Demon Dogs and Lab Rats: Why Don Bluth’s Movies Matter More than Disney

Don Bluth was born the same year Snow White came out and grew up watching Disney’s classic films. They informed his style, inspired his early career, and later drove him to start his own studio. However, by 1982, when Bluth directed his first film The Secret of NIMH, the world was a much different place than it was when Disney established the standard that made its first golden age so successful. Disney reigned when the Baby Boomers were growing up, and Don Bluth’s films came out as the last babies of Generation X grew up. His films captured the cultural shift from wide-eyed innocence and optimism to a darker, more realistic outlook. The difference between Disney and Don Bluth is the difference between kids who grew up listening to Elvis and the Beatles sing about holding hands and kids who grew up listening to Iggy Pop apathetically rock about suburban boredom, or kids who grew up listening to Morrisey’s New Wave vision of vegetarianism and bleak adolescent depression. 

- Demon Dogs and Lab Rats: Why Don Bluth’s Movies Matter More than Disney

I wrote this article originally with Pork & Mead magazine in mind, but it didn't fit in the issue I wrote it for. Fortunately, it was published on Mise En Scenesters' new web mag, and I'm glad cause I'm real proud of it. There's nothing like A) writing from the heart B) writing pop culture crit C) writing about the things you love

Coloring Book Careers and the Growing Up Guessing Game

My mother loves to ask about people she used to know, or that I used to know, or that really anyone anywhere used to know. Her brother still lives in the small town they grew up in. When they visit with one another, their conversations quickly become a litany of Italian and Polish names as he catches her up on everyone in her preschool class who stuck around. I don't even know these people, but to me, the Mortelleros and Biegasiewiczs have taken on a mythological status, the residents of a less-Nordic Lake Woebegon transplanted just east of Niagara Falls. On a recent 10-hour drive to Florida, she grilled me about all of my elementary and high school classmates. I asked her why she kept bringing up all these people we haven't seen since I had a learner's permit. She replied that she is simply interested in "how people become who they are."

-Coloring Book Careers and the Growing Up Guessing Game on Nooga.com

I feel like this column is best summed up with the immortal words of Diddy Dirty Money, 

"It's easy to be Puff, but it's harder to be Sean/What if the twins ask why I ain't marry their mom/ How do I respond?/ What if my son stares with a face like my own/ And says he wants to be like me when he's grown/ Shit, but I ain't finished growing/ Another night the inevitible prolongs/ Another day another dawn"

Who knows what they'll be when they've grown up? How do you know when you actually have grown up? And, most curiosity inspiring, how do people end up in weird corporate niche careers like HR?

Seize the Day, Embrace a New Kind of Success, and Get Those Olds Off Your Millenial Back

Despite working for all of undergrad with my eye on the prize of an eventual Ph.D. program, I myself passed on what had been my only goal for five years. It wasn't going to be how it was for my father, whose first and only job out of graduate school is the tenure-track position he started in 1990 and has to this day. I was looking at graduating into a frenzied job market with a dissertation in an especially competitive specialty when universities have started cutting tenure-track jobs in favor of somewhat dead-end adjunct positions. I recognized what many people in our generation are starting to see—that we can't play by the old rules and the old assumptions when it comes to positioning ourselves for the job market of the near future. Instead of the classic careers as professors my boyfriend and I each envisioned for ourselves, now we both work in social media. 

-Seize the Day, Embrace a New Kind of Success

I described this column on my Facebook as one "in which I stick up for Millenials, because all the olds won't stop trashing us." I was being a little facetious, but it's true. I'm tired of reading in the media over and over that my generation is a bunch of entitled loser slackers who need their moms to wipe the artisanal beer dribbles out of their pretentious mustaches, of articles that sing our praises only if it can be cast as a kind of douchy backhanded compliment. Come on, Gen Y! We're better than that.  Read this article to find out why and how!

"And the Oscar Goes To..." aka The Academy Awards 2012

I'm still really happy with this sum up of the 2012 Oscar contenders I did for Pork and Mead Magazine back in February. It's always a fun challenge finding a new angle for a subject everyone and their mother is covering at the time.

Image copyright belongs to MR172, used with Creative Commons

Let’s pretend for a moment that the Oscars event itself is a film—one of those intensely emotional, vaguely claustrophobic ones like Rachel Getting Married or Melancholia— that takes place largely at a single event and involves an ensemble cast. Each of the best picture nominees is a stock character and, come February 26^th, we can just kick back with the popcorn and see how the troops play out.

Get Personal: An Ad For Copper Creek

One of my favorite things to do is write ad copy. I tend to be a kind of long winded writer and I do a lot of personal essay kind of stuff, so ad copy is a fun change of pace. It's like the haiku of professional copywriting. Tiny little poems that make people buy things. It's delightful. This is one of the ads I've worked on that I'm most proud of. It was a super fun collaboration with Courtney Cochran, a Chattanooga designer I've had the privilege to work with at two different companies and on several freelance schemes. I think if we ever had enough time together we might take over the world. In the mean time, we settle for making great ads together.

Filling Your First Apartment

"We broke into the old apartment..."

 There were good times and bad times, and sometimes the only way to talk about it all is to talk about the place that contained those moments. Soon I'll be telling my own stories about my first apartment—the crazy upstairs neighbors whose suicide attempts I heard through the ceiling; the LCD Sound System dance parties; the two break-ins; the fights with my ex; the peaceful, idyllic Sunday mornings drinking tea in my robe on the porch, feeling life couldn't get any better. It was, as Annie Clark of indie band St. Vincent put it, "a champagne year full of sober months."
This is from another one of my Nooga.com columns, about moving out of my first apartment. It's also little about '90s nostalgia, because I can't help but think in terms of music when I'm trying to get ideas across. Prepare yourself for some great references to The Counting Crows and the Barenaked Ladies, not to mention the St Vincent quote above.

Jonquil, An Indie Rock Music Feature

From the Pork & Mead digital issue

I'm sharing the entirety of a music feature I did for Pork & Mead Magazine's May 2012 issue. The music editor gave me an assignment to interview Oxford, England-based indie band Jonquil, which was a lot of fun. I spend a lot of time thinking about and debating music, so it was a treat to put that down on the page and get to talk with the guys who make the music.

Listening to Jonquil is like picking up a  cupcake you thought would be vanilla only to find out its sweet lemon. It’s not enough to say they are a beach party band, which makes one envision bearded, flannel-clad hipster versions of The Beach Boys, which is rather inaccurate. It’s also not enough to call it summery indie rock, because Jonquil’s sound doesn’t evoke the kind of sun baked meadow that a lot of more sentimental songs by bands like Deathcab for Cutie do. Their sound draws a lot of comparisons to major American indie acts like Vampire Weekend and Fleet Foxes, if only those bands had been taught to play merengue güira by a crazed taxi driver. They are described in terms that bare little resemblance to either of those bands, or their chilly hometown of Oxford, England— terms like “tropical pop.” You have to wonder how they ever dreamed up blending this particular medley of sounds. 

What One 1970s Rock Opera and a Half-French Wedding Taught Me About Life and Love

Dancing it clean at the rehearsal dinner.

"Saturday night was one of those occasions that stay with you your whole life: the lights twinkling in Mason jars; the feast spread out; wildflowers and basil plants spilling across the tables; the dance floor slick with sweat and spilled wine; the words of devotion in both French and English; the bride like a heroine from a Romantic poem stepped out of time; and the groom like a handsome, turn-of-the-century immigrant, smiling from ear to ear at his future. Their love is, I’m positive, as boundless as it is timeless. This was one of those rare weddings that teaches you something about the archetypes of love and the primitive, primal way we celebrate with eating and dancing, feeding one another and moving together because food and movement and love are how we stay alive."

The excerpt is from a column I wrote for Nooga.com about my boyfriend's roommates' wedding, and how I used to be kind of neurotic about love. Ok, lets face it, I still am (bless my boyfriend's heart, as we say in the South), but at least I can write opinion pieces about it while celebrating my friends' happiness. You can read the rest here.