Tip in The Marvelous Land of Oz, by L Frank Baum

Spoiler Alert!

And it's a doozy. Imagine that you're a young kid, just trying to find your footing in life. Your world is still black and white, right and wrong, and that's how your young mind learns to categorize things and distinguish one thing from another. Like, say, boys from girls.

And then you enter Oz and follow the adventures of Tip, a boy escaping from the witch who has enslaved him since he was a baby. Tip and Jack Pumpkinhead and the Saw-Horse go off on adventures and la la and so forth, and Baum gets to engage in some high-larious sexist comedy about lady soldiers, and it's an Oz-ing good time.

Then you get to the end and find out that Tip is, in fact, Ozma, the lost princess of Oz, magicked into boyness to hide her from some nefarious something or other, I can't remember.

I can't remember because I was shaken to the core by this boy I've known for however many pages suddenly being a girl I've never met before. I'M a girl. I'm not suddenly going to be told I have to be a boy, am I? And everyone won't act like that's the most normal bit of "hey, we forgot to tell you..." they'd ever heard, will they? They won't just sit down to their palace feast while I sit there with my sudden new reproductive organs rustling around under there, will they?

No one seemed to mind that Tip had to be Ozma all of a sudden, but I sure as hell did. Baum, what the hell's the matter with you? At least let him/her be a bit conflicted or go on Maury or something to complain about how I Was a Witch's Transgendered Slave.

But Tip wasn't transgendered. He never thought he was a girl and never wanted to be one. He just had to be.

Maybe I just didn't like being the thought of girlhood being the consolation prize that Duty To Your Country stuck you with.

Jumping San Diego

Look how happy I was to be there this Memorial Day weekend!

San Diego Loves Myspace

Or not.

Normally I wouldn't endorse naughty words in public places where the children -- The Children! -- may be corrupted by them, but come on. This is awesome.

Peet's Coffee

What a loser! Writing about how much you love a particular brand of coffee is like writing about your favorite color or telling a story about a dream you had. What a waste of the internets.

But, screw it, Peet's Coffee ruined coffee for me. Everything else tastes like swill (with a few exceptions -- thank you, whatever they serve at the Novel Cafe in Santa Monica and King's Road in LA and Cubby's Cafe here in Culver City). I now get my bag of Italian Roast or Dickinson's Blend or whatever they call it from the supermarket and make my own and the three Starbucks within walking distance of my house can go screw themselves.

I'm so jittery about this topic, I just used "screw" twice in one post! What the hell! Thank god for the antioxidants, because they make up for the agitation!

Peet's Coffee emporiums, however, aren't decorative or cozy or conducive to much pondering, which is probably good, because I don't need to be sitting on my ass in some goddamned coffee shop all day, trying to look both intelligent and important. I have my cell phone out in case my AGENT calls, okay? It's not like I'm UNEMPLOYED.

PHP/MySQL and CSS

I was a backend database programmer for too long -- Oracle PL/SQL to SQL Server t-sql to a little Sybase to reporting with Crystal Reports to using ASP .net. I worked for companies, crafting queries and functions and oh my god, I just bored myself. I liked it because it's like doing logic puzzles all day long.

But when I finally taught myself some front-end languages and, as of last year, got into PHP and MySQL programming, holy cow! What fun. Clean, sensible, always improving, with huge amounts of solid online resources, glossaries and code libraries to help you figure out how to make your site do whatever you want.

I don't know what makes some brains wired to enjoy the thrill of conditional statements and relational databases and functions and so forth, but it sure makes for a fun day of working on a site.

And CSS is the greatest -- it helps makes design clean and easy to do. (Well, "easy"). It makes sites make sense -- what a country, Yakov!

Amazon.com

It works. Prices are low. Shipping is either reasonable or downright free. The interface makes sense. Almost everything is either in stock or available through a partner.

Amazon is the internet done right. I love you, Amazon!

Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware

A masterpiece by graphic novelist Chris Ware. Both the best book I've ever watched and the best movie I've ever read. Deeply felt, observant, and funny.

Ware (and Jimmy) seems puzzled by life and by other people, and this work seeks to put some pieces of that puzzle in place and make sense of life. That's what great art does.

This book broke my heart and gave me hope for mankind. Very slick, Ware!

"Gilda" (1946, Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford)

Putting aside my crush on Glenn Ford -- one of those regular-guy, low-wattage but high-charisma stars I'm so attracted to, like Gene Hackman and Ross Martin (it's a mystery to me why those Victorian ladies were attracted to Jim West when Artemus Gordon was right there. Must've been the tight pants) -- I was enthralled by this movie. It's grown-up storytelling at a high pitch, a story about adults and their complexities that is made by and for adults. Rita Hayworth was in her 20s at the time, but she plays Gilda as a full-grown woman aware of the consequences of her risky manipulations and willing (even eager) to take responsibility for them.

What a shock that is after being inundated with today's reductive version of womanhood; girl-stars and their coy, teasing, woman-child antics. Woman afraid to grow up. Desperate Housewives trying to freeze themselves in their own pasts. And too often these women are paired with grown boy-heroes who just want people to say, "Yes, Harrison. You've still got it."

Our heroes, Gilda and Johnny (of course, "Johnny"), are unscrupulous, self-absorbed, and compromised, but they're also vulnerable, loyal, and driven by love. They're drifting along riding on the coattails of questionable people, and they pay for their dissolution. They accept the consequences of their own actions and learn from their mistakes. Like adults. No phony fairy-tale ending where the Pretty Woman lets the wealthy prince whisk her away from all this – "all this” being the running of her own life and her growth as a person. What kind of shitty fairy tale is that?

I prefer Gilda, the beautiful heroine who seems to be a manipulative slut, and Johnny, the handsome young prince who works as a goon for a mobster. They're in love. They hurt each other terribly. I won't tell you whether they live happily ever after or not, but what a great ride it is to get to find out.

"Gilda" is funny, tense, suspenseful, intriguing, and entertaining. It was made in 1946. Maybe World War II made Americans temporarily smarter about themselves and about the perils of the worlds both inside and outside your door. They didn't look for easy answers; "Gilda” certainly doesn't provide any. Too bad the Iraq War hasn't done the same for us.

"ABC" by the Jackson 5

Michael Jackson is the ultimate test of the question, "can I separate the art from the artist? Can I go to my co-worker's swank party even though he's an arrogant prick who doesn't need more sops to his ego? Can I accept that branch of my relatives even though they're dopey and dull? Can I buy a Starbucks latte without worrying about fair trade and Third World farmers?" These are the conundrums of daily life.

The Jacksons are a family of greedy, waxen, manipulative liars. Not a nice thing to say, but molesting poor kids and fleeing to Bahrain is not a nice thing to do. ("Allegedly!", as Kathy Griffin would add.) How utterly unfair that they possess musical genius.

I can't figure out how their music (the stuff they've done both individually and collectively) can express such effortless joy and warmth when they themselves express the opposite.

"ABC"is pure joy. I feel lucky to be alive when I hear it. Isn't that a son of a bitch?

Maybe the Jacksons need to put the love into their songs because that's the only place they can find it. Maybe music is in their tell-tale hearts. Maybe they're just lucky assholes.

Other joyous Jackson songs:

"Someone to Call My Lover“ -- Janet
"I Want You Back" -- the 5
"PYT (Pretty Young Thing)“ -- Michael

It's the Jacksons, if you're nasty.

"Eat It" by Weird Al Yankovic

"Yo, Ding Dong, man. Ding Dong."

"You ain't fat. You ain't nothing!"

Weird Al at the top of his game (which is saying a lot). What a peculiar talent this guy has. Thank god he was around to keep a check on the excesses of the 80s and deliver this perfect parody song and video.

An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser

This is one of the most boring books I've ever read. It's the only book it's ever taken me literally years to read.

My mom picked it up for me at the supermarket (and no matter how much I ponder the idea of this book on the rack at the A&P, I can't figure it out) the summer before I went to college. It's a brick of a book in extra tiny, elderly-reader-taunting typeface. I started to slog through it, went away to college for a few months, came back for vacation, found it sitting on my bedside table, jeering at me, read some more, and kept this up until I finished it. Seriously, it's dull and takes forever to read.

And yet. I have a terrible memory for plot and couldn't possibly put most books down for more than a few days before I'd have to start over at the beginning to know what's going on. But I was easily able to pick this one up months later. Dreiser is boring for the same reason that he's memorable: he describes things in such sharp, intricate detail that he imprints them on your memory for forever.

I think this is one of the handful of Great American Novels because it's so authentically perceptive about and descriptive of the character of post-Civil War Americans. The hero of the story wants money and respect, and he knows he'll get respect by getting money. He wants to be a big shot. He ends up in the middle of a triangle -- devoted, simple, dull shop girl he impregnates versus glamorous, wealthy boss's daughter he pursues. He accidentally (except in the sense that he planned it) drowns his unsuspecting pregnant girlfriend in order to rid himself of his inconvenient past, but of course, you can't escape your past no matter how far down a river you put it.

Once you know this story, you see it everywhere you look, from Ted Kennedy to O.J. to Iran Contra to Watergate. Just push your dirty little secrets out of the boat and no one will know, will they?

It's the flip side of the American Dream, the true story to the Horatio Alger mythology. It's about our lust for privilege. We in America believe the privileged deserve better than the rest of us, as is evident from our health care system to our first class cabins to our Hummers and our love of casinos. If only we can figure out how to step on each other to claw our way up to the ranks of the privileged; then we'll be happy!

The movie adaptation A Place in the Sun, starring the perfectly cast and excellent Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, and Shelley Winters (gee, guess which woman played which character), is damned near perfect itself.

But before you see the movie, set aside a few years to read the book. The news, your neighbors, and your own seething ambitions will make more sense when you do.

"Tears of a Clown", Smokey Robinson & The Miracles

This lyrically intricate and layered song is pure emotion swaddled in an undeniable beat. The tension-filled lyrics are fun to say and fun to sing along with.

Smokey's peculiar, robotically-reserved interpretive style perfectly fits this song of secret passions hidden beneath bland exteriors. It's Smokey to a T, isn't it? -- the hard-bargaining, egotistical songwriting genius lurking like a troll beneath the bridge of his breathy tenor.

What's going on here? What is this "blog" you speak of? Are you from the future?

I am a crankypants. I think most things are mediocre to terrible, but that never stops them from being popular. That's lame. So then I thought, "Hey, Cranky, why not highlight the people and things that you think are really, really awesome? The Pearls in Poo, as it were." So these are the things I think are Pearls, including people I hope to work with some day. Unless they're dead. Wait, Natalie Cole proved it doesn't matter if they're dead. So, look out, John Wayne! The Wayne/Lamb Good-Time Feminist Variety Hour is in development!