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Everyone is talking about this recipe for mac & cheese that was the #1 emailed article from the Times online for like a week. Everyone I talk to has read it, and salivated over it, and some people have actually made it. Anyone want to have a mac & cheese party? I am dying to make this. It’s basically just pasta, butter, milk and about a million pounds of cheese, baked. The problem is that I honestly don’t know if my oven works. Yes, I’ve lived in my apartment for a year and a half, and made so little use of the oven that it’s not just that my oven doesn’t work and I haven’t gotten it fixed, but that I don’t even know if it works. This is probably something I should figure out. I would actually like to know if baking is even a possibility in my kitchen, should I ever decide to shock everyone I know by giving it a try. I even have cookie sheets, which were a housewarming gift after I whined loudly enough about wanting to have some “just in case.” Sometime last year I optimistically bought some Pillsbury sugar cookies, but the stick of dough is still in my fridge. Do those things expire?

It is something like 57 degrees out, and I didn’t even wear my coat today. I just got back from picking up some prints at this amazing photo lab across the street from my office. You have to walk up this weirdly industrial flight of stairs to get to it, and then the whole floor smells like photo chemicals. Mmmmm. It is such a trigger for my brain. Yesterday when I went to drop off contact sheets and put in our order I got back to work in a really bad mood. At first I couldn’t figure it out, but then realized that for awhile now I’ve gotten this displaced feeling when I’m in a photo gallery or a lab. Less so with the galleries, since I love looking at that kind of art on a lot of different levels, and my experience of it isn’t always related to my own work (or lack thereof). But being in a lab is a lot more emotional. And being in a lab like this one, where people are crouched over lightboxes and waiting for their stuff to process, and thumbing through binders of negatives and marking up contact sheets makes me feel disconnected. And duh, I am. It’s easy not to think about the fact that I don’t do photography anymore when I’m not in the middle of it, but when I’m there, and I can’t answer the guy’s question about whether we were getting our prints done by machine or by hand I get defensive and really, I feel homesick. Homesick for the darkroom, whichever one, any one. For that kind of process. But I don’t feel this way all the time.

So now I have these gorgeous 5×7 work prints that cost a lot of (not my) money because a machine didn’t just spit them out, and the edges of the paper are a little rough from where it was cut, and the idea that someone else made them is digging at me. I mean, these are just basic head shots of my organization’s executive director for using in this year’s annual report, but it’s this weird look at what I could be doing, or what I almost decided to do, and then didn’t, not quite on purpose. I’m not sorry (and yes, I know it’s never too late). But it still kinda sucks.

And then there’s this news:

Nikon said it would halt production of all but two of its seven film cameras and would also stop making most lenses for those cameras. The company will halt production of the film camera models “one by one,” though it refused to specify when.

Ouch.

Here’s what JT Leroy confidante Mary Gaitskill said back in 2001 about the then-distant possibility of a hoax:

“It’s occurred to me that the whole thing with Jeremy [J.T.] is a hoax, but I felt that even if it turned out to be a hoax, it’s a very enjoyable one. And a hoax that exposes things about people, the confusion between love and art and publicity. A hoax that would be delightful and if people are made fools of, it would be OK—in fact, it would be useful.”

Bookslut also pointed to another article this morning about the Leroy “revelations” (if you want to call them that), this time on Salon. The article was by Ayelet Waldman, and I read it, and it was okay. But then I clicked on “read all letters on this article,” you know, to see what the word on the street is about Leroy and partner-in-literary-scandal James Frey today. Here is what I mostly found:

Why does Salon insist on publishing drivel from a half-baked, modestly talented mystery writer? Simple: a)she’s a woman and b) if Salon didn’t publish Ayelet Waldman, we’d be stuck with another overwrought, self-absorbed female writer like Anne Lamott.

AND

Congratulations, Waldman. You successfully saved face by proving you knew he/she was a phony before everyone else. Your former support of Leroy won’t be embarrassing to you now because you knew it was a hoax….Oh, and also, congratulations for having a famous author for a husband. Because lord knows you wouldn’t be able to publish mastabatory crap like this without his name attached to yours, and stories of trips with him to Rome within the content to remind your readers of your viewpoint’s validity.

AND

You should listen to your husband more often. He is the sane one in your family.

AND

Congratulations on leading with an article so solipsistic, content-free, and unframed that it would do any teenager’s first blog proud. Kindly give Mrs. Chabon* a LiveJournal account and spend my Premium member money on someone who can write.

* Normally I detest the Mrs. appellation, but in this case I suspect it’s only because she is Mrs. Chabon that she’s so often welcomed to contribute her maunderings. Which makes it all the more painful that Salon published a lead piece about one hoaxer with celebrity connections conning another.

Hmmmmm.

And now I’ll stop posting about this shit. Maybe.

Andrew Bujalski (writer/director of Funny Ha Ha), has a new movie coming out, called Mutual Appreciation. He’s profiled in the Times:

[Bujalski's protagonists] are the most unassuming of existentialist heroes, slouching toward not epiphanies but the tiniest shifts in perspective. Both [Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation] are slow-burning comedies about the fear of adulthood made by someone who isn’t yet inclined to sentimentalize or belittle these threshold years.

…[T]he start-stop chatter in Mr. Bujalski’s films is less arbitrary than it seems. A master of the mixed message and a veritable sculptor of dead air, he’s deft at showing how inarticulateness can serve as defense tactic and passive-aggressive weapon.

The other day I watched Funny Ha Ha, this tiny little indie movie about some people wandering around their early twenties. It was pretty good. There were moments that were excruciating, conversations that went nowhere but continued for waaaaay toooo loooong, but it did manage to capture a certain kind of ridiculousness while also pointing out the ridiculousness of the ridiculousness itself. You know? And it was so homemade, it felt like the film was spliced together at the kitchen table. It never felt like anyone was acting, but it also never felt like a documentary… it just kind of felt right, and so the infuriating pieces wouldn’t have made sense if they had been less irritating.

Sometimes when I watch things like this I wonder why it’s even fun to watch stupid scenarios that are really close to your own life acted out on screen. It’s not like I really want to relive awkward conversations or drunken nights or bad dates or crappy jobs, or like I need to sit around watching the eerily similar tedium of someone else’s life on a Friday night. Maybe it is just like watching a train wreck, and you can’t look away. But it’s not, because it’s not actually that horrible. Is it kind of oddly comforting to know that your life can be approximated or portrayed with such accuracy? I don’t know. It’s not that I think we’re always looking for mirrors of ourselves in art, but there’s something satisfying about it when it’s done right.

I felt this way about Jason Schwartzman’s character in Shop Girl… he was so perfect(ly horrific) that it almost hurt, but it made me love the movie. Though that was different from Funny Ha Ha because the people in that movie were glamorous professional actors, so there was a level of detachment where you could just appreciate the artistry of the movie or the accuracy of the imitation. Where it could just be entertainment. In Funny Ha Ha, it just seemed like this is who these people were, that even if they were playing characters, their real lives were really similar to what they were acting out. Though there’s obviously an artistry in that, too. Really, I think it must be hard to do that kind of acting, to know that you’re essentially playing yourself, to carefully pause and scratch your nose and shift your weight and say “I don’t know” a lot, in conscious imitation of yourself and all your dumb tics that your acting job means owning up to.

I’m a little behind in my reading of this weekend’s Times, so I just noticed this piece in “Week in Review.” Using the recent death of actor Vincent Schiavelli (who played Mr. Vargas in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and that really scary subway ghost in Ghost) as a jumping point, Peter Edidin writes sweetly about the memorable faces of Hollywood actors who are not conventionally attractive, and how they enhance our experience of a film: Mostly, of course, movies offer beautiful faces and construct fantasies around them. But other, more idiosyncratic images of humanity have always been present as well, and with them a more expansive vision of what it is to be human. He quotes Nancy Etcoff, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School and the author of “Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty”: “Because we can’t fit [these actors] into a mold,” she added, “we have freer range to imagine who they are, so they can embody more complexity. Their features draw us in because we want to make sense of them.”

How lovely. But what Edidin neglects to say (or does he not notice?) is that the actors whose “idiosyncratic” faces have enabled their successful careers in film are almost invariably men. Can you think of the female equivalent of Adam Sandler? Paul Giamatti? Billy Crystal? Michael Showalter? Jimmy Kimmel? Steve Buscemi? Even Nicholas Cage? What about Jack Nicholson, these days (and don’t say Diane Keaton)? Many of these men are attractive, but they are allowed to be attractive by way of their distinctiveness, not after they meet certain standards.

Times film critic Manohla Dargis wrote an essay that ran in that paper about a year ago, called “One Word for What’s Happening to Actors’ Faces Today: Plastics.” She argues that plastic surgery is altering one of the greatest landscapes in cinema: the human face without pretending that this isn’t a gendered problem: Clearly, part of the blame for the spectacle of the post-human lies with the movie industry and its pernicious sexism; after all, Sean Penn wins awards with a face crosshatched with lines. But while it’s easy to blame the industry, the entertainment media, the satellite industries and the stars themselves, let’s face it: the other culprit, the faithful keeper of the cults of beauty and youth, is staring out at us in the mirror.

Plastic surgery preserves women’s faces so that they look younger (and less complex, and therefore less human) sitting pretty across from their male counterparts. So maybe that explains it. Maybe film audiences (or more likely, the people who make and bankroll movies) don’t want their female characters (or their movie-going experience) burdened by things like complexity. Laughing and frowning will both give a girl wrinkles. Better to remain neutral.

Regardless, I’m just sick of pieces like Edidin’s, where the writer is oblivious to the things that influence the phenomenon he gets to lovingly relate. It suggests that his set of observations and experiences are the end of the story.