sweetheart redux

Living in Los Angeles, and Hollywood in particular, gives me a surreal feeling and sometimes an almost disbelief in my actual life versus various fictional lives I come across in movies and novels. I am a native Angeleno and I glamorized Hollywood with a purposeful naivete when I was a teenager – I knew that the corner of Hollywood and Vine was just a street corner with a heavy metal shop (or a liquor store or something – my memory fails me) and some poor people waiting for their bus on it, yet I loved that street corner anyway, and loved books and movies and songs and photos that built on the mythology of Hollywood, and I went there every weekend for awhile, a feeling of excitement on the bus ride there and usually a vague feeling of depression on the bus ride back but always wanting to live there when I grew up. I could go on forever on this part of my teens (Hollywood, Nirvana, Courtney Love, a book called Weetzie Bat, Guns N’ Roses and Riot Grrrl are the main themes that dominate...

One of my favorite books I've read in the past year is Never Let me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, who also wrote the amazing novels Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans . I became anxious a few months ago when I heard that a film was being made of the novel, but I just learned that the film has already come and gone (in limited release), and while that information released me from the anxiety I feel at having someone ruin something I love for public consumption, I was also disappointed. here are a few pretty film stills. xoxo robin

I wrote a children’s story about a little boy whose cat dies, and for two months it was the best-selling book for children ages 5-7. Almost unanimously, the book critics who wrote about the book focused on the originality and bravery of the scene in which my protagonist, little Christopher, kneels beside his bed to say a prayer the night his cat Velvet has had to be put down, and finds he doesn’t know what to say. “Thank you my God for the day you have given me,” he begins, as his nightly prayers always begin, the way he was taught at Sunday School. But then he doesn’t know how to continue. “I feel very sad,” the prayer concludes. The book itself concludes with an illustration of Christopher smiling, sitting between his parents on an imprecise green watercolor brush-stroke of a couch. His mother and father each have an arm around his shoulder, and with their free hand, each parent holds the hand of Christopher that is closest to them. The words on this last page say: “They expl...

Looks like I’m going to have to use this blog as a rant forum again this entry. Here goes: both at the last office I worked in and in my current one, I’ve noticed a trend of people who don’t like someone else assuming that the person they don't like is bipolar. “Bipolar” really seems to have made it into the lexicon of well-known words. A person will say something like, “God she drives me crazy. She’s totally bipolar, I can tell.” At my last office, I wasn’t overly fond of much of the staff, so it was hard for me to not say something like “better bipolar than sub-intelligent.” But now I like my co-workers, yet I still overhear all these assumptions that their enemies must be bipolar, to describe said enemy’s unfathomable jerkiness. It really makes me feel like shit every single time I hear something like this. Bipolar people are a pain in the ass to deal with, okay, I get it. I believe that, at best, psychiatry is a misogynist pseudoscience fueled by kickbacks from the dr...

Angel Girls By Robin Crane Martin started giving him advice about girls when Tom was in his early teens. The advice focused on the bleak side of love, and all of Martin’s theories were proven true in Tom’s unfolding love life, leading Martin to guiltily wonder (at least he’d had his heart in the right place when he’d warned Tom of the landmines and Chinese Fingertraps hidden in an interesting girls’ psyche) if he’d created a self-fulfilling prophecy for his brother. Two stoned young adults lying on their respective beds in the bedroom they shared, always lying on their backs and keeping their eyes trained on the ceiling instead of at each other (at night with the lights turned off, the glow-in-the-dark constellation stickers Martin’d long ago stood on a ladder and stuck to the ceiling gave them a landscape they never tired of staring at), they talked late into the night, almost every night. Martin said once, “You’re going to have the same problem I do. You’re going to fall in love ...

Here's Sweetheart #5, put out in 1994, sometime in 9th grade. all the rhyming feminist poems are lyrics from what i called my "solo career" ... from before i started being in bands. i particularly like this zine because it predates much of my late-teen bitterness :). xoxox robin

two of my favorite movies that I keep hoping will be released on dvd are Housekeeping (1987) and Really Rosie and the Nutshell Kids (made for TV, 1975). These are two movies that, as a quirky, assertive girl, are endlessly enjoyable for me, but they also possess amazing charm, both of these films. Housekeeping, which I own on VHS at least, is based on a beautiful (though admittedly [and beautifully] slow) novel by Marilynne Robinson. I have heard that this book is a cult classic in colleges, with feminist literature major types. I didn't know that when I first read the novel, and honestly, I like to think that me and my friend Jocelyn are the only 2 people in the world who've read this book -- I think the book inspires that sort of feeling, there's a quietness to it that makes it like reading your own secret. Watching the movie first, letting yourself believe the characters are real, and then reading the novel afterwards is a neat experience, because there are extra ad...