taipei. tao lin. (192)

i forgot what inspired me to pick up taipei  but i did.  i have read other works by tao lin but wouldn't call myself a fan.  as i wrote in my post for his work richard yates, i am not sure how i feel about lin.  on one hand, i am never fully engaged in his work, i read it like i read things online, half-focused, but then he is pretty spot on when it comes to the hipster culture.

taipei, is another novel that is actually an autobiography that is framed as a novel (see: shelia heti's how a person should be?) which as i said before, thanks for the honesty but i can't help but feel cheated.  i mean why not just say it's a memoir?

in any case, in taipai, i discovered that tao lin did a shitload of drugs.  i mean a shitload.  and the sad part was that he did them because he felt like he functioned better in the world with them.  to quote the ever wise cher horowitz (which i think i have quoted before for this blog) "it is one thing to light up a doobie at a party, but it's quite another to be fried all day."  doing the occasional drug is kosher in my book but i can't imagine to the point of recklessness that lin did, having memory loss and vomiting all over union square from snorting too much heroin.  though in lin's defense he wasn't too fucked up because he did keep his google document of notes and of course all the videos which helped him create this work.  i am assuming all of the videos were real, i tried to look up the mcdonalds one but saw on his website the listing of the MDMA videos under his work.  i mean in the end he was able to do all of those drugs, not die, and still created a novel. so kudos to him.

but i mean reading about someone on drugs gets old quickly which resulted in my half-focus as a i read.    because in the end, regardless of how interesting these moments were to lin and his friends, they are all "you had to be there moments" for everyone else.  i have often thought that my life could be a tv series (after seeing mtv's "my life as liz") or a novel, well maybe more a collection of short stories, but i feel like i can never recreate the magic of what happen to me because for it to truly be great, you had to be there.  i could describe it but it was only truly worthwhile in that moment.  taipei was just one big, you had to be there story.  paul and erin's filming of tawian's first mcdonalds was great but i am sure it was 100% funnier if you were on drugs and there.  the same can be said for the #xmenlivetweet, i can imagine how incredible it all was for lin but to read it secondhand it wasn't all that amazing.  and i know because i have had ridiculous drunken (not drugged) incidents like lin, but i recognize that i am the only one that truly gets their magic.  like all the times i have snuck booze into the theater, for example my friend cody and i took in a bottle of rum when we went to see "pirates of caribbean" and i turned to him and in what i thought was a whisper asked for the rum, only for him to knock over the bottle and everyone heard the clank of the rum bottle.  or the time that my friends larry, peter and i went to see "jackass" and drank too much, and i had to pee so i decided to run out during an old person skit, and i ran straight into the mens room, apologized to a man peeing and bolted out the door while the concessions stand workers just stood their and laughed at my dumbass.  hilarious but would people want to read it?  my version of taipei would be called cahuenga and would be all about the drunken fun my friends and i had on cahuenga blvd circa 2008-2010.  but i mean other than my friends, who would anyone truly appreciate it or get it?  i mean lin has his celebrity clout to keep his readers reading but i am a nobody.

oh and before i drop all the drug talk (though it is like the defining theme of the novel), i did appreciate the irony of paul's disgust with erin taking prescription drugs.  erin started taking a pill as prescribed by her doctor and paul lectured her on not needing it and her becoming dependent on it.  this fight then escalated to the point in which paul left.  it was brilliant because the druggie recognizes the harms of prescription drugs.  society condones the recreational use of drugs yet drug companies are constantly trying to fix ailments that a) either don't exist or b) manageable without drugs.  i mean the number one side effect of most prescription drugs is death.  might as well take drugs for fun then.

though i have to add lin does not believe in drug problems as seen in this excerpt:

“They began talking about a Lil Wayne documentary that focused on Lil Wayne’s “drug problem,” which Lil Wayne denied. Paul felt it was bleak and depressing that the filmmakers superimposed their views onto Lil Wayne. Calvin seemed to agree with the documentary. Paul tried, with Erin, who agreed with him, he felt, to convey (mostly by slowly saying variations of “no” and “I can’t think right now”) that there was no such thing as a “drug problem” or even “drugs” – unless anything anyone ever did or thought or felt was considered both a drug and a problem – in that each thought or feeling or object, seen or touched or absorbed or remembered, at whatever coordinate of space-time, would have a unique effect, which each ever-changing person, at each moment of their life, could view as a problem, or not, for themselves.”

this is an interesting reasoning, everythinf outside of this notion of "self" is essentially a "drug" because it has some effect on us.  so i guess drugs really aren't a problem just another stimuli of life.

aside from drugs, there is also paul's relationship with erin, his wife.  i still don't know how that marriage happen though i will say i have, at least twice, tried to get two sets of my friends to marry when we were in vegas.  sadly it didn't happen both times.

erin and paul's relationship interested me because it reminded me of my best friend and i during my cahuenga years (maybe i should write this book).  we had alot of fun together but we also had these random fights.  my friend was also passive aggressive like paul, expecting someone to read his mind when he was upset instead of communicating or saying he wasn't upset when he was.  but part of the issue for us was just like erin and paul was that most of the fights happen when we were really drunk so that caused alot more drama than was necessary.  for me, it was interesting because i didn't know how authentic paul and erin's feelings truly were, everyone likes to believe there is more honesty when one is on drugs but at the same time your mind is so fucked that it might be true but it's definitely askewed. in the end, it just demonstrated how drugs can ruin relationships in addition to people.

as i mentioned earlier, lin is spot on when it comes to hipster culture.  i will admit that i loved the random asking of "do you like rilo kiley?" (for these that are curious, i do).  i also loved that marina abramović's "the artist is present" was mentioned because i sat with her for that piece.  goodreads was also namedropped though i don't think it's hipstery, i just use it.  but i guess everything felt very relevant but then again it was just his life.

i read it, not sure i would recommend it but at least i can say i read it.  which i guess is the point of reading tao lin.

much ado about nothing. william shakespeare. (114)

much ado about nothing is right.  i should have listened to the title, there is much ado in this play but it's all for nothing.

i was looking forward to reading "much ado" because the flavorpill team, well maybe just the writer of that post, cited it as their favorite shakespeare play.  but then it turned out to be much ado about nothing.

so the plot is quite simple but also pointless and sadly the result of a bitter man, don john, who hates his brother, don pedro and is jealous of claudio.  actually i found this amazing reviewer on goodreads that does abridged version of shakespeare plays.  i will link it here.  hilarious, right?  but seriously that is all there is to the play.  a bunch of pointless deceit and lies and in the end, everyone is in love and there is a double wedding!  and seriously the whole mask wearing at the wedding? i know it makes everything come full circle but it was so silly.

i think the issue i had was that there was too much dialogue and so many character, it was difficult to keep everything straight.  plus everyone was way too witty, i consider myself quick-witted, but given that the play is over 400 year old, most of that wit went over my head.  i mean i didn't even bother with the banter between the watch, it just didn't seem worth the effort to read sparknotes to understand jokes that probably would not make me laugh.

i did enjoy the exchanges between beatrice and benedick.  i even had a crush in my early twenties that started off like theirs.  a co-worker and i used to always tease each other in a non-flirty way, and our other co-workers started to question if we liked each other.  i actually hadn't thought of him in that manner until everyone started to say things and then oddly enough a crush did develop. and  no we did not end up married.

and i know as a girl, i should have been a huge fan of beatrice but i didn't fall in love with her.  i loved how sharp-tongued she was and gave it to benedick.  but after a while i got tired of her oh-i-don't-want-to-be-married-but-secretly-do. maybe her bemoaning of never bemoaning about marriage, just hit too close to home for me.  i mean she said something that i would totally say esp after attending my friend mona's wedding:

"this goes everyone to the world [of marriage] but i, and i am sunburnt. i may sit in a corner as cry "heigh-ho for a husband."

spot on me, down to the idea thinking tanned me is ugly.  lol.  i know she is this great shakespeare female character but she didn't wow me.  i think if i saw her in action aka in play and not on paper, i would have adored her.  i think an actress needed to add the sass needed her to be read.  my mind just read and didn't act.

i don't want to have much more to ado with this play so will wrap up with some random final thoughts:

-wow! way to go friar! for seeing the truth in hero's soul!  and coming up with that plan! so clever.  

-how was margaret not fired for getting it on in hero's bedroom?!?!

-seriously were identities that well hidden at the party?

-why was everyone willing to trust don john?  and what was his problem?!?!

-did anyone find it awkward how willing claudio was so quick to marry hero's lookalike cousin?!?

-also does the phrase "catch my drift" have shakespearen origins? don pedro said "go in with me, and i will tell you my drift." (his drift is the plan to get beatrice and benedick together)

maybe i am have been too harsh, i think "much ado about nothing" needs to be experience as it was intended as a play versus a book.  so i will see it before i make a final judgement.  also there is a movie version coming out or maybe it out so will try to see it.  and one last random fact, keanu reeves played in don john in a 90's film version.  imagine that!

truth in advertising. john kenney. (93)

i can't remember how i found out about "truth in advertising", i want to say it was featured in a barnes and noble email or maybe a goodreads one. but i do remember that nick hornby was referenced in one of the reviews. (its actually a publishers weekly quote, i found it on the back cover: "a comic tour de force; fans of nick hornby and jonathan tropper will have a new author to watch for.") since i love, nick hornby, i had to check it out. figured it would be the "high fidelity" of advertising. and it kinda was.

*this entry will contain some spoilers. if you plan on reading the book, read it first than read this blog.

"the truth in advertising" is the story of finbar dolan, the name is odd but i like it, though he goes by fin (love the nickname too, reminds me of "adventure time" . . . and i just realized . . . "glee", hmm maybe not so cute, after all).  fin works in advertising (duh?) and is going through a mid-life crisis.  though mid-life crisis seems like a misnomer, he is only 40, but if you think about it, if the average man lives til 80, than 40 is mid-life.  it's weird because when i think mid-life crisis, i think kevin spacey "american beauty", but i didn't think of fin as that old.  it could be that i was in high school when i first saw "american beauty" and far from 40 and now that i'm a closer to it, think of it as young.  i imagined fin as someone younger, like a not-as-hot-bradley-cooper (though i just googled and cooper is only 38). 

anyway, back to fin's mid-life crisis.  it's not so much a mid-life crisis, but a "what i'm a doing with my life" funk, which i feel is not a product of age, but a side effect of being born after 1970.  i feel like my friends and i are constantly in this funk, not so much because of how old we are, but because we are part of that "everyone gets a gold star" generation.  (this is what klosterman discussed in "the visible man" if you read that entry.)  as kids we were never really awarded for hard work but were constantly given positive reinforcement, as a result our work ethic isn't the greatest.  plus we have always been taught that work should make us happy but the fact of the matter work should just pays the bills.  as a result we end up on this search for work that makes us happy but this search is frivolous because work is never fun no matter how much you think you love your job.  so though fin is in advertising, he is questioning, "is advertising really for me?"

so normally if your work life isn't stellar, it's okay because you can fault your home life.  however, fin's home life is non-existent.  he was engaged but he got cold feet.  about eight months prior to when we meet him in the novel, he had just called off his wedding.  it's kinda sad but really not that horrible because better cold feet than a nasty divorce.  there is also a beautiful story about him calling off his wedding and a gravy boat.  it was sad and lovely and could be a great short story on its own.

so this is fin when we meet him.  i would like to say that things get better for him, but since this is a novel, it gets worse before it all sorts out in the end.

lets start with the advertising, because the title includes the word advertising. fin is a copywriter and his big account is diapers, think huggies but not cos kenney prolly couldn't get the rights to use their name so came up with "snugglies" to use.  so the big news is that snugglies designed the first flushable, biodegradable diaper and decided to launch this new product with . . . a SUPERBOWL COMMERICAL!!!!  this is exciting for fin, cos it is the superbowl.  however, he has a family emergency that makes this even more of a challenge. but before that, a word on superbowl commercials.

superbowl commercials used to be great but now they kinda suck.    they used to be clever and funny and now they are just lame.  in the novel, they came up with two pitches.  the pitch i liked most was based on "an inconvenient truth".  the commercial would show babies being born all over the world but with al gore heads, to show how green they were.  i thought that was clever.  the other commerical, the one they went with, i thought was a horrible idea and would have never worked in real life.  it was based on the apple 1984 ad.  i mean why even try to mess with that?  that ad is classic and any kind of spoof or parody would be bad and should never be attempted.  i know this was novel but still no one in their right mind fictional or non-fictional would ever give this commerical the green light.  (do you green light commericals, like show?)

back to fin's family emergency, sadly his father dies.  well not really that sad because fin hadn't spoken to his father for about 28 years.  without giving too much away, the father was abusive and there was an incident with his mother.  but the bottom line is that fin does not view his father as his father.  to add to this, fin and his siblings are not that close.  this actually broke my heart, i have my ups and downs with  my family but i can't imagine being in contact with none of my family members.  it must be really lonely.

so fin's father's dying request was to have his ashes spread in pearl harbor, near the spot where he was when the war ended.  fin's siblings nor fin himself,  want to do it because they all hate him.  and i hate to sound heartless, but i get it.  i found it odd how all of fin's friends kept telling him that he needed to do it because it was dad.  but the fact is, it wasn't his dad.  i think it's hard for people who grew up with both parents to grasp how it is to have an absent parent.  that person is a stranger.  the only connection you have to that person is your DNA and maybe some facial features.  that man is not your dad.  he didn't look under your bed for monsters, or taught you how to ride a bike or took you to your first baseball game.  he is not a dad that was there to help you when scraped your knee or had your heart broken.  he is not that dad from the google ad that always makes me cry, a dad who sends his daughter encouraging emails when times get tough. he is simply a man who helped create you but didn't really want much to do with you after, kinda like god in the old testament.  he is essentailly a stranger?  would you do it for stranger?  probably not.  or you would but not out of love but respect for a person's dying wish.  but you get my point.  (please note i'm not bitter about living in a single parent home, i think i'm better for it.  but i just feel it's unfair to assume that i owe my dad something when he was never really there for me.)

to not spoil one of the main themes of the book, i will not tell you what fin ends up doing.  you have to read to find out.  i'm also not going to tell you how the superbowl ad went.  you have to read that for yourself.

when i first started reading, i thought fin would become one of my book crushes. he is witty and has a great sense of humor. he also did this cute thing when he first moved to new york. he read "here is new york" and "traced the steps". he then "reread 'catcher in the rye' and did the same." this was kinda perfect cos the last time i went to new york i read books with famous new yorkers (i found a list online). i read "franny and zooey", "stuart little", and "from the mixed up files of mrs. basil e. frankweiler." i also read "extremely loud & incredibly close" because it was set in new york. so totally fell in love with him for that. (i plan on retracing "catcher" on my next nyc trip.). however i didn't fall complete. sure he was hip, he referenced a bunch of cool things but he was weird at times. like i hated his sarcasm. i was annoyed reading it so i could only imagine having to deal with it in real life. and i'm sure it was some defensive mechanism but still would be a dealbreaker for me. also his whole internal dialogues of convos with talk show host was not attractive either. though i loved how he framed life like a commercial and how he scanned through life. like on his first date he goes through a whole life with her. it's a lot to type out here but if you read it, i'm allison to page 145. he also flashbacks about his dad and sister, he sees them doing all of these mundane things but realizing the beauty and simplicity of each thing. it reminded me of charlie from "the perks of being a wallflower".

though those last two things just really mean that i enjoyed kenney's writing. how he captured life in an instant  he was clever and had excellent pop culture references.  i mean he called gwyneth paltrow, mrs. coldplay, kinda cool.  he also quoted f. scott fitzgerald. there were some other references that made me smile but didn't mark them so can't share them but i am sure kenney and i could be friends in real life.

also if you are in advertising you should read this. you will prolly get a kick out of the rundown of fin's agency.

oh last but not least, in the story there is a character keita, who i adore. he is the son of this super rich japanese shipping company owner and in charge of fin's agency. he was sweet and kind and for some odd reason i pictured him in my head as PSY. lol