancy word for "doesn't show up in my paycheck."

Noble Steed

One evening a few weeks ago, Hubby and I were sitting with my Dad and his longtime girlfriend on their front porch after a nice meal. The house was once my Nan and Pap's house and before they lived there, it was a hunting/summer camp from which the family escaped the Pittsburgh area into the comparative wilderness of Potter County, PA.

Though the house is much changed since my grandparents lived there--added on to and improved upon (there is hot running water now, just for one example)--it is natural to think of my grandparents when I am there. Perhaps because Pap was still living there when he died, his essence seems to permeate the house in a much deeper way than the essence of Nan, who moved into an apartment and then into a nursing home before she passed away. It is not only possible to imagine him sitting in his spot by the kitchen woodstove looking curmudgeonly while waiting for his ridiculously strong tea to steep, it is next to impossible not to.

So, the subject of my grandfather came up. He was a complicated man--with a bawdy sense of humor and a hair-trigger temper that exploded out of all proportion at times. He and my grandmother both had told me many stories about his temper and, of course, I had witnessed some examples firsthand as a child. He was also an alcoholic, though he had stopped drinking ("cold turkey," my grandmother told me) before my father was old enough to remember.

The story Nan told me of his quitting was that he had taken all of his pay straight to the bar and Nan found herself without milk for the baby, my father, and felt she had no choice but to borrow the money from the bartender. When word got back to Pap, she said, he never drank another drop. (He would not tolerate alcohol in the house--even made his beer-battered haddock recipe with Sprite. So sweeping was his prohibition and so forceful his personality that even years after he died, I felt guilty for putting a couple of wine coolers in the fridge at his house, where Nan then lived alone and absolutely didn't mind.)

That night on the porch, Dad said to me, "You remember that old ride-on metal horse? He rode that thing to the bar!"

"Mobo!? He rode Mobo to the bar!?"

Now, I'm sure some of my readers are not "horse people" and, therefore, may be totally unfamiliar with the world-renowned Mobo Bronco, who belonged to my father first and later was my near-constant companion throughout my early childhood. I rode him in Maryland, Texas and Colorado. I can even remember, when I was nine or ten, fighting my Baby Brother for a ride long after I should've given Mobo up. Getting Mobo going on the gravel driveway of the Pennsylvania house we lived in then was not easy, but was completely worth it.

He is a metal horse who stands about 19" high at his withers (4.3 hands to all you horse people out there) and 30" high at the top of his head. A rider sits on him and propels him along by pushing down on the "stirrups" which raises the body of the horse and as the body comes back down the mechanism pushes the horse forward on wheels hidden in his hooves.

I hadn't thought of Mobo in years--decades. I think I had seen him last when, about 24 years ago, we helped my parents pack up the house they'd lived in when I graduated high school and I assumed he was long gone. Then here is my father, with this blast from the past--and the hilarious (and somewhat pathetic) image of my 5'7" grandfather drunkenly maneuvering this (non-steerable) metal children's ride-on toy to the bar*. As my father laughingly pointed out, he must've already been drunk--surely he could've gotten there much faster walking or even crawling.

Talk turned to other things--politics, especially misinformation about Obamacare that is causing the fear and confusion that Republicans are only too willing to take advantage of (if not actively foster)--but my father couldn't let the horse thing go. Every few minutes he'd say, "I wonder where that horse ended up. I'm pretty sure it's right up in the attic."

Clearly, it was going to keep bugging him until he checked--it's a cursed trait he and I share. I have been in the attic or basement or rifling through filing cabinet drawers at 3:56 a.m. on a wild goose chase for something of only marginal practical importance on more occasions than I can count.

So, he went to the garage and toted in the ladder and crawled up in the hatch to the attic that is really just a glorified crawl space--you can stand up straight at the peak of the roof, but otherwise, there's crouching and hunching. I can remember crawling up in that attic for Nan as a kid and standing up in the wrong place and driving a roofing nail into my scalp more than once. I loved every minute of poking around in all that old stuff, though. I was born with an overactive nostalgia gland, I'm pretty sure.

Dad was up in the attic for less than two minutes when he handed the horse down to me. It is probably a testament to both my overactive nostalgia gland and to the general emptiness of my adult existence, that I got a little misty-eyed at the sight of him.

It's been a while, but when my father said, "You can have him." I'm pretty sure that was actual glee I felt.

And so, I've been reunited with one of the loves of my young life and Mobo has taken up residence in my entryway--where he startled the crap out of an unsuspecting Daughter-Only who first encountered him on a dimly-lit evening home alone. She said his eyes seemed menacing in the half-dark.

Maybe it's just me, but all I see is intelligence and warmth and, maybe, a couple of family secrets.



I told Daughter-Only of Mobo's long and noble history with our family (including the new tidbit I'd just been given), but she remained unconvinced of his value so I was forced to dig through the photo tubs until I found this:

L. to r.: Me, Our long-lost friend Tammy Cox, Little Sister & Mobo, off in the distance, looking steadfast as always. This was in Texas, so 1973 or '74. Mobo was probably the one thing I didn't fall off of during our stay in Texas.

Still, Daughter-Only did not warm noticeably to Mobo and I briefly despaired of passing along my appreciation for his pivotal role in so much family history but then Baby Brother stopped by and we dragged old Mobo out to show him to three-year-old Seventh Niece. She was lukewarm about him at first, the expression on her face verging on creeped out, but later, she came around:

Mobo rides again, sturdy as ever, beneath a fourth generation.

Mobo, recovering from his triumphant return to the family fold.

* A photo footnote:

Does this look like the sort of man who would drunkenly ride a children's toy to the bar? Uh, on second thought, never mind.



Masked Mom's Media Monday: Office Politics

As crazy as Cranky Boss Lady drove me in our ten years together at the flower shop, that job did have one major benefit: there were no "office politics" because after the first year or so, it was almost always just the two of us and an occasional driver, sometimes seasonal help. If there was an issue (and there were many), there was just the two of us there to work it out--or not. There was no "he said/she said" stuff, no competitiveness, no drama--or at least less drama than in a workplace with more players.

To be honest, Cranky Boss Lady, still drives me a little crazy, but the way things have been going at my current job lately, I actually miss the simplicity of that variety of craziness.

Masked Mom's One-Word Review: Ugh.

Spiral Notebook Sunday: Sunday, November 10, 1985

Sometimes, we have to learn the same lesson over and over again. The only difference between the me who, at 17, wrote tonight's Spiral Notebook selection and the 44-year-old me I've been these past few months is the older version recognizes the fact that all 75 of those selves are part of the same whole...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sunday, November 10, 1985

I've been 75 different people the past few weeks and it's beginning to pull me apart. I'm sure the pull apart feeling is exhaustion.



(Yet Another) Random Quote Saturday

"Did the ghosts of friends and family come and serve as my muses? Aren't ghosts merely delusions in grief? I know now that these questions are meaningless and the answer is absolute. What are ghosts if not the hope that love continues beyond our ordinary senses? If ghosts are delusions, then let me be deluded. Let me believe in the limitlessness of love, the beauty of contradictions, the miracle that is an ordinary part of life."

~~Amy Tan, "The Ghosts of My Imagination," The Opposite of Fate

The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Blogger

At work, today is one of my two days off per week. Despite being off, I somehow managed to spend MORE hours at work than I would on a normal scheduled day. I did this after getting up at a ridiculously early hour (especially after working til 11 p.m. last night) to drive Daughter-Only and First Niece to catch a bus to NYC to see Second Niece. We were late for the bus in the town twelve minutes away, but only by a couple minutes, so rather than making the girls wait around for three hours for the next bus, I tried to chase the bus down at its next stop thirty minutes away. We arrived at the stop there just in time to see the bus pulling away so...in for a penny and all that crap...we chased it, er, followed it to the town forty-five minutes away and the girls were unceremoniously packed on to the bus and made it to NYC at their originally scheduled time.

What I am trying to say is that tonight, I am continuing my almost unbroken string of disappointing blog posts. Here's hoping I get to spend some quality time with my drafts folder soon--otherwise, I might end up in Blogger Time-Out.

Random Quote Thursday

"We need a new definition of 'defense' that takes into account the quality of our education, the health of our people, the preservation of the environment, the strength of our transportation, the development of alternative fuels, the vigor of our democracy."

~~George McGovern, "A Letter to Barack Obama," "Easy Chair" column, Harper's, September 2011

(Nearly) Wordless Wednesday: Circle of Life Update

March 28, 2012

August 11, 2012

Ways I Am Not A Grown-Up, The Ninth In A Potentially Infinite Series

I have a hard time keeping secrets--especially my own.

Masked Mom's Media Monday: Red

Back in the olden days, back before the internet, before MTV, things were different. Our musical horizons were limited to pop music radio stations, to American Bandstand, to the occasional "rising star" featured on Solid Gold--especially if you grew up in the sorts of backwater towns that I did. These towns lacked not only a cultural "scene" of any sort, but often lacked a radio station that played anything from the decade in which we currently lived.

Despite growing up in just such a town, Daughter-Only's experience has been entirely different. Thanks to the internet, a woman such as myself (with my wholly unsophisticated musical tastes) has somehow managed to birth and raise a daughter who is thoroughly devoted to the concept of "indie" music. Many of the artists and bands to whom Daughter-Only has sworn her devotion measure their success in "hits" on YouTube, in the sales of albums and merchandise they produce in their own garages and ship out to a narrow, but nonetheless, rabid fanbase.

So it was that by the time Dia Frampton made her "debut" on NBC's The Voice, her actual voice had long since been a staple in our home. Daughter-Only's obsessive replaying of Dia's solo work and her work with her sister (as Meg & Dia) was a refreshing break from what I considered the monotonal droning of much of the music Daughter-Only listened to. Once the world at large was introduced to Daughter-Only's well-kept secret, Dia scored a major label recording contract (and second place on the first season of The Voice under the direction of "coach" Blake Shelton) and her album Red was wrapped and tucked into the Christmas tree for Daughter-Only.

Each spring, when I worked at the flower shop with Cranky Boss Lady, there was a four- to six-week window when we could get a "filler" flower called boronia heather.* Its delicate, hot pink flowers grow in clusters on a semi-woody stem. It is gorgeous to look at, but the major selling point as far as Cranky and I were concerned was its scent. It is a scent unlike any other--sweet, but not cloyingly so, crisp, almost citrusy--it is a bright smell, if such a thing exists. It is so addictive that I remarked more than once to Cranky Boss Lady that even as I was smelling it, I was still actively craving it.

Dia's voice is kind of like that. There is a sweetness to it, but not the bubble-gummy pop sweetness of many young female singers. Instead, there is a cripsness there, a purity, a clarity that works no matter what the tempo or subject of the song. In the songs that deal with heavier topics (such as "Isabella," in which the narrator urges a young girl to leave the turmoil of her parents' home or "The Broken Ones" with the lyrics, "I can't help it, I love the broken ones/The ones who need the most patching up."), the contrast of that sweet voice with the dark lyrics is deliciously, irresistibly poignant. 

Speaking of lyrics, Dia is more than just an amazing voice--she also wrote or cowrote everything on the album. The lyrics are not merely catchy, but also witty and intelligent. Though be warned--nearly every song has serious earworm potential.

Red is that exceedingly rare album that Daughter-Only and I agree on. By virtue of that fact alone, it is a remarkable work.

Masked Mom's One-Word Review: Enjoyable. 

*Alas, there was no scratch-n-sniff link available. Google really let me down on this one.