I approached last week’s SEO workshop dubiously. According to my understanding (which is based on what friends who do this stuff all the time) the best way to draw more traffic to your blog is simply to write all the time. And that’s not totally untrue. What’s also true, however, is that my neologistic propensity does not serve me well, when it comes to interacting with the creepy crawlie google spiders that be. Take, for example, the term SEO. Should I, on a whim, decide to refer to it as ‘Essie-oh’ instead, then, yes, my number of hits actually would go down. Maybe not due to that alone but certainly it plays a factor in it. So its a strange way to think about writing, basically, some words’ll crawl better than other words. Plain as that. Am I having a deja vu right now? Maybe. Lucky for me, the site doesn’t earn any money so there’s not reason to draw a certain target margin demographic to a particular page. Shall I further explain? I’m less cynical about it than I’m coming across, actually. But I’m tired nevertheless. Okay, more soon.
Nick Kristof’s op-ed in today’s NY Times, Health Care Fit for Animals is a short, effective, and refreshingly simple argument for health care reform in the United States. If you are feeling as overwhelmed by the healthcare debate as I am and are consequently avoiding articles on the topic, I encourage you read it anyway. IMHO, it serves as a vital Rosetta Stone for clarifying and contextualizing the various streams of discourse at the root cause of this collective frustration and anxiety. The response I posted on the NY Times website was an Editor Selection.
Stumbled across a Mad Men Season 3 Newsweek review that I found particularly lively, in that it gently interweaves the obvious and un-obvious allegorical nuances of the epic. Decided to further investigate. Blogger Dan O’Brien, understandably, prob gets a zillion times as much traffic as I do and his “Why You are an Idiot for Not Watching Mad Men” shows why. I’m cheating a bit by adding my friend Hollie’s blog entry about MM, since it’s actually about Season 1 and not 3 but truth to be told, Hollie’s blog is well worth reading in its entirety. Not only has she gone from being an actor to being a staffed writer on Cold Case in a period of a little over a year due to sheer determination, dedication and talent, but her insights about on-screen chemistry (which come from her acting talent and training) are actually applicable to all seasons, not just 1 or 3. In fact, while we’re backpedaling, I’d have to say that New York Magazine’s patented Don Draper Likability Index covering seasons 1 and 2 is still pretty fresh. Finally, please forgive my laziness (I’m not really lazy but I do really have to get started on my job hunt now, being that its a Friday and everything) if you really want to read Mad Men reviews, this metacritic link’ll be you there is no time flat. If I had more time, I’d try and dig up commentary on the music and on the cinematography and set design but that’d be another entry, I guess. Okay, so one more thing before signing off. For those of you wondering, why –despite the fact I can’t remember being this far gone over a show since Commander-in-Chief (which is actually what got me to start watching television for the first time since I was a teenager) there is a very specific reason that I don’t “Mad Men” myself on Facebook, here goes: while I loved working with this creative powerhouse during Season 2 and am not at all surprised to see Janie’s vision going viral in the form of the Mad Men Yourself phenom, I am apprehensive about embracing avatar altering fan rituals because, I dunno. It’s not really where or who I’m at, I guess. Then there are also those articles my dad forwarded me about virused Flash downloads and finally, because I’ve already got pics of my Mad Men’d self from the two Season 2 episodes I was in and I got em w/out downloading problematic software!
Click here to read my post about the Mad Men Season 3, episode 12 Kennedy Assassination episode titled “The Grown Ups.”
Click here for a bit of a babbley thought well intended (was new to blogging and didn’t get how spacing for the web and headers worked) and comprehensive description of my experience working as a featured background performer on the Mad Men, Season 2 episodes Three Sundays and Six Month Leave.
Mom can tell you everything about these. When and how they were made. Sometimes even by who. She had acquired all the horses before I was born. As a result, some of my earliest memories are of these horses. I remember spending long stretches of time studying one isolated pattern until I had completely familiarized before moving on to the next.
At different times in those early years of pattern recognition the shapes and colors came to mean different things. Characters wandering, lost searching for a fairy tale or buttons on a television set. Of course, my height changed as the context did. The saddle edge eagle and the mane, once so elusive were eventually at eye level, yet the mouth and ears remained out of reach. Growing taller meant gaining eye-level access to additional details. Returning to the horses now, as an adult to photograph all these familiar details made me sad beyond belief. Mom can’t keep them, as she had always planned on doing because she’s moving into a smaller house. Thus, they need to be sold. The horses —made by Hershel and Parker— are the real deal. Mom went to great lengths to get them restored properly. The bunny and the frog are smaller recreations of the real deal. Now I’m sad all over again. A Velveteen bunny type sadness. Well, okay, so long as they end up at a loving home or a place where they are appreciated as deeply as they have been thus far, I’m okay w/ it. Not like the wooden carousel horses are gonna know. Okay, look, its just plain weird being a human being, sometimes.
Although John Hughes’ films’ kinda began their downhill descent after Pretty in Pink and then careened into eminent demise after Some Kind of Wonderful, yesterday’s twinge of sadness (upon first learning of his sudden death) was made all the more acute by today’s radio retrospective. And what, besides soundtrack, could have possible succeeded in summoning up a melancholic parade like that. The outcast characters of his mythical Sherwood, Illinois all somehow managed to elevate the atmospheres’ around them through the soundtracks that their seemingly unaware characters, lived, breathed and moved within, thereby elevating the outcast experience right along with them. What was amazing was how, at the time, they seemed to resonate with absolutely everybody. At the time the phenom of the universality of an emotionally honest script, eluded me on a conscious level, while The Breakfast Club, his masterpiece, might well have been the most memorized screenplay since, well, okay, since Sixteen Candles. And even today, can anyone truly disassociate Ben Stein’s talk show appearances with his “anyone? anyone?” lecture in Ferris Beuller’s Day off? In those awkward and isolated early adolescent years, the Walkman & Echo and the Bunnymen/ Suzanne Vega/ OMD/Psycadelic Furs/ Simple Minds combo was the emotional subtext I moved through the world with. John Hughes and his characters seemed to always understood that, somehow.
When I was told I was about to watch a movie about a college professor from the late Paleolithic Era I rolled my eyes, anticipating some new Geico commercial spin-off. The opening had me chucking at it as opposed to with it. The script was way hokie. Plot points seemed planted and contrived and dialog silly. Then somewhere along the way, whoosh—sucked through the wormhole—there I was loving it. Was like the ultimate ‘what if’ fantasy for History Channel (without the annoying flashbacks), National Geographic and Scientific American junkies all swirled. Brought me back to those exhilarating brainstorming session I’d have with Brian Greene while writing Calabi-Yau. Anything was possible. Was using Aristotleian clues and formulas to speculate on how it’d end and got the rug pulled out from under, anyway. Thinking back through the craftsmanship, nothing was arbitraty, though I couldn’t have possible anticipated the outcome. Senses greater forces at play, I researched the writer, Jerome Bixby after watching it and discovered he’d work on numerous Twilight Zone and Star Trek Episodes during his lifetime. A TV show Bixby created in the 60s even inspired an Asimov story…whoa!
Saw Anne Waldman read Manatee/Humanity. Brunch on the patio with my friend, Jill and discussed what sort of work environments we should look for, according to the Myers Briggs. Finished watching season 2 of Mad Men, watched a one-year old discover birthday cake, realized that the camera that I thought was broken wasn’t. Night walk with boyfriend to look at flowers and swans and ducks and lake in moonlight. Some wealthy company is throwing all of their money at trying to get advertising on the moon, he said. We swiftly concluded that the likelihood of that occurring during our lifetimes is…not very. Cleaned and organized stuff a little bit but not too much. Didn’t solve and didn’t break anything. Took a bubble bath. Learned that my super supportive, inspiring and hyperprolific friend Hollie Overton just officiated her WGA membership and interpreted it to mean that, despite what it can sometimes seem, Hollywood does reward talent and hard work. Watched 15 minutes of that new King Arthur show on TV only to realize that the only ones who ever succeeded in adapting anything Arthurian were Monty Python/Terry Gilliam and Eric Rohmer Managed to actually get a little bit of work done. Live broadcast of Leonard Cohen’s London concert. Time isn’t moving too quickly or too slowly. Now, through open windows, breathing in the August night. Still thinking about the moon. Remembering the Smashing Pumpkin’s Tonight, Tonight video. What was that old silent movie they were referencing in the video? Loved how they created a video to rise to the level of the music’s fantasticalness. Wanted to see it; figure out more about the history Went foraging. Didn’t find it but found something else instead. A treasure in its own right. History of Moon movies presented as an Apollo 40th retrospective, no less. Windows are still open. Check out:
