studiomaya

[studiomaya]

30-day phone detox redux

Last summer I read a great book, How to Break Up With Your Phone, by Catherine Price, and went on a 30-day phone detox by following the guidelines in the book. I can't say that I'm “addicted” to my phone the way that many people seem to be, but I definitely felt the need for more peace and separation from all things digital. I'd heard Catherine Price interviewed on my favorite meditation podcast, Dan Harris' 10% Happier Podcast. and what startled and scared me the most was her comment that the very design of phone apps is to entrap its users into not being able to resist them.

I sometimes have a hard time resisting dessert, but there isn't anything particularly sinister about a hot fudge brownie sundae. But the thought of an app designed to keep me scrolling–that was really uncomfortable to think about.

Today I read an article from tech columnist Kevin Roose,“Do Not Disturb: How I Ditched My Phone and Unbroke My Brain.” Great title! But it's also a great article. Since last summer, my phone usage has crept up again, mostly because I've felt compelled to attend to my book marketing activities while out and about, and it's easiest to do with my phone. I think I'm going to start the detox again, however, to see if I can improve upon my current time spent on the phone. I have maintained a strict morning routine of all-analog (paper calendar, bullet journal planner, etc.) before attending to digital communications (email, Slack, etc.), so I think I'm a little bit ahead there. But as Roose points out, constant reliance on a phone to distract you serves to train you into being unable to pay attention to books and movies, and makes you antsy when you're standing in the checkout lane or waiting for the bus. I don't want to be that person. I never used to be that person! It doesn't feel good, and now we know it really isn't good.

It's interesting that I love technology and I love how much I can do with it, but I also want to master it, rather than have it dominate me. I love electronic music, but I also spent many years learning to play instruments, and still believe that this mastery is good for the human soul. Perhaps it's simply another example of the ways in which we don't have to be tribal, all-or-nothing, either this or that. I can be both digital and analog. But I want to be in charge.

[studiomaya]

Weekend Music: Mitski

By Kenny Sun from Boston – Mitski @ Paradise Rock Club (Boston, MA), CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57957415

Last summer, I saw a delightful movie, Hearts Beat Loud, about a father and daughter who (after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing) play music together. It was a bit frothy, but it was modern, it had all the right messaging, and it did everything a nice summer indie movie is supposed to do. I did a tiny little write-up here. It was a tiny write-up because there wasn't anything much for me to say. Cute movie. All the right things. Go see it.

During the movie, in which the daughter and father somehow end up with a song on one of the Spotify indie hit playlists (which I happen to listen to), there is a scene where the daughter (played by Kiersey Clemons) is listening to a song by Mitski. I don't know why I sat up in my seat and paid attention at that particular moment, but I just knew that Mitski was someone I wanted to check out. Maybe it was the Japanese name, maybe it was the interesting music, maybe it was the indie playlist, I don't know. But that afternoon I went home and looked for Mitski online. And I found the music video for her latest release, Nobody:

I dare you to watch this video and NOT end up humming it all day long. How often are indie songs earworms? Not often, I assure you. I was hooked.

However. It got complicated.

I was struck by the fact that Mitski has a Japanese mother and white American father, like myself; that she moved around a lot as a kid; that she ended up going to conservatory in New York. All of this fascinated me, and I wanted to read something into it, but I didn't know what. I googled and read some articles, but it was confusing. Hearts Beat Loud referenced Mitski as a way to show the success of the movie characters in the indie music world; in other words, Mitski was an icon, a sign of success, not a sign of a rebel. But I couldn't quite figure out who Mitski was as a person. She is private, and doesn't talk about her family story much. I wondered if she spoke Japanese, if she had gone to American high schools, if she felt as divided as I often do, in the sense that I feel neither Japanese nor white.

And the lyrics to her songs? They struck me as simple love songs. She sings about loneliness, alienation, feeling displaced. None of them sounded terribly edgy.

I bought her new album when it came out, Be the Cowboy. I had really liked Nobody, but some of her other new songs perplexed me. They sounded…angsty and discordant. In other words, they sounded like many of the other indie musicians out there. And yet, she seemed so different, someone who perhaps sits on the fringe, just outside the group.

In other words, what often gets me about indie music is that it can all sound the same. Which is kind of oxymoronic, right? How is “indie” just like everyone else? How is it that Mitski has become an indie icon, while being herself? And how has she become so beloved by people who swear they aren't included, that they sit on the fringe…and yet they are all in the same tribe?

As a tribe-less person myself, I was baffled.

We were lucky enough to grab tickets for a Mitski concert in our neck of the woods, at a small venue north of Boston. I didn't quite know what to expect. I had thought Nobody was one kind of Mitski, and then her album left me uncertain. Her performance left me even more fascinated. Here's a snippet:

It was almost a kind of performance art, with carefully choreographed moves. Here's another:

The above is from the song, Your Best American Girl:

When I first heard Your Best American Girl, I thought I knew what it was about. Loneliness, not belonging, and not being “really” American. All of that spoke to me loud and clear. When I saw the music video, I thought smugly that I'd been right. But when I saw Mitski's performance of the song, I wondered if I was overreaching. All those hand gestures! All those scripted movements! They looked like the 1970s-era Japanese pop idols that I had grown up listening to. I wondered if Mitski had been subjected to the same overly cutesy, overly choreographed pop music that I had been:

(apologies for this blast from the 70s, but this is the kind of pop music presentation I cut my teeth on!)

But then I heard the crowd singing along, a crowd that looked to me like they couldn't possibly know what lusting after the “American Boy” was like when you were definitely NOT the “American Girl,” and I realized that they were projecting all of their own feeling of sadness and despair onto a narrative that they had no way of understanding–and they didn't care, it didn't matter to them. And whatever Mitski's childhood influences had been–it didn't matter. She was telling her story, and they were grabbing onto it.

Last month, I found that The New Yorker agreed:

Wikipedia will tell you that the album is about “longing, love, depression, alienation, and racial identity,” but, to me, it still sounds like it’s mostly about Mitski. Its breakout song was “Your Best American Girl,” an instant-classic pop-rock anthem whose chorus alluded to a relationship obstructed by cultural mores: “Your mother wouldn’t approve of how my mother raised me, but I do, I think I do / And you’re an all-American boy / I guess I couldn’t help trying to be your best American girl.” The song was interpreted as a political statement. Mitski was catapulting a boulder into the moldy walls of our national bigotry! She was challenging a music industry in which Asian women were so rarely visible—and sometimes fetishized, by bands like Weezer, which the song’s chord palette cuttingly nods to—as well as a genre, rock, that ignores the women in its midst! Eventually, Mitski posted a note on Facebook explaining that, as far as she was concerned, “Your Best American Girl” was a love song. A lot of reviews had decided that she had written the song to “stick it to ‘the white boy indie rock world’,” as Mitski wrote. But “I wasn’t thinking about any of that when I was writing it,” she countered. “I wasn’t trying to send a message. I was in love.”

It took a long time for me to come round. I've decided I like Mitski. I wasn't ready to say that last summer, but I'm ready now.

[studiomaya]

Out now!

the portrait, by cassandra austen

Available as an ebook at Amazon.com and available in print at Amazon and also at bookstores everywhere!

And here's the blurb!

Lady Catherine, banished to the countryside as a useless girl with a lame leg, got her revenge by playing a dangerous game. And now it will ruin her.

When the old earl dies, his only child feels no sorrow. The earldom will now revert to the crown and Lady Catherine will continue to live life exactly as she pleases. But when she learns that she is the heir to a secret family title, everything changes. Marriage had once seemed unnecessary and out of the question; now it is the only thing she wants. The two men in her life both need her influence and wealth. Whom shall she choose? The kind but secretive Captain Avebury? Or the notorious Sir Lyle, the handsome smuggler? Both men deal very differently with honor. And when Catherine's secret self-destructs, which man can be trusted to save her?

The Portrait is about a strong woman, foolish decisions, trust, and the definition of honor. Fans of Jane Austen's independent women will recognize in Catherine a voice which will not be silenced.

Here's the Amazon link: The Portrait, by Cassandra Austen

Some of you may be scratching your heads, wondering why I chose to publish my first novel under a pseudonym. You may also be wondering how I square my multicultural identity and interests with something as staid and predictable as romance set in 1800s England. The truth is, I see no real difference between Jane Austen, being caught between cultures, and myself, growing up in Honolulu and caught between cultures. In fact, the stiff, structured environment of Jane Austen resonated with me greatly as a kid. It seemed that she had so many things she wanted to say, but the only way she could venture to say them was elliptically, through fiction. I understood that at a gut level. I think that's why I've always loved historical novels.

I hope you give The Portrait a look! I loved writing this book, and the only reason I used a pseudonym was to make sure I didn't confuse the die-hard romance fan with my other varied interests. Cassandra Austen is more of a book line or an imprint, versus a pen name.

Amazon and Goodreads reviews are most welcome!

[studiomaya]

A long, bumpy road to publication

I can hardly believe it. My first novel is finally going out into the world.

It's been a very long journey, and there were so many distractions. I wrote The Portrait many years ago, when I was a young mother at home with two children. I had recently left my job and didn't know where I was headed, both literally and figuratively. We had moved into a ramshackle farmhouse, a family property where we thought we could stay “temporarily” until we could figure out what we were doing.

“Temporarily” has become twenty years.

I have so many things to say about this journey, it doesn't make sense to try to fit it into a single blog post or newsletter. But it has occurred to me that many of you are aspiring authors, and if my journey can serve as an inspiration or reality check (or both!) to you, I'll be happy to put all of it out there for you to read and think about.

For now, I am exhausted! Putting up an ebook is not the cakewalk that people would have you think it is. There are a lot of tiny details that need to be sorted out, and what's more, the sequence for getting everything done right isn't clear. Who knew that you could mess up your Amazon author page if you tried to claim it before you had a book to claim? Who knew that you couldn't get a proof copy from Ingram in anything less than two weeks? (after my pub date!) Who knew that upload errors in Ingram are “normal” and can be ignored? Arrgh.

I'm going to hunker down for a little bit as I try to get ready for the holidays, three birthdays, and a novella that should have been done by now! I'll be back on pub day with my Amazon link and (I hope) a free novella for anyone who wants to take a look at my alter ego.

[studiomaya]

Weekend Music 2: Jake Shimabukuro

How can anyone not love Jake Shimabukuro?

I wrote about Taimane Gardner yesterday so I'm continuing the local talent and ukulele theme just for another day. There are so many things that I could say about Jake Shimabukuro, but first, here's a taste from one of my favorite Youtube channels, Hi*Sessions:

I also posted his version of “Kawika” a few weeks ago.

I've known about Jake for years–of course! How can you be from Hawaii and not know about Jake! He's not only a virtuosic ukulele player, but he has a loyal mainland following. This past spring we discovered that he was performing at a concert venue that we love, the Flying Monkey up in Plymouth, NH. Plymouth isn't super close to where we live, but I was intrigued. Jake Shimabukuro? Playing a small venue in a northern college town? Really? So we grabbed tickets and zipped up there.

I was amazed–a sold out performance! The crowd was wild for Jake's blend of Hawaiian and contemporary ukulele, and there was a mix of old, young, and families. After the performance, Jake spent time in the lobby chatting with fans. It almost felt as if Jake were visiting friends. And I think in a manner of speaking, he was, because he returned in July to another small New Hampshire venue, although I missed that one because of a Panic! at the Disco and Hayley Kiyoko concert (more on that in a future post!).

At the end of the concert he invited the audience to pull out their phones (really? yes!) in order to find the lyrics to Queen's “Bohemian Rhapsody” (my daughter said indignantly, “I don't need to look that up!”) and sing along to his rendition, which we all did, loudly!

[studiomaya]

New Story Grid Blog Post

I've got a new article up on the Story Grid website!

It's called, “Look in the Mirror: 10 Principles for Authors.”

I started out to write an article comparing writing a novel to training for a marathon, and it morphed into something a little different. But the gist of it is that we all have that better version of ourselves inside of us. All of us are actually high-performance athletes, chefs, singers, or whatever…inside. It may not show on the outside. And we may not see ourselves in that role, and that serves to bring us down when we daydream about the things we'd love to accomplish.

But if you look in the mirror WHILE YOU ARE DOING IT, while you are writing, cooking, singing, or dying on the treadmill, you get a glimpse of the better version of yourself. So look in the mirror and see what you are, and see what you can become.

[studiomaya]

Weekend Music 1: Taimane Gardner

I discovered a fabulous virtuoso ukulele player: Taimane Gardner. She does amazing genre mash-ups–her style is almost classical, but she takes that way beyond expectations.

I first discovered her on one of my favorite YouTube channels, Hi Sessions. Here's the first piece I ever saw her perform, “Fire:”

Everyone, this channel is TO DIE FOR. The backdrop is spectacular and the music is superb. It's a wonderful way to showcase local Hawaii talent. I can't believe I grew up with this as “normal,” now that I've spent many years living on the mainland. The contrast is stark–in Hawaii this kind of musical activity is available everywhere, whereas here on the mainland I feel I have to be a little bit of a groupie or hobbyist in order to live my life with a music-centric focus.

Anyway, back to Taimane Gardner. Her website is beautiful, featuring video  right on the home page. While she is almost goddess-like in the way she tells her musical stories, one of my very favorite music videos show cases the local Hawaii lifestyle so well, it takes me back to my days as a kid, when the most important things in life involved the beach, sunscreen, and a picnic lunch. I was never a surfer, but dang it, maybe I should correct that!

[studiomaya]

How DONE is never done

Last night I clicked the checkbox for “completed” on my weekly Wattpad serial and leaned back in my chair.

I was done.

In short order, I amassed a handful of “likes” and comments. People were glad I was “done,” it seemed!

I was glad, too. Except that when I sat down to tinker with that last chapter, there was a nagging sense that I was not actually done, and would never be done. It made me nervous. Should I click that checkbox and delude people (inadvertently!), or should I hesitate and think about it some more?

I filled in some obvious gaps in the last chapter. There was one place where I had changed a material decision in the hero’s life, so that had to be mentioned and then explained. There was another where the events in the narrative seemed to be in the wrong order—or were they? I couldn’t remember if I’d made those changes to earlier chapters.

Was I going to confuse people? Hmm.

One of the virtues of being older and not younger is that you know your own follies and faults all too well. And, if you are lucky, there are people in your life who know them even better than you do. My particular obstacle is always going to be, as Seth Godin calls it, “shipping.” It’s hard for me to share what I’ve made. I’m always afraid of rejection, ridicule, humiliation. It’s performance anxiety writ large, on a giant stage.

So I clicked the checkbox and let my baby go.

Next week I’ll send her off to a copy editor and if all goes well, it will hit the shelves at the end of August.

[studiomaya]

Progress Report 2: 30-day phone detox

Photo by Hal Gatewood on Unsplash

I completed week 2 of the 30-day phone detox, and I'm feeling terrific!

Week 1 was the “technology triage,” and involved some exercises in self-awareness. I was already pretty aware of the fact that excessive phone use makes me unhappy, but I appreciated the opportunity to really dig into how much I wanted more space in my mind and life. I deleted social media apps and installed a tracking app; I resolved to be more present.

Week 2 was about “changing your habits.” Again, these were all things that I already knew were good ideas (shutting down notifications, setting up no-phone zones). I skipped a couple of them because they weren't relevant. I already decline to look at my phone during dinner, for example. But I was blown away by the power of just moving all your apps off the first screen of the phone. WOW. That was huge. It took me a long time to rearrange everything to my satisfaction but the result is a soothing, EMPTY screen. I did the same thing on my ipad!

Because I didn't do all the steps meticulously, I've left myself some room to go back and get perfectionist, if I want. Right now I'm astonished at the difference it has made to do maybe 75% of the tasks on the list. I'm reading more and wasting less time.

Now, how do I persuade my teenagers to do this also?

[studiomaya]

Weekend Music 2: East Village Opera Company

By Abby621 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36009898

This is the East Village Opera Company.

It seems to be on hiatus right now, and not a lot of information is available about the group, which performed wonderful mashups of rock and opera back in the earlier 2000s. Their Facebook page has had postings as recently as 2017, but their domain name is up for grabs, so I'm not sure if the group will ever get back together.

I was fortunate enough to find a five minute docu-video for the group!

I first learned about East Village Opera Company from an NPR radio story back in 2006. It's hard to fathom how long ago that was. I had four kids under the age of ten, and we had just started commuting an hour away to a swim team that would prove to be a competitive turning point for my older two kids. Our long car rides back and forth daily to the pool were endured with the help of some new technology–I had just acquired an iPod Touch. I was homeschooling my kids and used the Touch and the sound system in our van to give my kids the music education that I felt they needed to have. When I found the East Village Opera Company, it was magical, an incredible opportunity to show my kids how the arts are meant to grow and stretch and transform.

The group treated these timeless, over-the-top arias as modern pieces that deserved the treatment that popular music of today would get.

If you're an opera fan, you are in for an amazing treat! It's hard to find music videos for this group but I've got a few for you below.

The piece referred to by group founder Peter Kiesewalter as “silly” but a beautiful piece of music, it's to die for:

And last but not least, the gorgeous “Flower Duet:”

[studiomaya]

Weekend Music 1: Hanggai

I don't remember how I came across Hanggai, but they're one of the best examples out there of cultural cross-pollination. Hanggai is a Chinese rock group that celebrates Mongolian culture and a sense of the lifestyle of the grasslands. Its members play both traditional and modern instruments, and their tunes are a blend of Mongolian folk music and rock.

The founder of Hanggai is not Mongolian himself, but apparently some of the other group members are Mongolian. It's hard to find any definitive information on the group, as their only web presence seems to be on wikipedia, their Facebook page, and on the website of their agent, Earthbeat.

I wish Hanggai did more international touring, and a New England stop would be very welcome!

Here are two of my favorites:

The Rising Sun

The Vast Grassland

[studiomaya]

Friday Mini Book Review: Running Down a Dream

Story Grid's own Tim Grahl has released his book, Running Down a Dream! It's fantastic. I read it all in one sitting, quite by accident. I was waiting out a lightning storm because our internet had gone down, and I was really just planning to read for a little while. I ended up reading for several hours!

If you've kept up with the Story Grid podcast then you already know the story behind Tim's book. It started as a list of tips and tricks that Tim has used to get to a successful place in his business. Under Shawn Coyne's guidance, this book became almost memoir-like in its emotional intensity. If you go back through the podcast episodes where Tim is actively writing the book, you'll hear the wave of emotion and angst that Shawn's prodding brought out in Tim–and the result is this book.

The special Black Irish Books bundle with Steven Pressfield's new book was supposed to end this week but I randomly saw that it's still up on the Black Irish website! It's $24.95 for a bundle that includes both Tim's and Steve's new books PLUS the audio versions! It's a crazy good deal, given that Tim's e-book alone retails for $9.99 on Amazon.com. Grab it now!

If you're reading this post after the bundle has disappeared, here is the Amazon.com link.

Tim has also set up a website specifically for this book, and you can listen to the entire first chapter there.

[studiomaya]

Researching your personal story

I've been working on a book that I started writing in (no joke) 1996. Back then, I was the under-thirty mom of a baby, stuck at home with a man-eating dog while my husband finished law school. The book started with a writing exercise, an assignment from a book I got from the local bookstore.

Things went on from there, both in my writing life and in my real life. I moved house a couple of times. My husband moved to another law school. I had another baby. I kept writing.

Eventually I finished the book. I sent it to some friends, they sent me comments. I revised it. I went to some writing conferences. I revised it again.

I then sent it out to agents, and got some great nibbles. A couple requested the full manuscript and read it. I was gratified by the positive comments. No one had a problem with the story, but they suggested that it was too long and needed more editing.

I got busy. I put the book away. I moved to a couple of foreign countries and back, and had two more kids. I started homeschooling. The kids had hobbies that they were really good at, and those took time. I started a photography business, because I was taking lots of photos of kids and sports anyway.

When things calmed down I pulled the book out again. I took a great writing class online and started work again, but I was having a really difficult time. I couldn't seem to get into the “why” of my character. It was perplexing, because I still had those positive agent comments in my mind. I knew the book wasn't terrible, but I wasn't doing a good job at revising it.

I finally figured it out. It's not, as Elizabeth Gilbert suggests, that the idea has come and gone and found greener pastures elsewhere:

Gilbert believes that ideas have agency. “Ideas have no ma­teri­al body, but they do have consciousness, and they most certainly have will,” she writes. When this idea “finally realizes that you’re oblivious to its message, it will move on to someone else,” but sometimes, “the idea, sensing your openness, will start to do its work on you.”

I worried about this after I read Big Magic. I thought that maybe my idea was angry that I had abandoned it, and had gone to find a more receptive vessel.

What solved the mystery was the decision to go back into my email from that phase of my life when I decided to focus on other things and leave the writing to a “less busy” phase of my life. Even as I write these words, I have to laugh, because that decision would leave my writing idle for over fifteen years, even as I started a business, homeschooled my kids, and moved overseas and back.

Obviously it wasn't true that I couldn't write because I was “too busy.” When I stopped writing, I invented new things to take its place.

The problem was not that I was too busy. The problem was that I had changed. I no longer was the person who had written the beginning of that book. That person was a lot younger, a lot more innocent and naive than I am now. What's more, as often happens when you are a grownup and facing Real Life, I had a crisis. I didn't know at the time that it was The Crisis. It just seemed like a series of sucky events, but as I scanned my 2001 email, I realized that I have now officially lived enough of life to know that the events of 2001 were my personal All is Lost moment, on my personal Hero's Journey.

What happened was that I did what all heroes do. I made a decision, creating my Climax. And now, in my fifties, I am living the Resolution of that decision.

I really am a historian at heart. I looked at the documents, and they showed me the truth. In some ways I am still the person I was in my twenties when I was in grad school. I was always a documentary historian, reading medieval documents in order to figure out what was really going on. But the way I interpret things has changed.

So I'm rewriting that beginning again, but I have to do it with full realization that my character is a person without my lessons in life. I'll have to make sure I don't tread on her optimism and naïveté. If this book takes a little longer for me to write, there's a reason. But I promise, it'll be better for it.

[studiomaya]

Progress Report 1: 30-day phone detox

I. Am. Loving. This.

I don't think I actually “need” a phone detox, but I suspect most people will say that if you spring the idea on them. I don't feel that I'm addicted to my phone, but I have to admit that on the occasions where I've forgotten to bring it with me, I've felt panic. And I don't like that sense of emotional attachment to a piece of electronics.

I decided to try out the 30-day phone detox in the book, How to Break Up with Your Phone, which I read and reviewed a couple of weeks ago.

It's been fabulous.

Look at the above photo. A busy woman sits at her desk. She's got her email open on her laptop. She's got a clipboard with an invoice on it, something that either needs to get paid or that needs to be collected. She's got a pen and a envelope, so someone is expecting to hear from her. She's got a calculator and what looks like a sheet of notes ripped out of a notebook. She's got the business pages of the newspaper obscuring a file folder and what looks like a report of some kind.

I look at that desktop and shudder. Ugh. I do not want to be this person.

But what is she doing? She's on her phone. She appears to be paying an invoice with an app.

TOO. MUCH. STUFF.

There is just too much stuff going on, all at once. How is she responding to email and paying a bill and writing a note and reading a note and keeping up with the news and evaluating a report–all at once?

This is not a thing. You can't think more than a single thought at a time. Multitasking is a lie.

I'm not going to list every step that I took from Catherine Price's book, because I really think people should go read it themselves. Don't just think, “Oh, a detox, I need that,” and then stumble through steps you find on the internet. Borrow or buy the book, read the actual brain science, buy into the idea that your phone is stealing your attention. Then do the detox.

In week one, Price has you to through a “technology triage.” The operative thing here for me was noticing how icky it feels to be on my phone for more than a few minutes, and to delete social media apps. I'm not actually a big social media person, but I really appreciated how great it made me feel to get rid of the actual apps! Really, if you need to get onto social media, you can do it from a browser. Deleting the app gives you control.

Once I realized that I don't even LIKE being on my phone (unless I'm actively texting someone), I stopped wanting to even pick it up. I would remember that I'm not actually going to feel good afterwards.

I downloaded a tracker app to see my progress. I would say the results after a week of detox: outstanding.

[studiomaya]

Creative Inspiration: Hearts Beat Loud

Sometimes you just want a movie that hits all the right peaks and stings us in all the right ways. I suppose to some extent it may feel a little bit like “color-by-numbers” but we don't always want to be shocked or revved up. Especially on a day when the temps were closing in on the upper nineties, in northern New England of all places!

Here's the closing paragraph of the New York Times review:

With its oversimplified emotions and dumbed-down depiction of the creative process, this inoffensive time-filler dissolves in the mouth like vanilla pudding. The songs (written by Keegan DeWitt and performed by the two stars) are pleasant, the drama is low-risk and the aesthetics are as laid-back and unforced as the performances. Frank might be a bit of a bully, but Mr. Offerman gives him a clumsy charm that softens his cluelessly selfish behavior, and Toni Colette and Ted Danson provide solid backup as, respectively, Frank’s friendly landlady and a perpetually high bar owner. There’s not a rough edge in sight — and, for many viewers, that will be just fine.

Focus on the last line, if you please. I was in the mood for simple, and that's what I got. But hey. It was cute and satisfying.

Thumbs up for a mixed-race family where race is a ho-hum detail, causing angst for seemingly no one. Awesome. Thumbs-up for a lesbian character whose sexuality is a ho-hum detail in the film and in her on-screen family. Thumbs-up for a modern sensibility that my teenagers “got” and enjoyed. Thumbs-up for a Brooklyn neighborhood that left me longing for the city.

I sometimes wonder why film and television seem so slow to portray life as it is really experienced by the younger generation today. I suppose the filmmakers are all old? This film does a good job. It was a Sundance pick back in January, so I guess maybe we should look at Sundance for fresh stuff.

Here's the trailer:

[studiomaya]

Weekend Music 2: Kawika

Today I'm just throwing out a bunch of different interpretations of one of my favorite Hawaiian songs, Kawika.

Professor Amy K. Stillman (Grammy award-winning ethnomusicologist at University of Michigan who studies Hawaiian music) has a wonderful blog post about this song. I won't go nerdy on you and repeat what she says and dig deep into it, but it's fascinating–if you're interested, take a look. “Kawika” is Hawaiian for David, and we presume the David in question is King David Kalakaua, the “Merrie Monarch” who helped revive Hawaiian culture back in the later 1800s. Kawika probably dates back to his coronation, and is further modernized and expanded over the years. Here are some great versions, both video and audio-only:

Sunday Manoa, featuring the very youthful Cazimero Brothers in the early 1970s, with their groundbreaking album, Guava Jam:

And then in 1991, the Cazimeros update the sound:

And last, this very playful rendition, live on stage. I have no idea who this group is, where the venue is, and it's listed as comedy–the audience occasionally bursts into laughter–I wonder if it's because they've taken the venerable old song and turned it into a Hamilton-style rap show tune? It's brilliant:

(image credit to Professor Amy K. Stillman for her scan of the Noble music page featuring Kawika)

[studiomaya]

Friday Mini Book Review: Everything I Never Told You

I don't know why I was so surprised to find that Celeste Ng's first novel, Everything I Never Told You, features a mixed Asian-American family. I truly didn't expect it, despite the fact that I knew Ng was Asian-American.

And as I read later in interviews conducted with Ng after her second book, Little Fires Everywhere, was released, she had concerns about being pigeonholed as an “Asian writer” after the massive success of her first book. So perhaps it's particularly odd that it never occurred to me that Ng being Asian-American makes her an “Asian-American writer” who writes about themes relevant to Asian-Americans. It may be because I grew up in Honolulu, where Asians are the majority–perhaps I often forget that Asians are a minority in this country. It may be because my own family is mixed Asian-American. It just never occurred to me that being Asian-American is a way to be pigeon-holed.

But of course it is. And I confess that I've been struggling with this in my own writing. Should I have an Asian character? Is that too “on-the-nose?” Should there be a racial theme in this story? Why? Why not?

It's complicated, and I like what Ng has done with these ideas, how she has handled these problems. They are problems, whether her readers realize it or not. Is she writing about alienation, isolation, parenting, marriage, teen angst, using the framework of race in twentieth century America? Or is race just that–race–in her book?

Everything I Never Told You is a gripping read, un-put-down-able. I tried to dislike it. It has a third person omniscient POV that at first strikes one as old-fashioned (like an English children's story, or a very old novel), with its rather bossy authorial voice. It seemed weird that one minute I was thinking thoughts inside the son's head, and the next I was watching his expression. I also kept trying to figure out why the novel was so gripping. Everything is explained–EVERYTHING. There is very little suspense, because Ng explains every single reason for everything. In some places, the reasoning is really trite, almost a little simplistic. There's no suspense. We aren't the ones figuring out the mystery–this narrator will explain it all, as it happens.

And yet I kept reaching for the book over the course of several days.

Another point worth noting is that this is a genre I normally really dislike. I'm not a fan of books about “love and loss.”

But I think I will be picking up Ng's second book in the near future.