Kimberly Hirsh

Apparently tonight is a waking-after-every-sleep-cycle night. Not my favorite.

🔖📺 Read Wednesday Forgets Why We Fell in Love With the Addams Family.

“The Addams Family films were about family being a haven of pure acceptance and unquestioning love.”

This is a perfect articulation of something I’ve known in my heart since 1991.

Introduce yourself with 5 TV shows 📺:

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer 👱‍♀️
• Firefly 🌌
• Star Trek: The Next Generation 🖖
• GLOW 🤼‍♀️
• The X-Files 🛸

I just finished the first episode of Wednesday. I have so many thoughts and feelings.

First, I’ve seen criticism that the Addams Family works best when you have the whole family. (Sadly, I can’t find the link to where I read this right now.) I completely agree but the decision to rely on the trope of a teen rebelling against their parents means any family time here is very tense. So I don’t want the whole family together because they’re not as loving as I’m used to.

As Emmet Asher-Perrin points out, the Addams Family movies are all about family as a safe haven, on the unconditional not just love, but positive regard they have for their children. That vibe isn’t present here.

(I’ll mention at this point that I haven’t seen the recent animated Addams Family movies, and that I shunned the musical because a huge part of the premise was Wednesday wanting to be normal for a boy and that’s just… not very Wednesday.)

But.

Jenna Ortega is brilliant. She perfectly revives My Generation’s Wednesday (what’s my generation? Xennials I guess?). Her delivery is beautiful. Her physicality is on point (🤺).

I really appreciate the Christina Ricci cameo. She’s adorable.

I love how this feels like a goth Veronica Mars. I’ve seen comparisons to Riverdale, but at least in the first season, Jughead’s narration is reportage, not reflection. He is wryly commenting on the corruption in his town. In contrast, Veronica and Wednesday give us interiority that isn’t self-indulgent.

It has me thinking about what bell hooks has to say about confessional writing, how perception of it is gendered. I’ve been reading remembered rapture lately.

I can’t deal with the family tension and all of the school bits are sort of… just being the cliche rather than commenting on it?

We’ve seen this roommate dynamic in Wicked (I may have started singing “Loathing” to myself when Wednesday and Enid met). There doesn’t seem to be a new take on it here.

Also: the embrace of the supernatural beyond the Addams’s immediate circle feels a little off to me here. In Charles Addams’s comics and in the 90s movies, the world was pretty normal. To suddenly have a school full of vampires, werewolves, gorgons, and sirens feels not exactly random, but out of place.

On this note: Thing. Thing has scars, Frankenstein’s creature style, and I don’t love it. I think because a disembodied hand is enough weird. It requires no additional weird.

The costumes are wonderful. The exterior view of the school makes me super happy.

I’ll give it a few more episodes but giving the Addams Family the Riverdale treatment with a Harry Potter setting, Doyle/Cordelia-on-Angel visions, and a more-Veronica Mars-than-Jughead voiceover feels mostly like trying to do too many things at one time.

(Also, I’ve seen comparisons to Nancy Drew, Buffy, and Sabrina the Teenage Witch but none to VMars, which feels super weird to me.)

Replacing Firefly in my 5 shows to introduce me and subbing in CXG.

🔖 Read What Is a Strike? Reflections from the Virtual Front Lines of the UC Academic Worker Strike by Mary Jirmanas Saba (LA Progressive).

In November, when I realized there was no way I was going to be able to get 50,000 words of writing done, I decided to try writing 750 words a day using the website 750words.com. I enjoyed doing morning pages this way. The traditional writing-in-a-notebook way tends to give me hand or wrist pain. But I was using the new site, and after a streak hiccup, I realized that it wasn’t quite the write tool for me. I actually do better without streak tracking, because if I mess up (and I didn’t, their system didn’t save my 750 words even though I’d written them), my perfectionism has me go NEVER MIND!

So I decided to use a combo of my Google Calendar to send me an email reminder like 750 words does and Scrivener to set up a journal where each entry had a 750 word target. That went well, for a while, until I hit a day when I just didn’t feel like it. And I gave myself permission not to. And that was fine, too.

I got back into it but overtime it just felt like… not quite what I was looking for. I would write things in there, and then I would think I had said those things to someone, but I hadn’t. And I realized that private journaling is great and valuable, but if I’m looking to be motivated to keep up a regular practice, I want an audience. (Can you tell I’m an obliger?)

I’m not a journaler. I’m not a diarist. I am an escribitionist. I have been for over 20 years. So if I want to keep up a writing process, blogging is the best way to do it.

I also really appreciate blogging as a mode of thinking, as a way of finding out what I think. When I write for no audience, words come out, but they don’t have sticking power in my mind. I do best when my ideas are things I can talk out with another person, even if that other person is a silent reader. I love having my blog as a tool I can refer to when I need help, a place where advice from my past self bubbles up for me.

So hi. I’m trying out daily blogging, again. I’m not setting a word target. I’m not going to stress if I miss a day. But this is my plan, to get something a little more deliberate than a quick note written every day.

🔖 Read

A year of new avenues robinsloan.com

I want to insist on an amateur internet; a garage internet; a public library internet; a kitchen table internet.

Yes! This! (hat-tip to Austin Kleon)

🍿 Watched Santa Games (Hulu).

Super cute. A sweet story about family & the power of second chances mixed with a funny take on social media, livestreaming, and reality competitions. A mostly Black cast which is rare in TV holiday movies.

I want my hair to look like Emily Axford’s hair.

🔖 Read Attention, trust and GPT3

“If your work isn’t more useful or insightful or urgent than GPT can create in 12 seconds, don’t interrupt people with it.

Technology begins by making old work easier, but then it requires that new work be better.”

Currently reading: Rule of Wolves by Leigh Bardugo 📚

Kind of resent that I have to do anything besides read this book, even though I love a lot of the other stuff I do.

Lately I often find myself feeling alert but unable to focus. This is a new vibe for me. If you’re a person who experiences this feeling regularly and has found a way to manage it, I’d love your advice. (I’m going to start by having a cup of coffee.)

🔖💀 Read If You Want to Give Something Back to Nature, Give Your Body by Caitlin Doughty (New York Times Gift Link).

I hope we get human composting in NC eventually. For now, we can donate ourselves to Western Carolina’s body farm.

📚💬

“I had been so well socialized by graduate school that I was torn between which writing path to pursue, agonizing over whether I could write from various standpoints in various genres.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work

📚💬

“I am most interested in confessional writing when it allows us to move into the personal as a way to go beyond it. In all my work I invoke the personal as a prelude.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work

Y’all ever think about how the worst moments in your life personally align with some of the most personally important cultural moments? 1989-1992 was a rough run personal but wow the movies of that time look large.

This week’s Craft Talk from Jami Attenberg is another great one:

“Don’t ever talk yourself out of writing something because you don’t know how it fits in the world yet.”

“Perhaps having children makes one increasingly distrust the symbolic world. Because suddenly nothing is as important as the very real particular.” Sara Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write

📚🎭

Finished reading: 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write by Sarah Ruhl 📚

Read this because it’s on Austin Kleon’s list of books about motherhood & art. But it held extra delight for me because it’s also about the theater.

🔖📺 Read Wednesday Addams Is the Ultimate Outcast by Miyako Pleines (Catapult).

🖤

🔖📺📝 Read TV Recaps Taught Me How to Write Criticism by Joelle Kidd.

I love Kidd’s discussion of the role of pleasure in criticism.

📝🎭🎨🧶🧵🎵💃🏿 This is a reminder that I write Genetrix, a very occasional newsletter curating stories of creative mothers. If those are the kind of stories you’d like to know about, please sign up!

🔖 Read Creativity as Spiritual Practice by Rabbi Adina Allen (My Jewish Learning).

“Each of us is endowed with creative capacity simply by being human.”

🔖 Read Haunted by the Ghost of 2019, Helena Fitzgerald

“A return to 2019 is an attempt to erase all of the losses that happened between then and now, but those losses, like the monster in a horror movie, will devour us if we refuse to face them.”