Tuesday, July 24, 2007

No again.

Please Never Say This Unless You Are Quoting Someone Who Is An Idiot:

"Game on!"

Saturday, July 21, 2007

Why.

Okay, please someone to explain why I need to be on more than one network such as myspace, friendster, linkedin and what have you. I'm confused. And I have only so much time to spend online looking for messages in six places.

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

The First Step is Admitting You Have a Problem

Summer television sucks. I’m catching up on some reading, for sure, but sometimes, in the evening, I’m just tired and I need a little mindless entertainment. But I feel like what’s going on right now brings ‘mindless’, as the guy on Mad TV says, to a “ho, nubba lubba!” (translation for those of you who haven’t seen it – “a whole ‘nother level”).

So what I am known to do is watch several shows at once. I do not have picture in picture. And yet, my feeling is, watching shows like this, I am more than capturing the essence of all of them in this limited viewing style.

Last night, I watched Wife Swap and Posh Comes to America at seven, followed by Extreme Makeover and Age of Love at eight.

By nine, I was suicidal, but too tired to do anything about it. At this point, I actually picked up and finished a book, bleary as I was.



Read it. Eighty brilliant pages about Vietnam was far less torturous than the combined programming I had on earlier.

Okay, so but let me talk about these shows a bit. I was drawn into the Posh show by the commercials and by my utter wonder at the apparent obsession they have in Britain with Posh and Becks. Basically, she comes to America a few weeks ahead of her husband and kids to settle in, buy a house and find a manicurist. It was hard to tell what of this show was meant to be cheeky and what wasn’t. She had a certain charm, I’ll admit (she does a fine impression of a blowup doll), but the name Posh seemed to fit. She lounges by the pool in heels. Her two best friends are her hairstylist and her makeup artist. But the whole show was so contrived that it was hard to tell if there was any real glimpse of her at all. All I could really latch onto about the whole show was the utterly foreign lifestyle. Hideously garish twelve million dollar houses, paparazzi, and especially, a group of post-middle-aged and multiply reconstructed/hair-extended Beverly Hills ladies who invite her over with a welcome lunch. It was during this segment that I learned of Posh’s affection for the term ‘major’, as in (imagine Posh accent) “These ladies had ‘may-juh’ lipstick on!” (in fact, it was really their lips that were major, if you ask me). I really don’t know what to make of any of this. I don’t know what my life would be like if I had that kind of money. It just seems really hard to imagine that it would be anything like that.

So I flipped between that and Wife Swap. Okay, I actually like Wife Swap. One of the things I love about it, as with many reality shows, is imagining what it would be like if I were on that show, and in this case, trying to figure out what would be the sort of opposite of our life, who they’d swap us with. Which would maybe be: very rich and indulgent, very rigid and religious? We’re not super neat or sloppy, we’re certainly arty, but we’re not very extreme anything, which helps for the drama on the show. And yet, all of the families they choose seem so extreme that it’s not often I can root for one over the other because they’re usually both so stuck in their weirdnesses that I don’t like either of them. Last night they had a family whose son was super into motocross even though he had hideous burns on his back from an accident and they more or less ignored their daughter, matched up with a ‘pagan’ family who ‘worshipped’ their mother, the goddess. Ben and I are, it’s safe to say, the opposite of both of these families. Maybe we would need two whole families to swap with.

Okay, and then there’s Extreme Makeover, which is almost pointless to watch until the ‘reveal’ which comes in the last five minutes, and Age of Love, arguably the most shameful of all of last night’s programming, a dating show in which a 30 year old man chooses between a group of women, half in their twenties and half in their forties. I have my own reasons for tuning in to this show, and am obviously rooting for one of the forties (not that this guy is so great or so bad), but it should come as no surprise that there’s no real depth to the exploration of this issue, if there is one, it’s as if they’re pitted against each other, so that only the vaguest commonalities come through – your twenties can very frequently suck, and your forties can be a time when you really know who you are. All of the women, younger and older, are basically attractive, and they made a point to pick especially ‘hot’ older women, but. But. It’s edited to be a sort of younger vs. older, typically catfighty kind of thing whereas in real life, I have women friends of all ages, and certainly there are differences to the extent that I’m not the same person I was when I was twenty-five, thank god, but the kind of people I hang around with tend to assume that we’re all individuals on our own individual timelines. I know, I know. I know this kind of show would never be deep. And yet I retain the hope that I can glean some little glimpse of something real.

Don’t ask me to give up TV. There’s 30 Rock and The Office and what else, I’m sure there’s something. But I need to cut back even more. (Yes, I said, ‘even more’. I watch less than I once did, believe it or not.) I don't really want to quit. I just want to be a social viewer.

Saturday, July 14, 2007

I Am So High Tech + DON'T FORGET ABOUT BEN'S SHOW TONIGHT

Two major developments in my life this week:
I now have an iPod. An iPod I actually loaded with my own stuff. What I'm saying to you is that I figured this out.
I have also, thanks to a friend, (yo what up CB!), discovered a new website to obsess over called Pandora. Probably I'm the last one to know about it, but in case you're behind me, it's a music site where you create your own radio station and it's awesome. You plug in stuff you like and they give you more stuff you might like and they get it right way more often than not.
My station is called Awesome and Great Radio.

But way more important:

BEN'S SHOW!

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Falling Down Is Not My New Thing, Even Though I Do It Sometimes

Okay look. I have a weird thing about making things happen when I write them. A sort of superstition, if you will, even though I'm not superstitious, which I decided a while back was actually a choice I could make, as I continued doing things like stepping over cracks, walking around ladders, avoiding black cats, knocking on wood and throwing salt over my shoulder, one day I thought, wait, I actually don't believe this will prevent and/or remedy any ill effects caused by running into these things, and so far so good, as I no longer worry about spilled salt in particular, which I do a lot because I like salt, a lot.
So it occurs to me that I could also decide not to have this other selfmade superstition about making bad things happen by writing about them, like family members getting sick or what have you.
The point today is, recalling the previous post about falling down being my new thing, is that it doesn't have to be my new thing, and so, just because I fell down a third of our front stairs yesterday for no good reason and now have a hideous bruise on my thigh which might be a really lovely shade of violet for let's say an evening gown but which on my thigh is well past unsightly not to mention sore, does not mean I have to continue falling down just because I said it was my new thing and therefore that concept is out in the world.
Because it's not enjoyable, really. And quite frankly, that thing about seeing your life flash before your eyes? Let me tell you what I saw, in one instant: I saw myself, at the bottom of the stairs, bent into unnatural positions, possibly never bending back into the original one.
And by the way? I don't even know how it happened. I didn't trip, I didn't stumble, I wasn't hurrying, I was standing up and then I was falling down for no apparent reason.
So falling down and or superstitions, known or selfmade, are officially my old thing. My new things include standing up and logic.

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Ben Brandt, My Man

Come one come all to see Ben's show at Caro D'Offay Gallery, opening this Saturday July 14 @ 7:00, 2204 W. North Ave @ Leavitt! If you can't make it, come anytime before September 8!

Thursday, July 05, 2007

No, No, No. No.

Dear The Today Show,

Feet are not the new face.

Thank you,
Elizabeth Crane

Dear Everyone Else,

Someone actually said this. No lie. Just when you thought 'something is the new something' could not be used in a more idiotic way, along comes 'feet are the new
face.'

Nothing is the new anything ever again.

Yours truly,
Me.

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

This Is How The Cranes Roll

We now interrupt this blog for a moment of full-on boasting.

As we speak, this man is on his way to my dad’s house:



That’s right, peoples. My dad and especially my stepmom, as I may have mentioned once or twice before, are quite active in local democratic politics in Iowa, which gives me great pride. On this occasion, someone contacted them and said, “Would you like to host this event?” And my stepmom told them they hadn’t decided on a candidate just yet, and they said that’s fine.

My dad often forgets to tell me things like this, relatives falling ill and/or dying and/or major politicians coming around and we end up having who’s on first conversations and so he’s talking about excitement and people coming by and secret service and I say “What are you talking about?” and he says all casual-like, “Oh, did I forget to tell you that possibly THE FUTURE PRESIDENT WILL BE STOPPING BY?” Okay, maybe I’m inserting a couple extra words here, but the casual-like tone is the important part.

I feel I retain the right to boast since my own personal level of commitment to the cause, beyond voting, involves complaining and signing moveon petitions.