Look At Your Life, Look At Your Teen Choice Awards

Either Hollywood is totally transparent and every motivation is totally clear or it is totally impenetrable and all we are seeing is the fourth or fifth layer of smoke and mirrors they are throwing in front of us. This can be true of politics too, and interpersonal relationships, even. With no way of knowing for sure what you're really seeing, you essentially have to pick an illusion. Your version of the truth.
Which isn't to say people who are listening to Watch The Throne right now in order to hear the secret Illuminati messages aren't crazy--those people are totally crazy. You should keep Occum's Razor in mind when you are designing your version of the truth. But when Taylor Swift excitedly holds Ashley Greene's hand and Ashley looks game in a kind of passive way, it's either because Taylor Swift really cares about the Teen Choice Awards or because she wants to look like she cares about the Teen Choice Awards (and because Ashley Greene genuinely doesn't care but is a nice person or because she wants to look like she doesn't care and is nice or maybe just because she took a bunch of beta-blockers in the limo).

It's tempting to ignore the urge to set up a kind of bedrock principle of Truth when you talk about celebrities. The act of observing something changes it; the Teen Choice Awards happen in anything but a vacuum. You can't shave your pubic hair with Occum's Razor, you know? It's fun to suggest that their traumatic experiences with Joe Jonas have led Ashley Greene, Taylor Swift and Demi Lovato to enter into an emotionally respectful polyamorus relationship together, but that (probably) didn't happen last night. Ashley Greene is a kind of boring and average nice person thrust into a weird set of circumstances; Taylor Swift is a teenager exploiting and being exploited by her tangled and ridiculous teenage emotions. Again: probably.

Because even Taylor Swift is eerily capable of handling a red carpet. The Teen Choice Awards were held at the Gibson Theater in LA last night, the same place where I stood on the red carpet a few months ago and held awkward interviews with whoever the harried publicists threw at me. I watched the live feed from several cameras last night and had Vietnam-like flashbacks at my computer, watching reporters jockey for position and listening to photographers and producers shouting "Ashley! Ashley! Can you look over here Ashley? Can I get Ashley for In-Style? Jesus Christ, can I get Ashley?" People like Zooey Deschanel stood in the midst of all that commotion and struck calculatingly seductive poses. In the pictures she looks fine, I'm sure, but in the context of that whole tableau it was indescribably off-putting and terrifying.

But for every moment that makes Hollywood look like an incomprehensible illusion factory there are human ones, too. On live camera three Joel McHale complained about the heat, couldn't figure out which camera he was supposed to be talking to and then apologized profusely for getting in the way of someone's shot of Nikki Reed. He told reporters he felt bad that they had to stand out there for so long (which is exactly what five or six people on the other side of the barricade told me in June). Right before the show started the live cameras finally found Ashley Greene, who was standing at the barricades by the doors signing autographs and telling everyone it was nice to meet them. "I'm pulling Ashley right now," someone could be heard saying. Ashley glanced over her shoulder at the voice, turned back to the fan she was talking to and said, "It's okay."

Coverage of the TCAs via 247Greene: Part 1, Part 2

BLOGGING TWILIGHT, The Rough Drafts

I'm moving in like ten days, so I have been packing up my old apartment. Now, I'm a borderline hoarder, as it turns out, and I have been coming across various scraps of paper that later became AFO episodes, essays and of course blog posts. I doubt you can read my handwriting, but it was sort of fun for me to find this shit; I'd forgotten that I wrote most of Blogging Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse out by hand, but I did. I should totally pick up that habit again, it was an affectation that impressed the hell out of most of my college professors. Do you guys still write things by hand?

After the jump I've posted a couple of rough drafts and links to the final products.

BLOGGING THE HUNGER GAMES, pt. 2: Dear Sons And Daughters Of Hungry Ghosts

Last time we met Katniss Everdeen, big sister of the year and budding domestic terrorist (probably). She and her family attended The Reaping, which is draft-day for a government-sponsored Battle Royale called The Hunger Games. Surprise, surprise, Katniss's little sister Prim got selected for the fight.

I'm very much aware of the race-bending/whitewashing controversy around the casting of The Hunger Games. Lots of readers were happy that Katniss Everdeen was, for once, a protagonist not described as a pretty white girl. But of course, when it came time for the movie adaptation they cast a pretty white girl. Shit. So the post-racial book fell victim to our present-racial times, right? Well, wait a second.

We heard in chapter one that even though Katniss and Gale are post-ethnic hybrids, Prim and Katniss's mother are blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryans. And now poor little pure, white Prim is in danger, and hardened, tough nonwhite Katniss has to go and save her. The story was, when the casting announcements were made, that the racial politics in America had been dealt another blow. Maybe we weren't as far along as we thought.

Chapter 2

Katniss is too stunned to do much of anything for a few seconds, but as her sister steps toward the stage she snaps out of it and screams: “I volunteer!” What? Very quickly she explains to us that people can volunteer if they want to go in another's place. Oh, well that's good! Prim wraps herself around her older sister and begs her not to go, and Katniss has to fight the urge to cry while she shakes the little bitch off. She notes that if people see her crying on the news, she'll be marked as an easy target; there's no crying in Hunger Games ball. Katniss's sudden presence causes some procedural confusion on the stage—I guess people don't volunteer all that much—but she is quickly introduced to the crowd as their female “tribute.” And then something interesting happens.

To the everlasting credit of the people of District 12, not one person claps...I stand there unmoving while they take part in the boldest form of dissent they can manage. Silence.

Instead, nearly every person in the crowd “touches the three middle fingers of their left hand to their lips and holds it out” to Katniss. (Did you try to imitate the gesture? It's OK, I did too. Were you not really sure which fingers were your THREE middle ones? It's OK, I wasn't either.) She says it's an antiquated gesture meaning “thanks,” “admiration” and “good-bye to someone you love.” Now, we barely know Katniss, and this is a gesture we are JUST hearing about now. That this image is still powerful, moving even, is sort of unusual. I don't know why I care yet, but I care already!

And then Haymitch, the former District 12 champion, stumbles drunkenly in front of the camera and falls off the stage like Ryan Adams. Ah, well.

The bulk of this chapter is actually an extremely detailed flashback, because the name of the male tribute is called and it's a dude named Peeta Mellark, a “stocky” blonde guy with alarmed blue eyes. Let me guess, is he Polish? (I can make Pollack jokes because my old roommate Paul was Polish and here's a true story: it literally took four of him to change a lightbulb once.) Anyway, it turns out he and Katniss have a history. No, not like that, perverts. Our narrator recalls the few months after her father's death in which her family began to starve—we find out that rather than get a job to provide for her family, Mother Everdeen just retreated inside herself (and not in a sexy way). Starvation happens all the time in her district, Katniss says, but officials always list something else as the cause of death like “exposure.” Because they don't want it to look like their citizens are starving? Um, why is it called THE HUNGER GAMES then? Wouldn't THE PLENTIFUL MILK AND HONEY DEATH MATCH be a better title?

Anyway with her mom hidden away at home in her blanket-fort of sorrow, eleven-year-old Katniss was forced to act. But there's only so much an eleven-year-old can do to run a household without the annual rations provided by Hunger Games eligibility—Katniss & Prim's Homemade Lemonade only brings in a couple of nickels unless it's a really hot day, you know? So our heroine goes wandering through the negro streets at dawn with her purgatoried torso looking for an angry fix when she stumbles into the Mellark family backyard, transfixed by the smell of bread. Mr. Mellark is a baker, and Mrs. Mellark is, as it turns out, a big ol' bitch. She tries to chase Katniss away and then goes back into the house to beat her son for burning two loaves of bread. Peeta comes outside then and casually tosses the burned loaves to poor, starving Katniss.

Peeta's so discrete about the whole action that we can't tell how premeditated it was—did he burn the bread on purpose so he could give it to her? The next day, at school, Katniss sees him (with a big bruise on his face) staring at her. She looks down at her feet to avoid him and sees the first dandelion of the season, which gives her hope that she'll be able to keep her family alive. It's a heavily symbolic moment for our narrator (I mean she pretty much says “it's a pretty important motif in my story—I mean life”) and ever since, springtime and survival and Peeta and bread and pita bread are all associated in her brain. Back in the present, Katniss is pissed because she never even thanked Peeta for the whole thing and now she has to kill him. Ain't that always the way?

Stray Notes & Questions

• I'm starting to come around to the present tense thing. The overwhelming consensus last time was that doing so creates a sense of urgency. Okay, fine, but Edgar Allan Poe wrote “The Masque Of The Red Death” in past-tense and still managed, you know? Past-tense is (or was) the English-Lit, Western-Civ standard. It's also a little bit harder to do—part of me feels like writing fiction in the present tense is setting the cognitive bar a little low for your readers. Am I being a tense snob?
• This is hard to work into a re-cap, but there's a recurring jokes about odds that I'm enjoying so far. Effie Trinket, one of the HG officials, has a little catch-phrase: “May the odds be ever in your favor.” The first time we hear it, Katniss and Gale are mocking it while they hunt. Katniss references it a few more times before Effie Trinket actually says it herself. And several times in this chapter, Katniss will comfort herself with the probability that she won't have to do something only to recall that the odds are rarely, if ever, in her favor. I see what you are doing there, Katniss.

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BLOGGING THE HUNGER GAMES, pt. 1: Papa Was A Rodeo

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The Predictive Ashley Greene Profile

I read Esquire fairly often. I'm a fan of the magazine, even though some of it (most of it) is patently ridiculous. I mean, they've got a crack staff of writers, no shortage of story ideas, and their annual "What I've Learned" issue has a must-read collection of interviews. But they also fawn over $8,000 sweaters that Every Man Must Own, they've got a huge, latent gay crush on James Franco, and the real problems start when they talk about women. Esquire insists that it isn't sexist but goes about proving it in a terrible way: by acting like they are the only men who have realized women are worthy of any sort of nonsexual consideration. Every profile reads like "Holy shit, [X female celebrity] isn't just a vapid walking vagina!" And then they act like they deserve a medal for inviting Megan Fox over and talking to her about horses instead of titty-fucking her. That women are smart and interesting is a monthly revelation at Esquire, and that is often worse than, you know, the Maxim method of just putting Ashley Greene on a couch and pulling her pants off and writing a 50-word blurb about Twilight's release date. You can write about how much a girl likes brisket and how she reads Faulkner, sure, but if you're clearly doing it to make a point about how you awesome you are for not just writing "Her tits are nice," well, you should just write "Her tits are nice"! Stop beating around the (lack of a) bush!

But anyway Ashley Greene is going to be on the cover of Esquire soon, and thanks to 247Greene we have a few shots from John Russo's shoot. Her tits look nice.

After the jump, I've got a working formula for Esquire's female-centered profiles and a guess at what we might be reading in a month or two.