In Which Cameron Crowe Knew How To Pick Them

Talk About Things That
Get Me Excited

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Singles
dir. Cameron Crowe
99 minutes

Kyra Sedgwick works for the vaguely named "Seattle Environmental Group", which probably amounts to a terrorist organization masquerading as a hedge fund. Her new boyfriend appears one day and helps fix her car, informing her he's an exchange student from Spain. The guy is pretty smooth, he gives her this really nice promise ring before he's "deported." She gives him her garage door opener for when he comes back. It turns out he was pretending to be from Spain. Cameron Crowe should ready an Elizabeth Gilbert-based lawsuit. (How Stella Got Her Groove Back was also a blatant infringement of his rights.) Good luck to the next guy she meets.

Hairstyles are codified, familiar. Cameron Crowe was evidently having sex with lots of different people in the Seattle area during this period. Campbell Scott's father left home when he was eight, and told him, "Have fun, stay single." Scott intones, in overbearing voiceover, "Work is the only thing I have complete control over."

His cubicle is a disturbing sight. The central machine appears ancient, rotten with some kind of papyrus note affixed to its membrane. Relics of paper ledgers contain god-knows-what information. The smell is redolent of pears and the slight afterburn a fax leaves in the air. There is no mouse. He appears to have altogether forgotten what being a human is: high speed DSL and a decent fucking browser.

Crowe views everything that occurs in retrospect through a gold haze. A relationship that falls apart is simply food for thought, and a reunion is always possible even when it's not. His peers navigate their world with spastic affront. Then again, their ancient machines deprived them of much wisdom. When Scott meets his environmental au pair to share water in an elaborate allusion to Stranger in a Strange Land, Paul Giamatti is making out with some girl at the next table, salivating over his water glass.

Perhaps anticipating her future role as The Closer, Kyra Sedgwick doesn't put out for several dates at least. To seduce her Scott discusses his plan for a SuperTrain. "People will park & ride, I know they will," he tells everyone he meets. It's amazing what a moron he is, I'm not sure if Cameron Crowe knew about this.

The idea of making a movie to praise yourself or someone you love is not foreign to Crowe. His new film, a documentary about how wonderful Eddie Vedder is titled Pearl Jam Twenty, features Vedder and Kurt Cobain dancing with each other in mutual adulation. Crowe's backstage look paints Vedder as a tortured soul that reaches back to his confusion over his real father. Eddie's every eccentricity, from his propensity to climb the stage and set, to overcoming his shyness, is worshipped like Pheobe Cates' left breast. What a wonderful time to be alive, and at two hours and twenty minutes, the euphoria lasts almost forever.

Everyone receives a trophy. He was a DJ in college. She's had bad luck with boyfriends. There's nothing on television, maybe one or two channels. Mostly reruns of old television programming like M.A.S.H. or older sitcoms, because the rights were inexpensive to acquire. In the eighties TV Guide began a spirited fight with TV Cable Week. New York magazine breathlessly reported that, "Readers of Fortune, Time, Discover, Life, People, Sports Illustrated or Money have often also taken TV Guide or Triangle's Seventeen." Does the past still excite you?

Back then TV Guide subscribers paid 69 cents an issue. There was a spirited debate over how many channels should appear in the magazine's listings. Different experts weighed in. TV Guide magazine was acquired by Rupert Murdoch in 1989 and you know the rest. Most of the individuals on the cover of TV Guide either became drug addicts, got AIDS while cheating on their wives, or in the case of Jay Leno, came out as a homosexual.

Was this a more innocent time? In comparison to the present, any time is infinitely more naive. The only problem any of these people really had was how seriously to take Jane Pauley.

Crowe also scripted the 1984 comedy The Wild Life, a loose sequel to his Fast Times at Ridgemont High, directed by legendary Hollywood producer Art Linson. The Wild Life has never made it to DVD because it uses every worn-out movie song you can imagine ("Born to Be Wild" opens the proceedings) and it would cost a fortune to purchase the rights. In every scene the intense urge to punch Eric Stoltz in the face is the film's driving motivation. Lea Thompson is so gorgeous the camera can barely turn away from her. Without Crowe's breakneck pace and his innate directorial desire to make his characters likable, the jaded teens just seem like overgrown assholes.

In fact, the crazy high school hijinks of The Wild Life and Fast Times at Ridgemont High now feel almost too adrenaline-filled. Singles offers a Seattle setting that is infinitely more desirable; you know, San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Matt Dillon has this long speech where he discusses the perils of living near the airport and having barbecues no one attended. His complaints are our dreams. Every person in his building knows every other person. It's like an adulation factory.

Things don't work out between Kyra Sedgwick and Campbell Scott after a pregnancy scare. Kyra's organization plans a "coastal" trip of Alaska. (It is never specified if this trip is to encompass the entire coast.) She tells everyone, "You don't have to be my boyfriend." She wears a coat accented with the imprint of a doe. Scott is advised in matters of love and life by the waitress Bridget Fonda; she informs him life is only 40 percent sex, and this revelation appears to shock him into action.

The idea of a 1992 Bridget Fonda being without a man for more than six nanoseconds is unlikely in the extreme. Her rent was probably in the $100 range, possibly less than that. This may have well been the 1920s. It was better than the 20s, it was basically the same as the 20s. Are you excited yet?

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He is a writer living in Manhattan. He tumbls here and twitters here. He last wrote in these pages about David Bowie's Secret Moonlight tour.

"Need to Know (demo)" - Pearl Jam (mp3)

"Walk With Me (live in CA)" - Pearl Jam (mp3)

"Times of Trouble (demo)" - Pearl Jam (mp3)

In Which We Are Unable To Copy Her Melancholy

Cut Off Shorts, High Top Converse

by ALICE GREGORY

My Girl
dir. Howard Zieff
102 minutes

It took great restraint, watching My Girl last weekend, not to mouth along to all the dialogue. I was a little nervous – it had been a decade since I had seen it last. Though I knew 11-year-old Vada Sultenfuss ("Tough break!" "I like my name.") couldn't possibly be as compelling to me now, I worried that I wouldn't be able to empathize with my former self who tried to imitate her every gesture. Only recently have I heard people my age reference My Girl as some sort of common childhood artifact. I didn’t realize it was a generational touchstone, and I’m glad I wasn’t aware of its popularity as a kid. If I had known that my worship was anything less than private, I might have been embarrassed. Idols should be individual.

Poor Howard Zieff. It’s always surprising to re-remember that My Girl isn’t a John Hughes movie. It bears all the marks of his auteurship: the leafy, recognizably American town; the broken fourth wall; the cued pop music. It’s tender and funny and sad and it takes its young protagonist seriously. Vada (Anna Chlumsky), the daughter of a widowed mortician (Dan Aykroyd), grows up lonely, somewhat neglected, and preoccupied with death. Her only friend is the similarly unpopular Thomas J. (Macaulay Culkin) in whom she confides her love of her teacher, Mr. Bixler (Griffin Dunne) and her hatred of her soon-to-be-stepmother, Shelly (Jamie Lee Curtis). When Vada loses her mood ring in the woods, Thomas J. goes searching for it, is attacked by a swarm of bees, and dies. Only in the grief-ridden aftermath of the event does Vada bond with her father, finally accept that she did not kill her own mother who died in childbirth, and come to love Shelly. Vada’s voiceover is introspective and familiar, full of tidy revelations and moments of self-actualization.

I remember not only the words and intonation of every line of dialogue but also trying, gracelessly, to integrate them into daily conversation:

“Oh, wow, a real Evil Knievel.”   

“Nephritis is a kidney disease, you don't get it from hot dogs.”

“Dad, didn't you say you needed prunes REAL bad?

It goes without saying that the lines were too specific to blend in very seamlessly. Like an idiot savant, my recall can be at once prodigious and frighteningly narrow. I can still recite Vada’s poem by heart (“I like ice cream a whole lot/It tastes good when days are hot/On a cone or in a dish/This would be my only wish/ Vanilla, chocolate, or rocky road/Even with pie à la mode”), but I seemed to have forgotten the more major elements of the story: the general morbidity, her dream to be a writer, the brazen foreshadowing of Thomas J.’s death (the tiny coffin carried in at the beginning, the boy in the wheelchair at the doctor’s office, the dead fish). This attention to detail at the expense of a larger message, if anything, set the precedent for later lapses in critical reading. 

I’ve thought a lot about why I revered Vada Sultenfuss so much. Not having brothers, the fact that her best friend is a boy must have been attractive to me. I too had a close male friend, Charles, but our rapport was much different. I didn’t have the upper hand, for one; I mostly trailed him, pretending to enjoy his hobbies: netting crabs, hunting mushrooms, firing potato guns. Charles is in school to become a dentist now, and we don’t have much in common anymore. But I remember our friendship as imbued with romance, much of which was mentally kindled, surely in the image of My Girl.  

Cool Girls abound in middle school, thin out in high school, and are mostly forgotten about by college. They can effortlessly transform a heinous outfit into a stunning one and render a forgettable song into an anthem. No matter their age, they force aporetic thought: is she wearing that necklace because it’s cool or is that necklace cool because she’s wearing it? Adolescent overvaluation of another person – fictional or not – is good practice for being in love, a state in which the hierarchy of action and justification is inverted and every gesture seems retroactively inspired, amazing because they did it.

Vada was my original Cool Girl, endowing random items with totemic value: phrenology charts, Sunbonnet Sue quilts, Schwinn bikes with streamers, those perfectly worn-in overalls the Gap could never replicate. And so many mannerisms to copy! There was that half-cannon ball she did when jumping into the lake, left leg jutting out, nose plugged. There was the way her forearms hyperextended on the nurse's desk. I learned the word "resilient" from her and the phrase "intellectually stimulating." I overused both.  

I gave myself hangnails and taught myself to dribble a basketball like Vada. I wasn’t reckless enough to be become blood brothers with anyone though, as she does with Thomas J. – I knew about AIDS.  I asked for a copy of War and Peace for Christmas one year, not realizing that Vada reading Tolstoy in 5th grade was meant to indicate naiveté and pretension. My mom refused the request, suspecting correctly that my interest was not literary. Instead, she told me that not only would I like Anna Karenina better but that we already owned a copy.

I envied the sort of after-dark freedom shared between Vada and Thomas Jay, the warm nights of Madison, Pennsylvania, which allowed her to wear peasant blouses while I, in Northern California, was stuck bundled in Patagonias. These were the days before eBay, so my imitation was more approximate than it was accurate. I wanted a red, straw cloche like Vada’s, but a rust-colored, canvas bucket hat would have to do. I wore a mood ring, but the gem would fall off during games of recess foursquare and I had to Epoxy it back on when I got home everyday. Like Vada, I dressed in flannel shirts, cut-off shorts, and high-top converse. Only now can I look back and identify the uniform of a lesbian fixed-gear biker.  

I also, obviously, just thought Vada was really pretty. At one point, Shelly catalogues her every feature: “sparkling eyes,” “the cutest little nose,” an amazing mouth.” There is indeed an overripeness to Anna Chlumsky’s beauty, an actress whose face, come puberty, would rot into a Topanga-esque vulgarity. Macaulay Culkin too: a cherub-turned-skull. Together, they’re like a visual justification for pedophilia; their fresh faces stamped with the expiration date of looming adolescence. Acne and swollen hips are just around the corner. Get ‘em before they turn.

Though surely unable to articulate it, even at nine I could sense that there was some crucial contrast at play between intellectualism and infantile habits, between reading War and Peace and climbing willow trees. Vada Sultenfuss represented a sort of personality that I’m still attracted to now, that ability to modulate between two polar registers: the jock who studies, the scholar who watches reality TV, the White House chief of staff who attends all his childrens’ soccer games.  

Really though, what I was most drawn to was the film’s permission to indulge imaginary crises. Like most everything directed at young adults, My Girl suggests that reckoning with tragedy yields complexity, that misery breeds interiority. Vada is smarter, funnier, and more feeling than her classmates. She succeeds in adult writing classes, talks sarcastically about terminal illness, and is hopelessly in love with her teacher. Growing up, I feared that I was too untroubled to be interesting. My Girl was my first confrontation not with death, but with its absence in my own life. It prodded me to hypothesize perverse fantasies about being orphaned, about cousins drowning. I knew I couldn’t rely on my own experience for the sort of suffering we’re told makes one smart.   

 
I could recruit friends to play cards with me on the front deck, as Vada does; I could fast-forward to the scene in which she recites her final poem and copy it down, word-for-word, in my notebook; I could convince my parents to buy me a goldfish, like the one she wins at the carnival. I could acquire Vada’s props and mime her movements, but I was unable to copy her melancholy. My mother wasn’t dead; my father wasn’t an undertaker; my friends were all alive. Superficial mimicry seemed like the easiest way to cultivate depth. My emotions were – and still are – performative. Affecting a sentiment until I feel it remains my first instinct, my greatest strength, and my worst foible. Thanks, Vada!  

Alice Gregory is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. She tumbls here.

"Rider" - Okkervil River (mp3)

"Wake And Be Fine" - Okkervil River (mp3)

"I Guess We Lost" - Okkervil River (mp3)

The new album from Okkervil River, I Am Very Far, came out on May 10th and is available here.

In Which He Can't See Without His Glasses

Word for Word

by ALICE GREGORY

My Girl

dir. Howard Zieff

102 minutes

It took great restraint, watching My Girl last weekend, not to mouth along to all the dialogue. I was a little nervous – it had been a decade since I had seen it last. Though I knew 11-year-old Vada Sultenfuss ("Tough break!" "I like my name.") couldn't possibly be as compelling to me now, I worried that I wouldn't be able to empathize with my former self who tried to imitate her every gesture. Only recently have I heard people my age reference My Girl as some sort of common childhood artifact. I didn’t realize it was a generational touchstone, and I’m glad I wasn’t aware of its popularity as a kid. If I had known that my worship was anything less than private, I might have been embarrassed. Idols should be individual.

Poor Howard Zieff. It’s always surprising to re-remember that My Girl isn’t a John Hughes movie. It bears all the marks of his auteurship: the leafy, recognizably American town; the broken fourth wall; the cued pop music. It’s tender and funny and sad and it takes its young protagonist seriously. Vada (Anna Chlumsky), the daughter of a widowed mortician (Dan Aykroyd), grows up lonely, somewhat neglected, and preoccupied with death. Her only friend is the similarly unpopular Thomas J. (Macaulay Culkin) in whom she confides her love of her teacher, Mr. Bixler (Griffin Dunne) and her hatred of her soon-to-be-stepmother, Shelly (Jamie Lee Curtis). When Vada loses her mood ring in the woods, Thomas J. goes searching for it, is attacked by a swarm of bees, and dies. Only in the grief-ridden aftermath of the event does Vada bond with her father, finally accept that she did not kill her own mother who died in childbirth, and come to love Shelly. Vada’s voiceover is introspective and familiar, full of tidy revelations and moments of self-actualization.

I remember not only the words and intonation of every line of dialogue but also trying, gracelessly, to integrate them into daily conversation:

“Oh, wow, a real Evil Knievel.”   

“Nephritis is a kidney disease, you don't get it from hot dogs.”

“Dad, didn't you say you needed prunes REAL bad?

It goes without saying that the lines were too specific to blend in very seamlessly. Like an idiot savant, my recall can be at once prodigious and frighteningly narrow. I can still recite Vada’s poem by heart (“I like ice cream a whole lot/It tastes good when days are hot/On a cone or in a dish/This would be my only wish/ Vanilla, chocolate, or rocky road/Even with pie à la mode”), but I seemed to have forgotten the more major elements of the story: the general morbidity, her dream to be a writer, the brazen foreshadowing of Thomas J.’s death (the tiny coffin carried in at the beginning, the boy in the wheelchair at the doctor’s office, the dead fish). This attention to detail at the expense of a larger message, if anything, set the precedent for later lapses in critical reading. 

I’ve thought a lot about why I revered Vada Sultenfuss so much. Not having brothers, the fact that her best friend is a boy must have been attractive to me. I too had a close male friend, Charles, but our rapport was much different. I didn’t have the upper hand, for one; I mostly trailed him, pretending to enjoy his hobbies: netting crabs, hunting mushrooms, firing potato guns. Charles is in school to become a dentist now, and we don’t have much in common anymore. But I remember our friendship as imbued with romance, much of which was mentally kindled, surely in the image of My Girl.  

Cool Girls abound in middle school, thin out in high school, and are mostly forgotten about by college. They can effortlessly transform a heinous outfit into a stunning one and render a forgettable song into an anthem. No matter their age, they force aporetic thought: is she wearing that necklace because it’s cool or is that necklace cool because she’s wearing it? Adolescent overvaluation of another person – fictional or not – is good practice for being in love, a state in which the hierarchy of action and justification is inverted and every gesture seems retroactively inspired, amazing because they did it.

Vada was my original Cool Girl, endowing random items with totemic value: phrenology charts, Sunbonnet Sue quilts, Schwinn bikes with streamers, those perfectly worn-in overalls the Gap could never replicate. And so many mannerisms to copy! There was that half-cannon ball she did when jumping into the lake, left leg jutting out, nose plugged. There was the way her forearms hyperextended on the nurse's desk. I learned the word "resilient" from her and the phrase "intellectually stimulating." I overused both.  

I gave myself hangnails and taught myself to dribble a basketball like Vada. I wasn’t reckless enough to be become blood brothers with anyone though, as she does with Thomas J. – I knew about AIDS.  I asked for a copy of War and Peace for Christmas one year, not realizing that Vada reading Tolstoy in 5th grade was meant to indicate naiveté and pretension. My mom refused the request, suspecting correctly that my interest was not literary. Instead, she told me that not only would I like Anna Karenina better but that we already owned a copy.

I envied the sort of after-dark freedom shared between Vada and Thomas Jay, the warm nights of Madison, Pennsylvania, which allowed her to wear peasant blouses while I, in Northern California, was stuck bundled in Patagonias. These were the days before eBay, so my imitation was more approximate than it was accurate. I wanted a red, straw cloche like Vada’s, but a rust-colored, canvas bucket hat would have to do. I wore a mood ring, but the gem would fall off during games of recess foursquare and I had to Epoxy it back on when I got home everyday. Like Vada, I dressed in flannel shirts, cut-off shorts, and high-top converse. Only now can I look back and identify the uniform of a lesbian fixed-gear biker.  

I also, obviously, just thought Vada was really pretty. At one point, Shelly catalogues her every feature: “sparkling eyes,” “the cutest little nose,” an amazing mouth.” There is indeed an overripeness to Anna Chlumsky’s beauty, an actress whose face, come puberty, would rot into a Topanga-esque vulgarity. Macaulay Culkin too: a cherub-turned-skull. Together, they’re like a visual justification for pedophilia; their fresh faces stamped with the expiration date of looming adolescence. Acne and swollen hips are just around the corner. Get ‘em before they turn.

Though surely unable to articulate it, even at nine I could sense that there was some crucial contrast at play between intellectualism and infantile habits, between reading War and Peace and climbing willow trees. Vada Sultenfuss represented a sort of personality that I’m still attracted to now, that ability to modulate between two polar registers: the jock who studies, the scholar who watches reality TV, the White House chief of staff who attends all his childrens’ soccer games.  

Really though, what I was most drawn to was the film’s permission to indulge imaginary crises. Like most everything directed at young adults, My Girl suggests that reckoning with tragedy yields complexity, that misery breeds interiority. Vada is smarter, funnier, and more feeling than her classmates. She succeeds in adult writing classes, talks sarcastically about terminal illness, and is hopelessly in love with her teacher. Growing up, I feared that I was too untroubled to be interesting. My Girl was my first confrontation not with death, but with its absence in my own life. It prodded me to hypothesize perverse fantasies about being orphaned, about cousins drowning. I knew I couldn’t rely on my own experience for the sort of suffering we’re told makes one smart.     

I could recruit friends to play cards with me on the front deck, as Vada does; I could fast-forward to the scene in which she recites her final poem and copy it down, word-for-word, in my notebook; I could convince my parents to buy me a goldfish, like the one she wins at the carnival. I could acquire Vada’s props and mime her movements, but I was unable to copy her melancholy. My mother wasn’t dead; my father wasn’t an undertaker; my friends were all alive. Superficial mimicry seemed like the easiest way to cultivate depth. My emotions were – and still are – performative. Affecting a sentiment until I feel it remains my first instinct, my greatest strength, and my worst foible. Thanks, Vada!  

Alice Gregory is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. She tumbls here and you can read Salad & Candy here. She last wrote in these pages about Breaking Upwards.

"Out of My Face" - Saving Abel (mp3)

"Beautiful Day" - Saving Abel (mp3)

"Sailed Away" - Saving Abel (mp3)