Newsflash: Women can be Funny, too!

Posted on October 7, 2008 by Larissa Archer

I try not to get too worked up over stupid stuff I read in the papers….I’m sorry; I shouldn’t lie right at the outset like that. I read the papers specifically to feed my anger. Maybe I’m afraid my bile will get bored if it doesn’t have something to roil and churn over, or that I won’t have anything to brood about when my bedtime bong hit wears off and I wake up at five in the morning. Some things really gripe my ass, including many articles I’ve read recently in The Times, The Independent, and several other publications from which I’d expect greater breadth of comprehension.

BIG NEWS: There are funny women in the world! Actually, the news seems to be about just how funny we can be, because anything more than a middling talent for comedy in a woman is a shock. Even more shocking is the fact that some of today’s comediennes are pretty, as well as funny. Adding to the collective gasp at the display of more than one attribute at a time in a woman–and discussing the trend as something women are finally allowed to inhabit rather than considering that the trend might be one newly foisted on us–is Caitlin Moran, writing in The Times, “It’s not like back in the 20th century, when women could be either funny but essentially unf***able – Joan Rivers, Roseanne Barr, Bette Midler, Lily Tomlin, Jo Brand – or f***able but condemned to a lifetime of speaking other people’s lines – Lucille Ball, Phyllis Diller, Carole Lombard…” Moran cites Sarah Silverman’s and Tina Fey’s recent appearances on the cover of Maxim and Marie Claire respectively as evidence that finally, this heretofore unseen species of female has emerged, one who possesses a talent only men are supposed to have but who didn’t develop it to compensate for her mediocre looks. As is often the case when the media starts discussing “revelations” of this sort, the only real revelation is in yet another example of the disconnect between reality and what the media says is reality. Ask everyone you know whether they have a female friend or relative who is both attractive and funny. I bet every one of them, bored with your question’s inanity, will say yes.
Actually, maybe the real revelation here is the one not being discussed. Maybe, in comedy, as in so many other professions now, it is no longer enough to be talented; the ones who are getting ahead are the ones like Silverman and Fey, who have looks and talent. If Roseanne were starting out today, I doubt she would gain the success she did twenty years ago, because it seems that more and more, talent unaccompanied by good looks will not suffice to help a woman achieve the success of her more “fuckable” competitors. Why, after all, put a fat funny woman on TV when finally there are skinny funny women we can put on instead? The 20th century, to which Moran glibly refers as to a stone age of outmoded unenlightenment, at least spared some of its talents the pressure to be beautiful. And now in our so-modern renaissance of equality and empowerment, we talk about those days when the merely talented could achieve success as dark and unevolved, compared to now, when, unless Maxim wants you in your panties on its cover, you just aren’t “it.” In any case, the successful contemporary comedienne left unmentioned in this and every other article I’ve read on the subject, is Kathy Griffin, who I would argue is as funny if not funnier than the two titanesses making the headlines. Griffin has famously undergone numerous cosmetic surgeries in an attempt, I assume, to validate her talent with the requisite fuckability.

It’s happening in other fields as well. Soprano Deborah Voigt was fired from the Royal Opera four years ago because she couldn’t fit into the cocktail dress designed for its production of Ariadne auf Naxos. Because of her great fame (developed over twenty years of singing in the best international houses, all that time being, by the way, enormously fat), it looked at the time like a first incidence of its sort in an art form known for the great heft of many of its stars. However, young singers new to the profession now will tell you that they not only have to keep the weight off, but they usually dress for auditions in dresses or skirts which show their legs at least up to the knee. They know that they will be considered for parts based as much on their sex appeal as on their vocal artistry. No wonder; I’ve attended a handful of opera productions in London in the past two years and have seen singers in leading roles wearing bikini’s, miniskirts, and merry widows with fishnets. I haven’t heard a lot of unforgettable voices, but I suppose that’s not what one goes to the opera for anymore. Voigt underwent gastric bypass surgery, lost a significant amount of her bulk and returned to the London stage in the same production earlier this year. It’s hard to think of that as a triumph for anyone but the people who fired her in the first place, people who assume their audience wants singers to look like Gwyneth Paltrow, and who, in making decisions like these, are cultivating a new audience who is now learning to judge an artist as much, if not more, by her fuckability as by her art.

And of course there are many examples of this in other arenas as well. A friend of mine argues, “Can you imagine Ella Fitzgerald doing a music video today?… She’d be kicked off the set, and we’d never hear her voice.” I wonder if Zadie Smith would have attained the level of success she enjoys now, if she didn’t possess a formidable beauty in addition to her formidable talent. It’s difficult to tell, since her looks are so often remarked upon alongside praise for her work. Would anyone ever take Anne Coulter seriously in any capacity—publish her silly diatribes or put her on chat shows so she could insult Jews and berate 9-11 widows, if she didn’t have long blonde hair and wear skirts up to her gigi?

To quote Sarah Silverman, “What the cock is that shit?”

No one says, “That Bill Maher is so funny and smart! Too bad about his nose.” Nobody suggests that it’s surprising or somehow novel for a respected journalist like Anderson Cooper to also be a hottie. Nobody in the public sphere discussed the fuckability of George Carlin. People just aren’t as obsessed with mens’ looks as with womens.’ It’s understood and has been for centuries that a man’s worth lies in how well he does his job, not how he looks while he does it. That and how much money he makes. But that’s a different rant altogether.

And so we have journalists writing about this fake new movement, the advent of the funny beautiful woman. Along with this fake movement is the more real movement of the funny successful woman. Much has been made of Tina Fey’s status as the first female head writer on Saturday Night Live. While this says something about the changing status of women in comedy, it doesn’t say everything: left unsaid is the hypocrisy revealed in the Saturday Night Live modus operandi. SNL offers political and cultural satire from a liberal and progressive perspective. For 33 years it’s used humor to reveal and criticize inequality, intolerance, and other ills (in addition to equally relevant fare like “Landshark” and “Massive Headwound Harry”). What does it say about the show and its progressiveness that until Fey assumed the role of first female head writer there, 24 years after the show’s inception, the creative staff had been a notorious “old boys club”? I do not intend to diminute Fey’s success or her struggle to achieve it, but rather to highlight the peculiar backwardness of a cultural institution (as SNL has been called) which, as late as 1999, could still have been referred to as an “old boy’s club.”

It’s not so much that women are evolving. It’s that the worlds in which we work to make a living and a name for ourselves are small-minded and full of fear. It’s that these worlds have a long way to go before they can consider our talents, successes, and failures without embarrassing themselves and us. People act surprised when we display more than one talent at a time, or have bothered to cultivate any talents when we could have just coasted on our looks. Respected and successful thinkers like Christopher Hitchens can write essays about why women aren’t funny based on the fact that we have wombs and are innately prissy, and supports his theory by claiming that when we are funny we’re usually “hefty, dykey, or Jewish,” and still get published in Vanity Fair. People with influence can talk about something you and I and everyone we know already knew as if it’s some cultural break-through, and then pat themselves on the back for recognizing it and being progressive enough to acknowledge it as a good thing.

What the cock, indeed.

Posted in angry feminism, Publishing rants | 1 Comment

My Kilburn Apartment

Posted on August 22, 2008 by Larissa Archer

When I first moved to London and was looking for a room to rent, I didn’t take any of the precautions I now know to be necessary. I didn’t check the mattresses and furniture for bedbugs, I didn’t visit the neighborhood after dark to gauge its safety, I didn’t check my landlord’s record with the council to see if there were any lawsuits. I avoided the disasters to which I had left myself vulnerable only by luck.

The room I chose is in a pre-Dickensian tenement in the old Irish neighborhood of Kilburn. When I moved in there were two other people living in the flat, a pensioner from Liverpool named Ken, and a Philippino cleaning lady named Irma; one other room was empty. Ken told me that Irma used to have a another friend living in her room and that my room and the empty room downstairs each had two people living in them, all Philipino immigrants, bringing the tenant number of the four-bedroom flat to seven, but that that arrangement had recently been outlawed by the council for some reason having to do with taxation. Before he had arrived a few months before, his room had been occupied by a German woman named Lolita, who apparently still came around once in a while to steal silverware or other amenities that she claimed to have originally purchased for the house. It all seemed part of the exciting new world of London to me.

The day after I moved in, Ken asked, in the overly-tactful tones of someone whose job it is to tell you a loved one is dead, that I not put my tampons in the bathroom bin.

“But….where, then?” (blushing horribly)

“Well, the Philipinos used to do all that stuff in their rooms and then take them out in little baggies to the dumpster when they went to work in the mornings.”

“What?? No, I can’t do that—why do you know this??”

“I mean it’s unsanitary to have them just lying in the bin like that; it’s biological material and it decays and stinks and attracts flies.” His anxiety surprised me; it’s not as if I flung them naked over my shoulder and watched them slide down the wall; I usually wasted half a roll of toilet paper wrapping them up like small mummies and stacked them neatly at the bottom of the can.

“I’ve never had a fly problem. I really don’t like talk—“

“I mean if you won’t keep it in your room, at least the bin in the kitchen has a lid so the flies won’t get at it.”

“I’m not walking my tampons to the kitchen.”

Actually, Lolita had recently stolen the lidded bin from the kitchen and ever since then we’ve thrown our garbage in an orange plastic grocery bag from Sainsbury’s which sits atop the kitchen table. Even had I been willing to make the journey with fistfuls of balled-up tissues from the bathroom to the kitchen every time I required a change, I figured that adding menstrual detritus to the used teabags and banana peels staring Ken in the face while he takes his tea would just aggravate his unease, so I bought a small bin with a flip lid for the bathroom. For the first few months I’d leave the bin empty and only line it with a grocery bag when I needed to use it, but I found that if Ken saw the orange handles peeking out from under the lid for more than five days in a row, he’d lecture me again about flies and decay. So now I replace the liner with another at the end of my period and leave it there for the rest of the month so he can’t tell when my periods are or how negligent I’m being without flipping open the lid and risking a faceful of rot and stench. Sometimes, tired of his policing, I consider collecting nine or ten of my used tampons and hanging them like windchimes over his door, but this fantasy usually only preoccupies me in those vengeful and intemperate days leading up to my periods; when the time is ripe for gathering, my moods have softened and I’m more concerned with finding burgers and chocolate.

Ken told his life story to me in fragments; when we get along, he often comes into the kitchen while I’m eating dinner and picks up at whatever chapter he left off, or repeats one he had told me before if it is sticking in his memory. He worked as some significant sort of bureaucrat in Whitehall all his life until offered a deceptively attractive early retirement package, which he accepted and has regretted ever since. Now he is past reemployment age, bored with the idleness to which he consigned himself, unable to enjoy much of a social life on his paltry stipend, and spends many hours a day sitting on the couch in the living room staring at the wall. Eventually he bought a TV license and took his old Panasonic out of storage and now watches sports and American movies from breakfast until he goes to bed at one thirty in the morning. He was married once, just after his retirement, to a Colombian woman named Bibiana who he claims comes from one of that country’s notorious drug cartel families and who finally wiped him out and ruined his credit: after giving up his lucrative job, he lost in his divorce from Bebe his house in Greenwich, his life savings, including his severance package from Whitehall, and most of his possessions. Every once in a while Bibiana calls up, asking for “Meester Ken” and Ken disappears with the phone into his room, and emerges two hours later, white-faced and shaking.

More naturally fussy than I am about housekeeping, Ken usually takes the dishes left after washing to dry by the sink, towel-dries them, and returns them to their cupboards. I consider life to be too short to be spent in pointlessly fastidious tasks like wiping down cereal bowls and polishing spoons, and have always been content to live out of the dish rack, so to speak. It saves the trouble of having to both open and close the cupboard door, and eliminates the threat of leaving it open and bumping one’s head against it while lost in concentration over the stir-fry. Also, I’ve probably seen too many movies, maybe watched too much X-Files, but there’s always in my mind a small but specific dread of opening the cupboard door and finding something hideous and unnatural sitting on the shelf next to the coffemugs—a severed foot, perhaps, or the chupacabra. Unlikely, I’ll admit, but better safe than sorry. When Ken and I are on the outs, he continues his meticulous attention to his own and the other housemates’ utensils and porcelainware but leaves mine on the rack. In our relatively peaceful household, this passes as “fightin’ words.” So in retaliation I put my goods in the cupboard and use his stuff instead. I replace my usual low-maintenance snacks of avocado and yogurt with more complicated meals requiring pots and large spoons and multiple plates, even a colander if I can find a use for it. After I wash them, I then leave all of them dripping and preferably still sudsy on the rack, forcing him to either fume silently as his own kitchenware air-dries, or to once again clean up after me like the harried hausfrau he failed to recognize is his true vocation. An advantage of this method is that unlike me, Ken did not buy his silverware at the 99p shop, and it’s refreshing to use knives that don’t bend when I try to cut cheese with them, and forks which don’t break off at the head and get lost in my spaghetti. Likewise, once we’ve made up, in a gesture symbolic of our renewed amity, Ken will take whatever I just washed, lovingly wipe it down so that it shines dry and pristine, and carefully return it to the cupboard.

Ken and I have been the only constant tenants of our apartment for these two years. Irma had an obese boyfriend who would break the tiles on the bathroom floor when he stepped out of the shower, and when we complained, she moved out. Then we got an American girl from Texas who was studying for a year at London School of Economics. She drank a lot and would introduce disgusting or otherwise objectionable topics when we were all eating in the kitchen, particularly if Ken was there. I remember an awkward dinner one night when she opened the discussion by asking Ken if she could borrow his razor to shave her nether bits before her date later that night. She would often attempt to provoke him in this way; I think she believed herself something of a brazen Yankee firecracker amidst the stodgy old-world Brits who just didn’t know what to make of someone so honest and uninhibited. Ken never responded with the level of aghastment I think she was seeking, but he did develop a keen and unyielding animosity towards her with which he bullied her into leaving after only two months. For a while we had a Japanese girl who was here on a workstudy program in PR and a Colombian woman who worked for a fishmonger in St. John’s Wood; we liked her even though she spoke no English because she would often bring us free fish, and even better, cook it for us with pilaf, but she left to move in with her boyfriend, also a fishmonger. Then we had two Japanese girls named Yoko. Downstairs Yoko still lives with us, but Upstairs Yoko moved out after a horrifying murder took place in our building.

I left the house one morning to find our street cordoned off and a policeman with a clipboard asking me for my name, my exact address, where was I going now, when did I plan on coming back and would I be available for questioning then? He wouldn’t tell me what happened, but I found out on the news later on that a headless body had been found in the recycling cage in front of our house. When I came home that night the street was still roped off, I had to sign in again, and a large tent had been set up in our courtyard, with security guards and men in forensics suits milling about, taping black plastic over the windows and carrying boxes of things from the apartment. I caught a glance of a meat cleaver in one of them. Luckily they honed in on the man they believed committed the murder before I got home, but Ken and Upstairs Yoko had each endured three-hour interrogations that day.

It turned out that the body belonged to our neighbor on the first floor, who, it quickly surfaced, went by several names. To us he gave the name, “Kamal Kamal,” to our landlord Bilesh, “Alberto Reynondo,” and to others, some complicated Algerian name I can’t remember. He received, and still receives, mail addressed to all of his names. The man charged with the murder was our neighbor next door, who lived in the flat above the victim’s, and who was tracked down in Leeds two days later. He admitted to having dumped the head in a canal in nearby Little Venice.

It was all a very dismal business, and the Yokos were quite shaken by it, particularly as the murderer had chatted each of them up on different occasions. I felt that the least our landlord could do, considering it all, was to lower our rent, but when our contracts were up he instead raised it for each of our rooms by five pounds a week. Two months after the murder, the police returned control of the two empty one-bedroom apartments next door to Bilesh, who then rented both of them at two hundred forty pounds a week each to the family of Somalians who had been living in our basement for the past year. We were shocked Bilesh had the cheek to demand the market price, and the highest end of the market price at that, for these apartments which, even without considering what had taken place in them, were pretty shabby—ill-heated, no fire escape. We were even more shocked that the Somalians, who knew what had happened there, were willing to pay such a sum for them, but the council is paying their rent and they don’t seem to mind the ghosts. I suspect they’ve seen worse in their lifetimes.

Upstairs Yoko decided to move somewhere she believed more peaceful, although I doubt there’s anywhere in this ancient city that didn’t see, somewhere in its history, a similarly bloody episode. I considered moving at the time, but it somehow seemed an overreaction. Ken’s fussiness, a daily bother, is a much more powerful incentive to leave, as are Bilesh’s relentless increases on the rent every six months. And yet Kilburn is a pretty great neighborhood to live in, and I have a lot of closet space, and an extra bed in my room for when my mom visits me. Ken does make nice mashed potatoes for us once in a while. I guess it all makes for a good story.

Posted in London | 4 Comments

Pensées Françaises

Posted on April 2, 2008 by Larissa Archer

Sarko and Carla visited L’Angleterre last week and of course images of the odd couple took up more space in the UK’s newspapers than reports of Zimbabwean election-rigging, Hilary-slamming, and new revelations of the brain cancer-mobile phones link put together. Actually, the rags showed only a few token pictures of Sarko in his platforms, and devoted most space to “Carlamania”: Carla in the seven outfits she wore during her two-day visit, Carla kissing the prime minister, Carla offering her dainty hand to the prince’s puckered lips, Carla tucking her dainty ankles under her chair on the cover of The Independent, Carla apparently having spent much effort not to out-glam the traditionally sub-chic wives of English politicians. Carla curtsying like a shy schoolgirl to the queen.

It is the last pose I mentioned, or rather the exaltation of praise from the mags on her impeccable manners and proper respect for British protocol with that picture as the exemplary image, qui me derange.

Why should the wife of the President of the Republic of France curtsy to the Queen of England? I’ve asked several Britons this, and most of them, in an attempt, I assume, to avoid a discussion of the modern relevance of feudal custom, said that the curtsy is foremost a gesture of respect for the great age of the hardy monarch. However, I know that this is la merde de la vache, parce que if 40 year-old Carla Bruni were meeting another head of state—say the US had an 85 year old female president (Ayez l’imagination!)—she would not curtsy. She would accept the aged figurehead’s offered hand for a business-like shake, perhaps dip her head a bit. She would not bend at the knees, she would not diminute her super model frame in a gesture of subordinance, however brief, to the leader of a foreign nation. It is not the queen’s age, but her status, which requires one to symbolically demonstrate the recognition of that status in one’s physicality.

But first of all, why should status transfer between the citizenries of different nations? Elizabeth II is not Carla Bruni’s queen. I’m not suggesting the French first lady should have spit on the ground before the English throne, but why should she be required to perform the same obeisance as would a subject to that throne?

Secondly, as ridiculous as this might sound, considering Elizabeth II had already been referring to herself in the royal “we” for over a decade before the Bruni was born, as well as that half a year ago Bruni was no more connected to politics than well, your average aging model-turned-pop singer, but as wife of the president of the republic of France, she’s technically, if not historically or in the affections of the public, equal in rank to the queen. One could argue that this isn’t so since she is the wife of, but is not herself, the head of the French government, but then neither is the queen the head of British government—the prime minister is. Nobody curtsies to Gordon Brown.

Is it all so simple as that she was visiting the queen on British soil and was therefore obliged to act according to British custom? I’m trying to imagine the queen visiting the French leader and his new wife on Rue St. Honoré, and I just can’t imagine her submitting her royal form to any attitudes of deference. And in that case, would Bruni once again curtsy in the same way I did when I was about to perform the twinkly-toes dance in ballet class when I was five? It just seems so undignified.

Any thoughts?

Posted in angry feminism, Publishing rants | 2 Comments

Paris Pix

Posted on March 4, 2008 by Larissa Archer

Hi. I’m still in London. I don’t know what to do with my life. but I went to Paris over the New Year and for a bit after. There are lots more pictures on my facebook page, but a lot of my readers (those who haven’t abandoned this neglected blog) are probably too shrewd to sign their identities over to the F-Monster.


A guide explaining “The Judgmentless Execution of the Moorish King” (bad translation mine) to schoolchildren.


I think the title of this sculpture was “I have nothing to wear today!”

You can try to capture the early evening moon, but it’s never quite right.

at Brasserie Lipp. I appreciated how well-lit so many of the restaurants were. People go out in Paris–much more than in other gloomier, less social, less glamorous places that shall go unnamed but where even the pubs close at 11 as if that’s any way to live–to see and be seen, and that peskily romantic dim lighting–used in lands where people don’t know romance from their asses and rely on tired old gimmicks from outdated American rom-com’s because if they’re going to be hopelessly awkward socially and not know how to dress or get their teeth fixed or talk to women, the only chance they have is in impaired visibility–just doesn’t work.


St. Chappelle. of course.

http://www.youtube.com/get_player

Posted in my travels | 5 Comments

Edinb’rahhh and Moscow!

Posted on September 30, 2007 by Larissa Archer

I know I was supposed to write a more in-depth account of my blow-out at my old magazine, but I can’t be asked. Instead, I’m posting pictures of my recent travels to Edinburgh for the fringe festival and Moscow, for a short course I did with the great Moscow Art Theatre. Edinburgh Castle.

me with a deep-fried Mars bar. Brilliant.

evening at Red Square

Novo Devitchi Convent
We were instructed never to photograph soldiers, police or otherwise official-looking people, but I found that after I chased these ones down Tverskaya Boulevard, interrupted their attempt to buy cigarrettes, and apologized a lot (in charmingly broken Russian, I like to think, something like, “Forgive my Russian Tongue. She is a Wretchedness. I am sweet little students of the great Moscow’s Art Theatrical. Please I can you both to photograph with my sweet little non-journalistic camera machine? You are very spectacular. Please don’t cast away your bags from McDonald’s. They are a very spectacle.”), they were very accommodating.
Gogol.

Anyone on facebook can see many more pictures on my page. ‘ooorrrrrah!

Posted in my travels, theatre | 1 Comment

The Latest Rejected Article!

Posted on July 19, 2007 by Larissa Archer

Yup, and this time for reasons I might delineate in a wrathful expose shortly, fired from my job!! For those of you who didn’t know, for the last year, I’ve been a paid editor (and unpaid writer) for New York Moves magazine. The brief version goes something like: publisher Mamoonah finds out that chief editor Richard is paying me twice as much as she expects her skilled employees to be paid (that is, pittance or nothing), insists that my pay be slashed in half, I decline to work at the new truncated rate, am replaced with two twenty year-old interns out of Harvard (who allow such literary abuses to appear in print as “comprised of,” “who’s” where “whose” is required, nostalgic references to Sex and the City in nearly every article in every issue, and phrases which manage to be overwrought, out of place, and cliched, like “down that road lies madness….“). During my latest trip to the city, after receiving no responses to several emails and phone calls I make concerning $500 I am owed, as well as my hope to negotiate an agreeable payscale and continue my work there, I appear at the office to discuss it in person and am ushered back out into the corridor (interns all a-gawk) by chief editor Richard and lectured on the necessity for me to “get real,” informed that I have made a nuisance of myself, the magazine no longer wants my contributions and would I please leave the building.
This is an article I had written at the behest of chief Richard on the subject of truth; he wanted something profound, like why truth is good and lies are bad (perhaps this was motivated by the fact that he had been lying to Moonah for several months about how much money he was paying me). Since I haven’t blogged much recently, I’ll post this for you to read while I contemplate why everything I’m involved in ends in flames.

How tenuous are the bases of our day-to-day interactions with our fellow men and women. How dependent we are upon these strangers for the management of the dross of our daily lives. We trust the butcher to be honest about the freshness of his meat. We trust our doctors to give honest diagnoses of our ailments, and not condemn us to unnecessary surgeries. We trust reviewers to give objective assessments of the movies we see, not based on any financial or personal entanglements they might have with the studios or artists. Of course, to trust blindly is naïve, and if one investigates any one of these relationships beyond the surface, one is likely to find betrayals of varying degrees of seriousness. The butcher wants to get rid of his aging beef and will probably extend its shelf life by a day or two in his claims of its newness. Most doctors in our country get paid extra per surgery, and thus have reason to err on the side of slicing into one whenever possible. It is common knowledge that a reviewer’s published opinions will often understandably coincide with the business interests of the publication for which he works. How much advertising does Warner Bro.’s buy in the Times?

Life would be significantly simpler and less stressful if honesty could be taken for granted in our interactions with strangers. The unfortunate fact is that because those interactions usually take the form of financial transactions, we are constantly assuming the pose of either one who profits by the other party, or one by whom the other party profits. It makes sense that widespread dishonesty would stem from this commercialism, and the only thing keeping us from plummeting further into treachery is whatever innate honesty people possess individually, or even collectively, that is, how much value our society places on honesty, even if only in lip service easily drowned out by the din of lies told in the name of the “bottom line.” In our impersonal relationships, based only on the assumption of honesty, the lack of that honesty causes the greater anxiety and majority of problems.

But what of our personal relationships, the basis of which is not the assumption of honesty but the assumption of love? These are not constructed around the exchange of goods and collection of profit, but around the mutual affection and wish for the well-being of the other. The accepted reckoning is that in such relationships, honesty is still the best policy most of the time. However, if it is a given that the basis of a relationship is love (this is of course an examination of forms, not of individual real-life cases, each of which is no doubt riddled with exceptions, qualifiers, and contradictions), then one can also assume that any lie told is told in the name of love and well-wishing, rather than profit and exploitation. The name for this is of course the “white lie,” and many deny its validity regardless of the motive. The white lie, detractors say, encourages people to cling to comforting but hollow notions about themselves, and they are wise who face those harsh truths and find comfort by some other way than self-delusion. When your wife asks if her butt looks big in these jeans, and indeed it does, is she not better off knowing it?

A friend of mine, let’s call him Ellis Richardson, and I are locked in a long-standing stalemate in our debate on the virtues of lying. His conviction is that every lie we tell, “white” or no, holds us back as people and as a society: we must endure the harshness of the truth (for the unmitigated truth is indeed a harsh thing) in order to come out healthier, happier, and freer: it is good for your wife to know her butt size to scale. My stance is that the truth can be too destructive when wielded indiscriminately; it is a tricky thing to unite candor and tact, and it takes some thick skin to be made happy and free by the clumsy imposition of some terrifying accuracy. I have, until now, avoided examining this topic too closely for fear of being persuaded by “Ellis” towards his blanket condemnation of any and all forms of lying, as this would discredit the staggering number of lies I’ve told in my life and prevent me from ever being able to lie with any integrity again.

But perhaps there is a compromise in the differentiation between the motives behind lies told for profit and those told out of affection. That Zorbas the Greek desires the dying Madame Hortense is a “white lie,” but her belief in the lie and their lovemaking give her a brief but truthfully-felt bit of happiness before her death. How much kinder is Zorbas’s lie than the cruel frankness of the old women who keep their perverse vigil at her bed, not bothering to conceal their intention to plunder her small home the moment she expires! It is Zorbas’s generous and affectionate nature, his greater engagement with love and pleasure than with ambition and profit, which make him trustworthy even in his dishonesty.

It is accepted wisdom that the person you love is the one person with whom you can be completely honest, but I would contend that rather, the person you love is the only person with whom you can be dishonest, as it is (or as long as it is) from a position of genuine goodwill. When you are loved by someone you can trust that if he lies it is because he believes that the lie is not only kinder but actually better for you than the truth. Whether the lie is ever better in fact seems to me no less reliable than that truth is always better, is always kinder, is beauty. One who knows you knows when your illusions are harmless or even healthy, and when they perpetuate destructive or delusive behavior, and if he loves you will feed or destroy those illusions accordingly. It is not for his own profit but that of his beloved, that the one who loves, lies.

Posted in Publishing rants | 6 Comments

In Defense of Sloth

Posted on April 1, 2007 by Larissa Archer

Since I haven’t posted for a while, here’s another article from New York Moves’s Christmas/Seven deadly sins issue (the one to which I contributed “In Defense of Vanity” and “Blinded by the Light,” linked below. Thank you, Odious, for the inspiration for my thesis; you know what I’m talking about.

No other city in the world is quite as unforgiving towards sloth as New York. The expense alone overwhelms anyone who doesn’t exert a near superhuman effort to break into and succeed in our job market, the most overcrowded and competitive in America. The glut of cultural offerings shames people who might otherwise content themselves with Monday night football and the occasional Cineplex outing into becoming reluctant but regular patrons of the arts: it’s simply too embarrassing to admit that one hasn’t seen the Bodies exhibit, or that one missed The History Boys or that one still hasn’t visited the new MOMA. Thousands of restaurants featuring the cuisine of hundreds of different cultures encourage the frequent dining-out customary to New Yorkers, many of whom return home after sixteen-hour days to snatch too few hours of sleep before waking at dawn to start the frenzied day all over again.

Yet within each New Yorker is a “Secret Sloth” as my driven friend Aggie named hers, who would rather call in sick and spend the day sitting on the couch watching sitcom reruns and slurping Cup O’Noodles. The fact is, work is stressful and takes up a lot of time, and most people who are making enough money to live in the city are doing it in high-pressure jobs that don’t necessarily offer any creative satisfaction but leave one too exhausted to pursue other interests with any gusto. The city’s recreational offerings also have a cultural and historical gravitas that discourages regarding them as recreational at all. In any other city one can simply take a walk in the park. In New York, however, Central Park carries with its very name the countless remembered scenes from film and literature, which crowd in upon one’s consciousness while one’s merely strolling along its perimeter. One almost feels an obligation to match one’s scarf to the autumn leaves. And under-accomplished if one fails to meet the love of one’s life while sitting on the bank of the duck pond pensively tossing breadcrumbs into the water. A day at the beach requires an hour-long train ride and once you get there, you have to search the shore for empty patches where you can bury your wallet, and then hope your feet miss the shards of bottle glass strewn in the sand as you wind your way through the screaming children towards the water. In New York, even leisure is never lazy.

Why bother with any of it when you could just sit around? I for one grow weary by the mere process of deciding how to best take advantage of this magnificent city. The opportunities for enrichment terrify me. I am exhausted by the possibilities. The very idea of how meaningful a Saturday afternoon can be makes me want to crawl back into bed and only move to change the channel from Nickelodeon to TV land. Are other New Yorkers leading productive, culturally rich and satisfying lives? Should I feel ashamed that this is what I really want? Does Gray’s Papaya deliver?

I have a friend who describes sloth as the only vice which is its own reward. The other vices drag other people, other things into the picture. They require effort. Greed links the wish for an immoderate amount of something to the pursuit and acquisition of the same. Gluttony requires the material of indulgence. Lust culminates (the luster hopes) in the physical act driven by, but not itself, lust. Wrath involves a world of associated passions, and its extremity can be quite taxing. Sloth just is. One is slothful to be slothful, that’s it. Nothing but sloth is needed, and nothing but sloth results. Sloth owes its existence only to the will to be slothful, the wish to do nothing rather than something. It’s a powerful temptation, and a self-perpetuating one once tasted. It is a particularly dangerous temptation in a city like New York, and the only one of the “seven deadly sins,” as they are so dramatically named, that New York by nature does not encourage. It is hard to walk down the street any day here without contending with lust, gluttony, envy,…. temptations towards each of these are plastered on every billboard, walking their dogs in the park, safe behind shiny glass at Bergdorf’s, wafting through the morning air outside Balthazar’s bakery…wrath emerges swiftly enough when hailing a cab at Columbus Circle on a Friday night. New York was made for sins like these. The city, however, has very little patience for anything less than a super-heightened level of activity from its inhabitants, and thus sloth is the only one of the deadly sins which is out of place here. When one gives in to sloth, one “drops out” of New York and its ethos in a very real way. Practically, one can’t survive here without the energy to succeed and the willingness to exercise it. Culturally, the city is wasted on one who’d rather lie in bed than partake of the thousands of world-class offerings.

And yet, that “Secret Sloth” within each of us—dare I assert that every New Yorker has one? Am I the only who finds the constant pressure to “do stuff” oppressive and pushy? My bed is soft and warm, and my TV has so many channels, and Cup O’Noodles is really quite good; it recently introduced an excellent white cheddar flavor. Even as someone brought up to work hard and drawn to New York by that superior and prolific cultural life for which it is famous, the task of getting out of bed and living life to the fullest is a hard sell.

Sloth, by nature, is a very anti-New York sin.

Posted in my neuroses, Publishing rants | 3 Comments

A Heartbreaking Performance of Staggering Genius

Posted on February 20, 2007 by Larissa Archer

Angela and me at our best. I’m trying to teach her the “Tijuana Booty-Slap, ” or “TJ Booty,” as UCSD co-eds called it on their week end orgies south of the border. This was at a fabulous Easter party she and I threw at my place in the Bronx last years. *sniff*…good times…..
p.s. make sure the sound’s on!

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New Year’s Blogolution

Posted on January 23, 2007 by Larissa Archer

I was asked to write an article on the nature of change (or something, I don’t really pay attention) for the January double issue, which has now turned into the hulking January-February-March triple issue, of New York Moves Magazine. I originally felt it best and most appropriate to write one of those “the problem with you lot…”-type pieces and keep myself out of it, but then my editor suggested that it would be more convincing if I at least pretended to use myself as an example, which I did, in part. This is for anyone wondering about the inaccuracies of my life story as told hereafter.

“How few the days are that hold the mind in place; like four or five hooks holding up a tapestry. Especially the day you know you’ve stopped becoming, the day you know you merely are. What ought to be moves far away; what is comes close.” -Arthur Miller, After the Fall

Much commentary has been devoted to the infamous New Year’s Resolution and its hurried evanescence in the weeks following the New Year. Its inherent, doomed optimism is the stuff of sad jokes and wan regrets, yet every year, people resolve again to lose that weight, to quit smoking, to save more money,… as if they haven’t made these promises to themselves every previous year, and broken them through neglect, lack of discipline, or plain unwillingness. I’d wager most peoples’ New Year’s Eve resolutions didn’t survive their New Year’s Day hangover, let alone the ensuing weeks that have brought us to the threshold of spring. We are accustomed to breaking the promises we make to ourselves, and it is almost touching to see how innocently we go on making those promises, not just every New Year, but every new day.

But is our eagerness to make these abortive resolutions a sign of hope or self-delusion? As a country we descended from people who were willing to drop everything and sail thousands of miles into unknown and dangerous territory in order to pursue a lifestyle they dreamed would be better than the one they were stuck in, and we pride ourselves in our touted “ingenuity.” Change is an integral part of our makeup, and probably the makeup of any healthy human being, but what does it say about us that we seem to be constantly on the hunt for newer, better, and often unrealistic versions of ourselves, only to abandon the hunt with such ease most of the time? We spend thousands of dollars every year on fad diets we know must fail. Most of us can’t afford a new wardrobe every season but strain our credit limits chasing this tantalizing image of our chic new selves, hoping (and knowing full well it is an empty hope) that by “bettering” our appearance, so will our social, professional, and romantic lives be bettered too. We spend years in psychotherapy, only to find that, though we’ve “learned” a lot about ourselves and our atavistic compulsions, our ability or even willingness to change those habits somehow never caught up. Whose bookshelf isn’t crowded with half-read self-help books?

This isn’t to say that people don’t or shouldn’t change at all; New York is indeed the place to find people who have made real and lasting changes to their lives and themselves. But it seems that change—real change, not the kind bidden in a drunken vow made at 12:01 on New Year’s morning–can only happen a few times, those “four or five hooks holding up the tapestry” of one’s life. And it also seems that those few true changes only really happen, conversely, when we rid our minds of unrealistic pipe dreams and face up to our situation, and the changes that are indeed possible to make in that situation.

Some years ago, on another coast and after receiving yet another rejection letter for a story of which I was rather proud (the sort of defeat which always reminded me of my other disappointments: financial dependence, empty love life, facing a lifetime of obscurity, the usual), I came to realize that, by my own standards, and I’m sure, those of anyone with any sense of reality, I was a failure. But in that moment of crying into my pillow, it occurred to me that I had been in the same position, crying for basically the same reasons, more times than I could bear to count. And I also realized that the reason I hadn’t made any drastic changes to my life in any aspect was because for the past few years I had fooled myself into believing that if I made little changes, the bigger gains I dreamed of would magically come to me. My love life would fix itself in time if I just “improved” myself: I read constantly to sharpen my intellect, I worked out often, even did ballet, to stay in superior shape, I developed an eye for vintage fashions and always dressed elegantly. My career would blossom if I refined my skills and made myself into a great writer—some important commissioning editor or agent was bound to glimpse one of my stories or be charmed by my pitch letter and want to represent me. Basically, the changes I was making to my lifestyle were too timid to have any real impact because I was convinced that my real life—my destiny! was somewhere in the future, and it was my task to endure the nowhere life I was in and prepare for the coming miracle by making twee adjustments to my fundamentally defective modus operandi. I would not admit to myself that the paltry life I was enduring those years was indeed my life, my real life, and that unsatisfied, flailing girl, the real me.

I won’t go into the details of what happened after my revelation, but hope it suffices to say that I have experienced real change, several of them, even, since then, my move to New York being the primary one, and catalyst to all the others. And I think these changes were only made possible the moment I let go the cozy platitude that I was becoming, and embraced the ghastly truth that I was.

We are obsessed with becoming, and perhaps this has to do with our youth-fixation (for when we are young it is our duty to devote ourselves to becoming) or maybe it is the epic pressure of the American Dream which bullies people into disdaining their lot for a more dazzling one. Whatever the cause, it seems the constant encouragement to chase an idea of how much better, happier, more perfect one could be, provides a convenient and ever-renewable distraction from recognizing, and making peace with, who one is to begin with. Your first day of maturity is not your 21st birthday, or the first day of your job, or the day you first make love, but “the day you know you merely are.” Vital to change is the recognition that your real life, your real self, is not some perfected being waiting in the distant future for you to grow into them, but who you are right now, shortcomings, discontents and all.

Posted in my neuroses, Publishing rants | 1 Comment

Baby Pix!

Posted on December 30, 2006 by Larissa Archer

Hey, that last post was a total downer. Here are some baby pictures for you to admire until I post for real again.

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