In Which We Begin To Conflate Our Identity

Liza with a Z

by ELIZABETH BARBEE   

I am prone to self-pity. The smallest things make me question my worth: a torn stocking, a bad picture, an angry driver flipping me the bird. I am particularly sensitive to comments about my physical appearance, even when they are not blatantly malicious. Over the course of my life, at least 30 people, most of them strangers, have told me that I look like Liza Minnelli. When a conversation turns in this direction, I end it as quickly as possible and find a quiet corner in which to weep.

I recently shared my distress with my therapist, and he encouraged me to fight back. “When people hurt you,” he said, “let them know.” It seemed so simple.

We spent the rest of our session brainstorming comebacks. Most of my ideas were passive aggressive. “Maybe I could liken the perpetrator to Barry Manilow,” I suggested. When he said this was not a good approach, that it would make me seem hostile, I decided it might be best to offer a polite correction. “I could say, 'Actually I look like Edie Sedgwick.'” He laughed as if I were joking.

My mother came close to convincing me that being compared to Liza wasn't an insult. “She doesn't do it for me either, but a lot of people feel differently,” she said, “In the 80s, she was at the top of People magazine's 'Most Beautiful' list!” There is no evidence of this on the Internet, but there are a few pictures of Liza from that era that aren't too freakish.

Her album covers are usually flattering. At times, she even teeters on pretty (see the photo accompanying "Love Pains.") Just as I was coming around, I sat down to watch the 2014 Oscars.

Ellen DeGeneres was on a terror at the Academy Awards. Most of her jokes were funny because they were cruel. She poked at June Squibb's age and Jennifer Lawrence's clumsiness. Pretty standard comedic procedure, but I was in no mood for it. When the camera zoomed to my unfortunate doppelganger, I considered turning off the TV, but some perverse impulse kept me watching. “Hello to the best Liza Minnelli impersonator I've ever seen,” DeGeneres quipped, “Good job, sir.” It felt like a personal affront. Though I once thought them brilliant, I will never speak fondly of those CoverGirl ads featuring Ellen again. That will show her.

Part of the reason I take the comparison to Minnelli so hard is because I agree with it fully. Some comments you can brush off, but others hold too much truth. Liza and I have the same haircut, the same name, the same cartoonish features.

Because of the remarkable similarities between us, I have begun to conflate our identities. When I look in the mirror, I see her face. That is why I feel comfortable analyzing her flaws in such detail. I am not being critical of her so much as I am being self-deprecating, charmingly humble. Maybe I would have more confidence if I thought confidence were a desirable thing. In my experience, it is usually indicative of a lack of depth and self-reflection. I would have lunch with someone who thinks he looks like Lyle Lovett over someone who thinks he looks like Channing Tatum any day of the week.

Elizabeth Barbee is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Dallas. She last wrote in these pages about her efficiency apartment. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Born to Love You" - Ben & Ellen Harper (mp3)

"Learn It All Again Tomorrow" - Ben & Ellen Harper (mp3)

In Which We Predict The Rest Of Our Dating Lives

Debauched Youth

by LAUREN QUINN

The 90s were a brutal time to be a pubescent girl. It seemed like every time you got a good celebrity crush going, the object of your obsession up and died on you. The 90s may have been the last era of when non-conformist, non-commercial weirdos could still enjoy mainstream success, but there seemed to be a price for that: the 90s was also a time when being young, talented, famous and male proved an often-fatal cocktail.

What was a twelve-year-old girl to do? Build a shrine and crush out anyway. Because nothing says budding heterosexual co-dependency like a crush on a dead celebrity.

Kurt Cobain

This crush began young. As the most mainstream and well-known tragic 90s celebrity, the pervasiveness of Kurt’s music and persona provided plenty of fodder for your tween obsession. You pretty much tore down your NKOTB shrine to replace it with a Kurt one, in which you displayed a flair for DIY by crafting devotional objects, such as the drugstore votive candles where Kurt’s face was pasted over Jesus’s.

By age 12 you were wearing white plastic sunglasses and puke-green grandpa sweaters (just like the one on Unplugged!). Precocious, you even tried to read Naked Lunch; you gave up after ten pages but kept the book around cause it made you look cool, a fact none of the other middle schoolers seemed to grasp.

As an early bloomer, you were doing drugs and falling in love with strung-out street musicians by 15. Nothing enraptured you like a moody genius with dirty hair and “potential.” You wrote tomes of confessional poetry for these boys, which you self-published in a zine and sold at your local anarchist bookstore.

After a string of unsuccessful relationships that involved a disproportionate level of erectile dysfunction, you’re now either single or married to a dude in recovery. You’re a writer, painter or sous chef. You regularly read The Rumpus and have written a memoir of your debauched youth that you are too scared to show anyone.

River Phoenix

You grew up in California or Florida. Your parents were hippie artists and were in fact the first ones to show you My Own Private Idaho. River’s button nose, wickedly intelligent eyes and lustrous coif overshadowed the fact that he played a gay junkie, and you were smitten. You forced your girlfriends to watch the movie at sleepovers and though none you understood much, you all agreed River was cute. You were greatly relieved to discover he was not in fact gay. (The dead thing was still a bummer.) You became a vegetarian because River had been one. You made your parents buy you leather-free shoes and enroll you in drama classes. In high school you fell in with a crowd of slumming-it trust-funders. You dated at least one ecstasy dealer and were probably sent on Outward Bound.

You’re a crunchy granola type now. You have a weakness for yogis and pretty boys, and are loathe to admit you actually fell for the let-me-give-you-a-Chakra-massage line once. You have probably lived in Ecuador. You don’t care much for Joaquin.

with eliza hutton

Brandon Lee

You were a goth. You wore knee-length TOOL shirts and dog collars, and your neck was permanently stained purple from Punky Color hair dye.

Though Brandon wasn’t a junkie, the sheer spookiness of his death made him crush- worthy. You were attracted to the supernatural element of The Crow, which spurned your tendency to indulge in fantastical departures from reality. You learned to skateboard and liked to pretend you were Sara; you’d mutter her lines to yourself while cruising around your strip-mall suburb, the film’s soundtrack blaring in your Walkman. (“Eric?”) You liked to think that if you’d been born a few years earlier, you’d have been cast in her role.

You developed an affinity for doomed, epic love affairs; you dated boys who lived far away, had burgeoning mental illnesses or were not-so-secretly gay. From them you received tortured love letters, vows shouted at your bedroom window in the middle of the night and at least one case of scabies. More than one of them painted his face like Crow- style (NOT on Halloween) and took you on a date that consisted of drinking vodka at the local cemetery.

You are currently in an open relationship. You still own a pair of black raver pants.

Elliott Smith

Just kidding. There is no way you had a crush – like, an actual crush – on Elliot Smith and survived your adolescence.

Bradley Nowell

Since the only Sublime song you knew when Bradley died was “The Date Rape Song,” this crush didn’t really flourish until 40oz. to Freedom hit the airwaves when you 16 or 17. As such, it had a slightly less demented edge to it. There were no shrines, vegetarianism or role-playing, but there was a lot of singing along to the album as you drove around in your boyfriend’s hotboxed truck delivering bags of weed to local stoners. You were attracted to the way Bradley’s good-time vibe was twinged with addict despair (cause it sure as hell wasn’t the bucket hat that did it). More into partying than fashion, you were a no-frills girl who wore the same hooded sweatshirts as your skater/surfer/ bro boyfriend. Your relationship involved lots of keggers and hacky sac, and one pair of lawn-seat tickets to a Sublime summer concert sans Bradley (total disappointment but you made the most of it).

You now work at a microbrewery and play in an Ultimate Frisbee League. You are still together with the same boyfriend; you are often heard saying, “We don’t have kids; we have a dog.” You have a blown-out tribal sun tattoo on your lower back.

Shannon Hoon

You grew up in Indiana or Ohio. You had long hair and hand-sewn patches on your jeans. You spent a lot of time in the woods. You. Ate. A. Lot. Of. Mushrooms.

As the Weird Kid, you were attracted to Shannon’s peculiar inflections and out-to- lunch gaze. Having always felt you were born in the wrong era, you listened mostly to the Grateful Dead and Led Zepplin, so Blind Melon afforded you a slightly more contemporary connection with your peers. You enjoyed a few months of marginal coolness after he died. But then you dressed as The Bee Girl for Halloween and performed a twenty-minute tap routine in the lunchroom and were swiftly relegated back to Untouchable status.

As such, you didn’t date much as a teenager. You went to a small liberal arts college, where you met a kindred spirit in a Kafka course. Your honeymoon involved an Ayahuasca ceremony.

You are now a preschool teacher. You get really stoked every year when you get to play “Three Is The Magic Number.”

Lauren Quinn is a contributor to This Recording. This is her first appearance in these pages. She is a writer living in Hanoi. She twitters here and blogs here.

"Open the Door" - Magnapop (mp3)

"Waterfalls" - TLC (mp3)

In Which We Start Feeling Protective of Dakota Fanning

Growing Up Is Hard To Do

by QICHEN ZHANG

No one really thinks about why the movie industry has leeched onto modern life. It's so easy to accept the fact that you're paying $10 to sit in the dark with a bunch of strangers, getting early stage diabetes with your box of Jujubes. But if given a moment to think about it, the answer is nothing new. Cinematic timelessness haunts us. Despite this being a pretty primitive way to signify its entertaining quality, it perfectly describes the contemporary obsession with movies.

Every time a soccer mom sits down with her glass of Arbor Mist to watch Now and Then after dumping Timmy off at the park, she is incredibly capable of ignoring Melanie Griffith's mullet and see past all the late '90s denim in favor of more important recurring themes - of growing up, of family issues, of pre-teen whoredom (sometimes known as puberty). Not only do we accept the universality of young experiences, but we extrapolate and start believing that the actresses themselves live in a world that operates free from the rules of time. Who cares about time when you've got Christina Ricci's forehead eternalized?

But at the same time, this unique characteristic of cinema could very well destroy its appeal. The shock of realizing that actors are under the same cruelties of time as mere humans sends every time-specific movie down a spiral of disappointment. The inevitable confrontation of actors separate from their characters is like shock therapy. "What do you mean Nicholas Hoult is going to look like Nick Nolte in 50 years? Stop yanking my chain!"

I command you to look like this forever, damn it.No one ever wanted Anna Paquin to grow up after The Piano. No one ever wanted to witness Macaulay Culkin get married and divorced, all within two years. And maybe I'm alone on this one, but I sure as hell never looked forward to Brad Pitt growing a beard. Further examples help emphasize the point.

Someone buy this man a razor--this can't be legal.Exhibit A: Thora Birch. As Teeny and the younger version of Griffith in Now, there is a more pressing question than "What the hell was the casting director thinking?" The issue crops up after considering her entire repertoire. Not only was Birch kind of crass to professionally experiment on her then-audience in American Beauty as a rebellious, tortured suburban teenager pining after a boob job, it was totally unwarranted. I liked you already, Thora. Teeny had an attractive innocence that Jane will never embody, no matter how big her chest got. If you really wanted to make a career statement, you could've just gotten the boob job yourself instead of veiling it under a fictional characterization. Don't be a pansy, T-bone.

Just doin' my thang, being a teenager, gettin' all angsty on you.Exhibit B: Katie Holmes. Oh, the virtue of Joey Potter. Give me one reason to not like her and I'll ask why there are two more guys in every episode chasing after her than after you. Those puppy eyes and angelic charisma easily made the WB audience of lonely fan girls forget how the entire six-season run revolved about sex (and no one ever getting any).

Figure 2. Angst continued.Had we just left Holmes as is - as a mere vessel for one of the most relatable characters in primetime history - everything would've been fine. No exposing Tom Cruise's dwarf status. No awkward bob haircut. No domesticity association and horrifying redefinition of what it means to be a modern mom, which apparently involves getting coiffure tips from Posh Spice.

The product of Spice Girls idolatry finally bubbling up to the surface, otherwise known as a new, all-time low.Exhibit C: Dakota Fanning. Okay, so maybe time wasn't so cruel after all. But I'm still not convinced that Foxy Fanning growing up is a good thing. Let's just talk about how one moment I'm being victimized by her playing games with my heart as retarded Sean Penn's adorable daughter in I Am Sam, and the next, she's practically playing the baby to Letterman's cradle robber on The Late Show.

Just want things back the way they were!Maybe the most important lesson to take away from these examples is that we should be more aware of a fictitious time frame and realize that, no matter how awesome and sassy Thora was as Teeny, "Mel with a mullet" had to replace her eventually. Facing time's reality can be painful. After all, isn't movie-watching supposed to be a way for us to escape conscious life? But while it's difficult to prevent ourselves from letting the character mask time's effects on the actor, maybe it's something we absolutely need to do to enjoy the paradoxically permanent yet temporary performances that we find memorable.

Or maybe Dakota Fanning could start wearing more clothes.

Qichen Zhang is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Cambridge. She tumbls here.

"Lifeline (Barefeet version)" - Citizen Cope (mp3)

"A Father's Son" - Citizen Cope (mp3)

"Keep Askin' (acoustic)" - Citizen Cope (mp3)