In Which Woody Allen Ruins The Left Bank

Without Wonder

by KARA VANDERBIJL

Midnight in Paris
dir. Woody Allen
100 minutes

Midnight in Paris captures the reverberating warmth of the only place in the world that meets all of your expectations by kissing them fondly on both cheeks. As with all places you have never or only rarely been to, the images feel prehistoric, frozen in a time and place well outside of our hectic present.

Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) and Inez (Rachel McAdams) bicker about whether not they should move to Paris. They have just accompanied Inez’s parents on a business trip, and Gil — whose career has been successful and entirely unsatisfying — hopes to find inspiration for his first novel. Inez finds his pipe dreams of living in a Left Bank garret and becoming a novelist completely ludicrous.

Tension only increases when Gil and Inez meet up with some of Inez’s friends, Carol (Nina Arianda) and Paul (Michael Sheen), a pedantic asshole who belittles Gil at every opportunity. None of his companions want anything to do with Gil’s Paris — a city that nursed the creativity of his literary heroes — although they have quite a bit to appreciate about the Paris that can be consumed for the price of a museum ticket.

Inez wanders in and out of antique shops, devours profiteroles in restaurants. Her continual disagreements with Gil color all of their scenes together — even during a kiss, she whispers, “You wouldn’t want to do that, would you?”

One night, while Gil strolls alone through the streets, a group of friendly Parisians invite him into a vintage Peugeot and take him to a party across town, in the 1920s. Believing it to be a costume party, Gil laughs in the face of a very sincere Zelda Fitzgerald (Alison Pill) and Scott Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston), who is pretty enough but definitely not as obnoxious as he probably was in real life.

Within five minutes Gil believes that he has actually traveled back to the Paris of his fantasies and learns that when the Fitzgeralds offer you a drink, it is best not to refuse. Allen gets us to hate Inez quite rapidly because she hates Paris, and who hates Paris? Gil refuses to address the growing problems in his relationship, opting instead to invite his fiancée along on his escape from reality. It is no wonder that Inez cheats on him with Paul, who, unlike Gil, has evolved past a ninth grade reading level.

Owen Wilson is Gil Pender is Woody Allen, the least Woody Allen of all Woody Allens not played by Woody himself. Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll) is absolutely ridiculous in every way we would expect Hemingway to be ridiculous, stringing monosyllabic words together in quick succession and going on about how much he wants to fight. Adrien Brody cameos as Salvador Dali. Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates) seems to like Gil’s novel a little bit more than she actually would have. Midnight in Paris comes off as an overblown English major’s wet dream.

Gil steals Inez’s pearl earrings to give to Adriana (Marion Cotillard) and spends far too much time lying to Inez, whose father has hired a private detective to monitor Gil’s comings and goings. It is all a lot like Match Point, except Gil steals Pablo Picasso’s girlfriend and then he does not have to kill her in the end because she is already dead.

Inez, Adriana, and an alluring little ingénue named Gabrielle (Lea Seydoux) direct Gil’s experience in Paris, over which he progressively loses control. When Gil asks her what she has been up to, Gabrielle smiles and replies, "Dinner with friends."

Allen slowly narrows the scope of his story little by little — from the grandiose lights of the Tower to a string of bulbs hanging in a narrow alley — until it is possible that a world containing Montmartre and La Place de l’Opera should also contain an American screenwriter and his fiancée on a bridge, overlooking the lily pond that in all likelihood engendered the entire Impressionist movement.

Like all Woody Allen doubles, Gil is afraid of death, and we get the impression that settling into a future with Inez will be the end of him. Since settling is inevitable, you might as well settle in the present, where the worst thing that can happen to you is getting caught in the rain.

Kara VanderBijl is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about Breillat's Fat Girl. You can find her website here.

My Favorite Movies

by WOODY ALLEN

When I awake during the night, to quell my existential panic I make lists in my mind. This sometimes helps me fall back asleep. Almost always the lists are of movies - adding and subtracting titles, substituting. My tastes seem to me unremarkable except in the area of talking plot comedies where I seem to have little tolerance for anything and certainly not my own films.

Fifteen of Woody Allen's Favorite American Films In No Particular Order

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Double Indemnity

Shane

Paths of Glory

The Godfather: Part II

Goodfellas

Citizen Kane

White Heat

The Informer

The Hill

The Third Man

Notorious

Shadow of a Doubt

A Streetcar Named Desire

The Maltese Falcon

Twelve of My Favorite European Films And Three Favorite Japanese Films

The Seventh Seal

Rashomon

The Bicycle Thief

The 400 Blows

Grand Illusion

Rules of the Game

Wild Strawberries

8 1/2

Amarcord

Throne of Blood

Cries and Whispers

La Strada

Breathless

The Seven Samurai

Shoeshine

(Note: If we take Citizen Kane from the top list and put it in the second list, this would be my list of the best films ever made.)

Silent comedies are all taken up by Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin.

I put comedies in two categories - comedian's films which can be awful save for the comedian's work and comedy movies that have plots. Of the comedian's films or broader sillier films that I always laugh at are:

Duck Soup

Monkey Business

Horse Feathers

A Night at the Opera

A Day at the Races

Monsieur Beaucaire

You Can't Cheat an Honest Man

Never Give a Sucker an Even Break

Casanova's Big Night

Airplane!

Of talking plot comedies, I'm hesitant to say my list because my taste is eccentric and there are any number of comedies I love that would make me seem foolish or should I say, foolish in the eyes of the world. Plus there are any number of iconic comedies that never have and never will give me a laugh and I don't like to hurt the feelings of anyone who turns such a tough dollar making screen comedies or even their descendants.

I will admit my list is always topped by The White Sheik, and when I think of American comedies my conviction is that no finer ones exist than Born Yesterday and Trouble in Paradise. Also The Shop Around the Corner is pretty damned good (I get a lot of fishy looks when I tell people I think Born Yesterday is the best all-time American stage comedy but it's the way I feel. A close second is The Front Page, the play.) After the above four, my insomnia list gets dicey for public consumption with a few predictable choices but many very personal ones. Incidentally, my list never includes my own comedies.

From a note to Eric Lax. 

"United" - Pete and the Pirates (mp3)

"New Year" - FM Belfast (mp3)

"Dreaming" - Seapony (mp3)

The Best of Woody Allen on This Recording:

Emily Gould on Manhattan

Alex Carnevale on Mighty Aphrodite

Pauline Kael on Interiors

Sarah LaBrie on Match Point

Yvonne Georgina Puig on Crimes and Misdemeanors

Tyler Coates on Annie Hall

Julie Klausner on Hannah and Her Sisters

Molly Lambert on Woody's sequels

Joan Didion versus Woody Allen

Karina Wolf on Woody's New York

Durga Chew-Bose on Mariel Hemingway

In Which We Want Our First Time To Be With Someone We Don't Love

Overweight Individual

by KARA VANDERBIJL

Fat Girl
dir. Catherine Breillat
86 minutes

A popular paradox suggests that French people subsist entirely on a diet of saturated fats and somehow manage to stay slender; another claims that a country of cynical, intellectual snobs can also be the most misguidedly romantic among us. In Catherine Breillat’s provocative film Fat Girl, recently released on Criterion Blu-Ray, all these truths come up against serious obstacles. The only one that remains impervious to doubt is the high nutritional value of the average croissant.

Two sisters — Elena (Roxane Mesquida) and Anais (Anais Reboux)  — are on the Atlantic coast in France for what will certainly be the last summer vacation of their childhood and innocence. Slipping away from their home one afternoon in search of entertainment, the girls discuss what sort of man they would like to lose their virginity to. Long-legged, doe-eyed Elena claims that love will do her in, whereas overweight and serious Anais admits she would like to share her first time with someone she does not love. “What if I find out he doesn’t love me? What if I stop loving him later?” she asks. Elena flippantly remarks that nobody would want to sleep with her sister because of her weight.

Anais’ rebuttal that a man might sleep with, but will hardly fall in love with a beautiful girl who has no substance comes true about five minutes later, when the sisters end up at a sidewalk café next to a young Italian named Fernando. He has but to stumble over a few French words and put Elena’s fingers in his mouth for her to put her tongue in his. Anais devours a banana split (of course!) and watches the amorous spectacle curiously, enviously. This is what happens during vacations on the French coast.

Americans have trouble enjoying their holidays because they feel like they ought to be working to earn more of them. The French, on the other hand, don’t enjoy holidays because they have too many of them. Be you scholar, soldier, or Nicolas Sarkozy you will begin your career in France with six weeks of paid vacation. A lot of time to spend lying on a beach or skiing in the Alps, you might say, and you would not be wrong. More importantly, though, six weeks is a long time to spend thinking about yourself, and what life is all about, and whether or not you should sleep with the older Italian man you just met.

This is a film about sex, although not as much as Breillat’s carefully explicit scenes would suggest. Elena invites Fernando to her and Anais’ bedroom on the first night, commanding her sister to feign sleep while she fools around with him. For a while we forget that Anais is in the room only because we take her place as the voyeur. Through her eyes we are forced to remember the violence of the sexual act—the fear of the first time giving way under the pressure of a primal desire. Once initiated into it we rarely think back on when we first discovered that strange and pleasant task of our body; Anais reminds us that the discovery was traumatic, embarrassing, and absolutely sublime.

Beneath the humor of Fernando and Elena’s pre-coital exchange resides a sinister darkness that allows us to experience pity for Elena for the first and only time in the film. Fernando asks her to put on music, to stop talking, to “prove her love”. He tells her the stories of his various romantic exploits and complains when she shies away from intercourse. “Do you really want me to go alleviate myself with another woman?” He finally pressures Elena into having anal sex, promising that she will still be a virgin. If you are not yet tired of the stereotypical Italian male, watch Breillat unveil him in his entirety.

Anais writhes in humiliation, envy, and her own budding desire across the room from them. Her only summer fling came into being in the pool, where she engages herself to the wooden leg of a dock and subsequently cheats on it with the metallic ladder. “Are you jealous?” she whispers to the dock, tenderly kissing it, wrapping her legs around it. “Yet you will be the one to benefit from what every other lover will demand of me!” This humorously heartbreaking exchange ends as she reclines on the dock.

She is wiser than we are and yet terribly naïve, chewing on the end of phallus-shaped foods and struggling into a mint green dress her sister also tried on. Because she disapproves of her only role model, Anais learns to regulate herself, adopting an independent moral code at the age of twelve. This is admirable; what is not admirable is that her rich inner life is not encouraged, since no one can look past her exterior. Shockingly (and refreshingly!) this also applies to her beautiful sister. A bad sort of person cannot look past his biases, but the worst sort of person is completely incapable of looking at anyone else. Everyone in Fat Girl is the latter sort of person, except for the sisters.

Traditional roles of parent and child disappear in favor of passive aggressive power struggles. The girls’ father is a French workaholic, in other words a living oxymoron. Early on he abandons the female members of his family to vacation alone while he returns to work. He, Fernando, and a rapist at a rest stop are the only active males in the film, and while they may possess emotional and physical power over the women, they do not evolve past the roles of “absent father”, “smooth-talking woman-hating bastard”, and “sociopath criminal”. For all their despicability, they can only passively turn Elena and Anais into not-girls-not-yet-women. This metamorphosis actually happens in the dark space between Elena and Anais’ single beds, between their entwined hands reflected in the bathroom mirror.

What first appeared as a spiteful, yet comfortable sibling rivalry flowers into a much more complex relationship throughout the film. Mesquida’s brilliantly executed Elena is the moveable feast of this film, whiny, casually cruel, and somehow endearing in her blossoming womanhood; Anais feeds on her example even as she rebels against it. Family vacation does not force them to spend all their time together — they do it naturally, spurred on by curiosity of the other’s complete dissimilitude and the irrevocable intimacy that exists between them. “You are the one person I cannot forgive,” confides Elena as they stand before the mirror, staring at girlish bodies whose capabilities were long ago surpassed by those of prematurely skeptical minds. This is the most important relationship of the film, because it transforms two sisters into the left and right brain of a single being.

They fight for the maternal role that the woman who birthed them never claims. This pinch-faced, dark-haired broad spends the entire film in a glossy bathrobe, smoking cigarette after cigarette while her daughters suffer. She brushes off Anais’ tears as “adolescence” and her eating habits as “hormonal”, slaps her when she finds out about her older daughter’s dalliances, and stands by passively as her girls struggle to find out which one of them is right. Food, cigarettes, and oral sex function as appeasement in scenes fraught with conflict: parents chain-smoke over a tense breakfast, Elena soothes Fernando’s frustration away with a short blowjob in the garden, and of course Anais eats. When she gets sick in the car on the way home, Elena pats her back as she throws up. Love masquerades as cruelty, cruelty masquerades as love, and both of them somehow end up in bed with Anais and Elena.

Unsurprisingly, Fernando’s declarations of love prove false when the engagement ring he gave Elena turns out to be stolen from his mother. Their remaining parent, infuriated, ushers both girls into the car and recklessly begins the drive back to Paris with a cigarette on her lip. Thus ends the vacation, but their return to reality proves even more devastating. While spending the night at the rest stop, Elena and her mother are respectively bludgeoned with an axe and strangled with a scarf by a local criminal; Anais, though she escapes into the woods, is gagged and raped. The look on her face is horrifying; this was only to be expected, it seems to say, with perhaps a little bit of contentment.

Some may express shock at this overtly violent ending, while in fact it festered underneath everything the whole time: the loud yellows and corals of the girls’ clothes, the open resentment in their faces, and the dangerous pull of the ocean on the sand. In the end, Anais denies the rape as per her wish to be taken by someone she did not love. Pale and dazed, she contrasts sharply with Elena, who is covered in blood—and the paradox remains. In a film which unabashedly exposes everything, Breillat hides a most painful loss of innocence.

Kara VanderBijl is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about the history of blogging. You can find her website here.

"Lisbon, OH" - Bon Iver (mp3)

"Towers" - Bon Iver (mp3)

"Holocene" - Bon Iver (mp3)

"Hinnom, TX" - Bon Iver (mp3)

In Which I Pretend That We're The Oldest And Dearest Friends

Good Night, Dear Void

by KARA VANDERBIJL 

In 2001, when the Internet was still an infant, Heather Armstrong started a website recounting the details of her everyday life. "I should probably shoplift something before I die. Why do I daydream about Rod Stewart in inappropriate positions?" were some of her first musings. Heather had taken up web logging as a pastime while working for a startup company in Los Angeles; she wrote about living in this strange new city, her departure from Mormonism, and the quirks of her coworkers. A little under a year later, she was fired from her job and shunned by her family after telling stories about them online. None of this shocks you, but that is because you too were an infant in 2001. The 00s were full of scandalous Internet precedents that, today, wouldn't make you bat an eye at the evening news. But you have to understand that none of this had ever happened before.  

Online diaries appeared early on, despite the fact that no one but Don Draper and Moleskine aficionados had kept journals for many moons. Pioneers like Justin Hall gave guided tours of the web to the handful of people able to navigate it without a search engine.

Historical records, however, attest to the fact that a primitive blog post appeared in 1977 when Jimmy Carter wrote a tender message to extraterrestrials. "This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so that we may live into yours." He stowed the note upon the unmanned probes Voyager I and II before they were launched into space along with a conglomeration of Mozart recordings and random pictures of animals that we now refer to as the Golden Records. Since champagne bottles with notes inside had previously been the only way of communicating with complete strangers, we might call his gesture momentous. More significant was the fact that we managed to lasso an expanse of this unknown into a monolithic box of wires in our parents' den and call it cyberspace. I do not know what cyber means but for all intents and purposes in this post it will mean small and domesticated, not unlike a Chihuahua.  

Do you remember how large it was? How your father dared not tinker with it, and how your mother tiptoed past lest it wake from its sterile slumber? Even you had trouble closing your eyes at night against its subtly threatening electronic whir.  After you were tucked safely in bed your parents spent approximately twenty million years attempting to dial up to a distant planet called Juno, which somehow kept them in touch with the rest of the world. Maybe they found Justin Hall. Your father learned to type e-mails uniquely with his index fingers and your mother discovered online recipes. Much later you understood that your parents were the first unsuccessful targets of a mass marketing campaign that ultimately worked on you by creating your universe ex nihilo. Previous interactions with childhood artifacts such as the green expanse of a front lawn or the primary colors of a rainbow Popsicle lost sense until they could be revived in golden Instagram tones.  

In 1998 Google reared its multi-colored head and putting your name on things suddenly and instantaneously mattered.  For the first time in millennia something traveled faster than the common cold and the Pony Express. Cyberspace coughed once and information went viral — your credit card number, that e-mail to your ex, all your thoughts and feelings, and Heather's annoyance with her Prada-purchasing employer. The resulting vertigo was much like watching a film made twenty or thirty years ago but set twenty or thirty years in the future, in which all of the technology is outdated. When you live in cyberspace, every future encounter already happened thirty seconds ago.  

Thus Meg Ryan dumps Bill Pullman and Greg Kinnear for Tom Hanks, who she meets first on the radio in 1993 and then online in 1998 in Norah Ephron's You've Got Mail. The film chronicles a romantic encounter and technology that were already obsolete by the time they showed up in a theatre near you. As such, we cannot really blame Kathleen Kelly (Ryan) for leaving a man obsessed with typewriters for the man able to make her jump three feet in the air with his AIM chats.

The film climaxes before it even begins with an online meet cute; the touch and kiss in Central Park are the natural, but unnecessary proofs of their affection. Kathleen takes her laptop to bed in an overtly metaphorical manner to chat with her mysterious lover. Joe Fox (Hanks) predates Twitter with his succinct wit. "Don't you love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies," he writes in an early e-mail. Blissfully unaware how easy it is to be disrobed by a clever turn-of-phrase, Kathleen virtually drops her panties in most of her replies. "Sometimes I wonder about my life," she confides. "So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around? I don't really want an answer. I just want to send this cosmic question out into the void. So good night, dear void."    

Early on, Kathleen confesses her greatest shortcoming to her online lover: that she is unable to produce quick comebacks. It was not the first time somebody would unconsciously compare online performance with offline performance, and it would not be the last; Joe warns her of the regret that results from "saying the exact thing you want to say at the exact moment you want to say it", but she does not heed his advice. And why would she? She has experienced the greatest love affair of her life in cyberspace; shouldn't the rest of life's exchanges be as potent as the ones that appear in her inbox every morning?

Yet when the inevitable exchange takes place in the coffee shop, Kathleen feels awful; she is used to ensnaring a man with her eloquence, not putting one down. "A perfect blend of poetry and meanness", says Joe Fox of her barbed comments, ironically aware all in one moment that the woman who has just insulted him is also the one who has wooed him, except this time face to face. This conflict would only be solved at the end by the kiss in Central Park, a gesture irreducible to an emoticon and the antidote to that tense moment in the café.  

Kathleen expresses herself in an incredibly long-winded e-mail to Joe later that night:

I've been thinking about you. Last night I went to meet you, and you weren't there. I wish I knew why. I felt so foolish. As I waited, someone else showed up. A man who has made my professional life a misery. And an amazing thing happened. I was able, for the first time in my life to say the exact thing I wanted to say at the exact moment I wanted to say it. And of course, afterwards I felt terrible just as you said I would. I was cruel and I'm never cruel. Though I can hardly believe what I said mattered to this man. To him, I am just a bug to be crushed. But what if it did? No matter what he's done to me there is no excuse for my behavior. Anyway I so wanted to talk to you. I hope you have a good reason for not being there last night. You don't seem like the kind of person who'd do something like that. The odd thing about this form of communication is you're more likely to talk about nothing than something. But I just want to say that all this nothing has meant more to me than so many somethings. So, thanks.

The most enjoyable part of the film profiles Joe as he allows himself to waver humorously like a holographic image over his Internet personality, hoping that Kathleen will guess he and her mystery man are one and the same. In a face-to-face exchange that resembles gchat banter, Joe and Kathleen exhibit some of the various outdated terms ("handle"!) and mores of cyberspace.  

JOE: So, what's his handle?  

KATHLEEN: Uhh…  

JOE: I'm not going to write him. Is that what you're worried about? You think I'm going to e-mail him?  

KATHLEEN: All right, NY152.  

JOE: N-Y-one-five-two. One hundred and fifty-two. He's a hundred and fifty-two years old. He's had one hundred and fifty-two moles removed, so now he's got one hundred and fifty-two pockmarks…on his face… 

KATHLEEN: The number of people who think he looks like Clark Gable.  

JOE: One hundred and fifty-two people who think he looks like a Clark Bar.  

KATHLEEN: No! The number… the numb… his address? No! No, he would never do anything that prosaic. 

In 1998 we briefly worried that people online might be the Unabomber or other assorted local killers, although our belief that people were much less genuine online than in person did not fully manifest until much later. We speculated how the appropriate screen names and passwords would weigh on our future relationship with cyberspace. George Pappas' (Steve Zahn) lament that the Internet was just another place to be rejected by women, and Birdie's (Jean Stapleton) wry "I tried to have cybersex once, but I kept getting a busy signal" were the first signs that elitism reigned just as much on the web as it did on the street. The odds of becoming a chosen one, a favored child, were only slightly higher online. This sort of intimacy with the Internet required you to take off a lot of proverbial garments: fears of what would happen if you trusted people you had never seen, of who might be reading your words, and of how dependent you might become on the relationship. Quick intimacy happened for people who never bothered to consider these questions.  

Casually mentioning Y2K will earn you a few dates and giggles at dinner parties, a lot of times from the same people who were filling their bathtubs to the brim and buying SPAM for the Judgment To Come. Coincidentally, what is most frightening about cyberspace is also what is most frightening about space. Neither one does anything aside from subtly containing all the information that we stow away in them. We pretend that they attack our wellbeing, but these claims most often turn out to be hoaxes. Our lights did not blink on 01/01/00, but if they had gone out the most dangerous thing about Y2K would have been your neighbor wanting to shoot you for your stockpile of Peeps, not your computer going insane. It would be nice to believe that uploading Chuck Berry and Bach and pictures of bunnies onto a couple of discs and throwing them out into the solar system might create empathy in an extraterrestrial, but the truth is that we are not dealing with a predictable system of 0s and 1s. We are dealing with ourselves, and we are our greatest threat.  

Your web presence is to cyberspace what unreliable narrators are to books. This is not a bad thing. In fact, the unreliability of its inhabitants is what makes cyberspace so interesting. Second in popularity to screenshots of Jean-Luc Godard is the hoarse lament that real life is somehow more important than life online — put the two together and Tumblr will cease to mystify you. Severe introspection may cause you to have a few rough months, which will in turn cause you to leave Facebook and get really into carrier pigeons. On the other side of this crisis comes the realization that nobody really believes your profile, the pictures you are tagged in or your blog posts constitute the entirety of your person.  Some people spend more time striving towards or sabotaging sincerity online than others; a sense of purpose abides in culling them out.  

Shortly after her run-in with employers and parents, Heather Armstrong cheerfully warned fellow internauteurs: "BE YE NOT SO STUPID." Hard to swallow, perhaps, since these episodes turned a little hobby into the dooce.com empire, a multi-faceted creature that landed her on the 2009 list of Most Influential Women in Media along with the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Martha Stewart, and Christiane Amanpour.

You would have to go back 678 pages to see her first post and you would find that Heather owes her fame not so much to her wit but rather to her historicity. She began like Dickens' David Copperfield, chronicling her life in dizzying detail. At its root dooce.com invited you into the front seat of a car sticky with non-caffeinated beverages (Mormon habits die hard) and informed you of things like the bodily functions of its author, her romantic disappointments, and her first taste of tequila. Conservative estimates place Ms. Armstrong's readership at six digits, proof that you can spend an inordinate amount of time talking about breakfast cereals and wake up to find you matter to the world.   You have to be the first or the last person doing something to be famous, and those lines blur fast in search results where only seconds separate one person from another.

When it comes to blogging nothing will get you a recognizable amount of attention except for detailed descriptions of your sex life, your drug intake, your latest shoe purchase or the fact that you read a lot of books. Truly intoxicating is the thought that the world may become unrecognizable — may even end — and leave naught behind but Twinkies, your favorite book inside a floating orb of light, and your personal blog. However, very little personality remains in the blogosphere. If you zoom out until you reach the edge of what you know, you might see how very undifferentiated you are from a distant star. Ex nihilo, nihilo.

Kara VanderBijl is the senior contributor to This Recording. She last wrote in these pages about her favorite novels. She is a writer living in Chicago. You can find her website here.

"You're Lyin' To Me" - Trey Brown and Mission Dorado (mp3)

"Careful What I'm Leavin' Behind" - Trey Brown and Mission Dorado (mp3)

"Is There Gonna Be Somethin' Left For Me?" - Trey Brown and Mission Dorado (mp3)