All of the media frenzy surrounding Where the Wild Things Are and its affirmation of Spike Jonze’s full ascent from hip and quirky skatepunk to full-on auteur is a lot to handle. It’s the sort of frenzy that prompts certain forced appreciations and offers temptations for backlash (backlash that is inevitable when one finds themselves so squarely in the center of the demographic for a marketing campaign). It’s the sort of frenzy that can make it difficult to really have an experience with a film.

I was anticipating this sort of excessive self-consciousness as I saw the film on Wednesday. As if every moment someone was whispering “Spike Jonze, Dave Eggers and Karen O (with Bradford Cox in the band!)… It’s Cool! It’s So. F***ing. Cool.” into my ear. The Warner Brothers people were handing out paper crowns and people were laughing at the title sequence. This is the sort of situation that makes contrarians like me squirm and ask doubtful questions. Is this film not just bludgeoning me over the head as a collaboration of all things mainstream-but-still-hip? Can it possibly be enveloping enough to overcome its insistent context?
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Sometimes the Take the Handle writers get tired of swimming around in their money pools and decide to go out and do something for the people. Preferably something that involves making money.

The following is a series of text messages sent between the hard-working street team to document their deeply patriotic experience. No politicians were harmed in the sending of these text messages.

SGtBB: Up (5:28am)

WIWD: Don’t vote (7:20am)

AitZ: Only five hours until only eight hours! (7:58am)

WIWD: Ethnic group most likely to accept flyer: Hispanic. (8:39am)

SGTBB: Paper sluts (8:42am)
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Recently I’ve been listening to a few popular American anthems in an attempt to stay in touch with my people. I’ve got Asher Roth’s “I Love College” and 3oh!3’s “Don’t Trust Me” going and I’m totally awash. (If you don’t know them, please listen to the songs at the bottom of the page, a la SGtBB.)

This music is terrible. I mean truly godawful stab-yourself trash. I’ve been told before that I’m a snob and that I’m no fun and I accept both accusations with open arms if the ability to swallow trash like this and call it nourishment is the measure of an open-minded guy who knows how to have a good time.
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At Take the Handle we have always viewed the culture of blogging with a strong sense of skepticism. We are, of course, running one, but the culture of amateurism and over-saturation surrounding this world unquestionably demands wariness. Some events of the past few days have reminded me, though, of the power of blogs when they transcend the realm of amateurish emotional purging and develop as a voice of genuine alternative media and historical documentation.

The first of these events happened right here on our own pages when TTH contributor May Wilkerson posted a response to an NPR story in which she had been featured as a subject. NPR is no doubt a respectable source of news and cultural analysis, but when May was interviewed for a story on “hooking up” and the uncommitted culture of “young people” she felt the need to explain the manner in which she was mischaracterized. Anyone under the age of 300 who has listened to the piece would immediately recognize it as out of touch. Still, the suspect omissions of May’s long term relationship with another woman and the succinctness with which they summarized her current relationships with men clearly reeked of a story using its interviewees as slightly manipulated sound bites and of a story written with little allowance for the play of idiosyncratic experience.
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Advice to a burgeoning TTH columnist: try to avoid choosing columns with such opaque parameters that you wind up needing to define the entire state of contemporary culture in order to submit (and this to supersede a column designed to capture all things Americana). It will cause procrastination and writer’s block.

I suppose that “all thoughts while drunk” is not particularly easier to hone in on. Anyway, they’ve been asking. I can hear the crowd’s roar. I get Drinky’s demanding texts. I’m awash.
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If technology is the primary marker of our age, the mark that it leaves upon us, I believe, is one of immediacy and location. What I mean by this is that the connectedness of modern technology hopes to find a way to approximate where we are and what that location’s significance is to us at any given time.

Is Twitter much more than a GPS for the social world? Is it simply a reactive marker to track emotion across the day’s topography?
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Sometimes, when we’re hanging around the Take the Handle offices – casually listening to some Wagner or debating nuanced interpretation of Proust – we get into conversations about Facebook. Now, I am fully aware that trying to make cultural statements about Facebook in 2009 is as behind-the-curve as learning about T.I. from daytime television.

Surely savvier 19-year olds have already moved on to some sort of webcam-operated séances, or whatever comes next.
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I have a headache. Does anyone else have a headache? Perhaps it’s the seasonal transition and the subsequent changes in barometric pressure. That must be it. But what can you do about the weather? It’s easy to have a similar feeling about politics. I’m happy about Obama, but what can he do about America? Really?

Certainly everyone’s feeling some strange late winter blues. Obama may be promising us a hopeful economic escape, but we’ve still got Iraq on our shoulders. We still have Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo on (and in) our heads. What can Obama really do about Hugh Jackman? Bobby Jindal?
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I wouldn’t dare fuck with Liz Lovero. I can read the writing on the wall. This is a girl who could advise a turtle to leave its shell or make a Coke drinker turn Pepsi.

Yesterday, in the Inappropriate Advice column, she gave a nuanced view of the many complex rifts that money and class can create between friends. Certainly, as Liz notes, there is a privilege in being able to maintain cool despite the financial and social stresses that accompany age. Conversely, it is absurd to come down too harshly on the capital-seekers when we will all one day need to heed the calls of financial reality.
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All over the city of New York streetlights are flashing Walk and Don’t Walk simultaneously. Have you noticed? A casual white man strolls leisurely and a menacing orange hand warns caution. Each sign flickers slightly from some lack of voltage and the mood is certainly ambivalence. Are there cars coming? Is it safe to walk?

Sometimes metaphors are so strong that they feel entirely unambiguous. The city is filled with such hesitation and foreboding — talk of our nation’s financial meltdown is relentless and though we now have our great beacon of hope in the less-White House it’s uncertain whether we will be significantly more involved in the mystical political game than we were during Bush’s reign of terror.
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I’m going to one-up Drinky here and base not just a single entry but an entire Column on the following quote from Christopher Walters’ recent “Corner by Corner” post:

“I wasn’t sure just where my own life started, new, separate from everything I have inherited.”

Ironically, Christopher follows the statement with the wonderfully oblivious retort: “I didn’t want to know.” Nonetheless, his first proposition (and its subsequent reiteration in Drinky’s column) had me wondering, perhaps tangentially, about our lives. About the nature of us. I mean that us to be both exclusive and inclusive. I thought about my friends, but I thought about you, too.

Us the participants of this orgy of unprofessional intellectualism, self-love and sadness. Us the culture of misanthropic socialites, outer-borough refugees, and stray mutts (unwittingly signaled by unavoidable cultural commands to ignore duty and dig up the buried-but-heavily-scented bone of the aesthetic). Us still up for the sunrise as suits begin to pile on the trains and head downtown to collapse an economy and subsequently revel in bonus pay. Us who then manage to work for twelve hours receiving no pay at all, gaining only that peace of mind that is the world is of our choosing.
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