HARD SIX CITY

down funder, land of the rising fun

So!

Summer is gorgeous and seems to be sticking it to us heat-style.  I got a bicycle and a Category 3 sunburn last weekend exploring Toronto’s beaches and rental prospects in the far west.

Summer is a good time for austerity because there is so much that is delightful and free of charge about it.  Austerity for the sake of a massive trip is also easier than, say, saving up for appliances or something, because you can say to yourself “you could be drinking these pints now or you could be drinking them in Tokyo with Honda robots.”

That’s right.  It’s supratravel tyme.

So my grandmother is not your average octogenarian and has set her sights on the Great Barrier Reef as a YOLO destination of choice.  She asked me to accompany her on this wild Australian adventure in the fall and I was like “Oh, maybe just let me think about that for negative a million seconds.”  We mulled over itineraries—two weeks is barely enough to cover everything—but it sounds like there will be enough koala-interrogating action to form a rough idea of what that whole other world is like.   

The Japan part comes next.  Rawstar and I have been musing on Azn loczns to travel to for some time, and since I’ll already be in that part of the world…we were like this: TOKYO.  

So!  

Since the Australia leg of this megatrip is largely plotted out already, I’m researching everything we need to know about Tokyo.  A week including travel isn’t a lot of time so we’re going to be darting around the Yamanote line until we lose it like Tetsuo in Akira.  And with that, I’ve exhausted almost my entire repertoire of Tokyo references.  

Brown bag lunch for the rest of ever, no more Toronto fin-dinning—gotta save for srsly so I can be a tourist somewhere else—somewheres, in fact, that are very else.  LUCKY GIRLLLL

Girls on Film

So The New Yorker has been blablaing about Lena Dunham for at least a year now—first about her movie, Tiny Furniture, and now her HBO series, Girls.  The latter, exec produced by Judd Apatow, is being hailed as a kind of Sex and the City for the educated white millennial she-set. 

I loved the illustration of relationships in Tiny Furniture and was anxious to check out the show.  Girls packs in a lot of scenarios common to 20somethings like Dunham who have aspirations in love and self-actualization in equal measure.  For Dunham, those two goals often get conflated as she—and her character, Hannah—heavily draws on writing material from her own life.  She and three other recent grads navigate NYC in small apartments with very little of the glamor and Pilates-toned sheen of its television matriarch.  

With the series introducing a lack of polish with Dunham unattractively slurping long noodles, and in between raw cuts of her naked body and remarks about the proliferation of holes in her underwear, Dunham exposes ordinary flaws as par for the course.  Girls today can be gross and not feel pressure for apology as representatives of the gender (tanks, feemoneezim!), and I think this may be the first show I’ve seen to capitalize on that.  It doesn’t ignore the often unfair realities of being better or worse looking, but it also doesn’t reduce human experiences to those realities.  Male characters in television and movies have long openly bemoaned their unattractiveness with the notion that it’s a disadvantage—but not a completely prohibitive one.  It’s pretty sweet that Girls shows girls with that same mentality.  In this universe, non-hot girls can have dreams and sex and a destiny outside of just being the pretty one’s obnoxious sidekick who’s inevitably going to get paired off with the male lead’s chubster cousin with the oxygen tank.  

Nudity and sexuality are approached in a surprising way.  Sex in the show is typically an embarrassing depiction of regular people’s bodies having emotionally uncomfortable sex—and not uncomfortable in the SATC “OMG I can’t believe he’s doing ________ (insert quasi-deviant act)!” sense where you know Carrie’s going to make a pun about it later over brunch so much as the “Eggggggh, this guy is saying some sketchy stuff while we hump but I guess I’ll just go along with it, maybe it’ll get hotter?… ” sense.  Sex and relationship dynamics in the show are woven together smartly, and there’s real life in common themes: falling desperately over someone who openly treats you like garbage, trying to be in love with someone you no longer have feelings for—they’re all demonstrated with honesty.  The girls in this show aren’t seeking relationships to serve as a happy ending so much as a meaningful connection. 

The asexual dynamics between men and women as friends are realistic too.  Hannah’s guarded friendship with her roommate’s boyfriend is spot-on.  You feel like they’ve been amicably tolerating each other for years.  

The show is funny.  Hannah slathers her terrible choices all over the city like rancid butter on toast, Jessa is a privileged confetti explosion of a free spirit (“I don’t think Jessa understands texting.  She calls them ‘word alerts’”), and the two less extreme characters, Marnie and Shoshanna, provide balance along with their less crippling idiosyncrasies. 

A special difference between SATC and Girls is that the female lead is also the writer and director. As long as she doesn’t get shitty at what she does, the series won’t plummet to the lowest common denominator when it gets popular.  Cough, cough, I’m looking at you, lame-Paris-series-finale.  Watch it!