Catie Disabato's Blog, page 9
July 12, 2015
heartbarf:
Being unhappy feels like having your soul slimed on Nickelodeon. It’s next to impossible...
Being unhappy feels like having your soul slimed on Nickelodeon. It’s next to impossible for me to write anything good while I am still standing in the sliming place, head hung and feeling wet, thick, and grossly famous. But I find myself now writing many poems about my own unhappiness while being surprisingly happy. What I’m saying is: it’s kind of interesting to watch the slime hit your own head and neck as (almost) a third-person observer.
July 9, 2015
July 7, 2015
zanopticon:
Pretty Little Liars doesn’t make any sense. I mean, from a certain vantage point and if...
Pretty Little Liars doesn’t make any sense. I mean, from a certain vantage point and if you squint the plot holds together, or at least forms a recognizable kind of shape, but week to week it strings you along, loses its way, gets lost in a subplot. This doesn’t matter. It is compulsively consumable, candy-sweet, candy easy to suck on and suck on ‘til your whole mouth is sugar and your tastebuds are wrecked.
It helps that its four female leads are startlingly, almost inhumanly pretty, uncanny valley pretty: ageless, poreless, overwhelmingly lush. Their neon prettiness is an invitation to looking. Their stories are about all of the things that prettiness can’t save them from. Awful things happen to these girls.
When they show starts they have common, adolescent secrets– eating disorders, closeted queerness, parents who are liars, who are faithless, who are struggling not to go broke. As it progresses, the stakes change: someone is trying to kill these girls, but also, at the same time, to shame and reveal them.
The genius of the show is that it treats both kinds of threat as equally devastating.
The point of melodrama is that it blows things out of proportion, but in the case of Pretty Little Liars that telescoping, Alice in Wonderland bigsmallbig effect serves to collapse the distinctions between major and minor traumas, which is, as far as I remember, accurate to what it felt like to be a teenage girl. You are watched, you are threatened, you are always trying to decide if someone’s invasions or incursions are harmless, or well-intentioned, or malevolent, and you never figure it out until it’s pretty much too late.
In the early seasons, A. targets each girl specifically, in turn. The arc of these episodes is mostly expository– there’s no larger plot being pressed into motion, just the show introducing us to its characters by having us watch someone slowly, methodically take them apart.
In particular, A. goes after athlete Emily by needling her relationship to her body: when she goes in for work on an injured shoulder, A. stands in for the masseuse. The scene is deeply unsettling to watch, in part because A. doesn’t hurt her. A. actually does give her a massage. When she realizes what’s happened, it’s too late to do anything about it. She lay there and let A. put her hands on her skin.
More recently, A. trapped all four of the girls in an underground bunker and sequestered them in exact replicas of their bedrooms. For a month she tortured them, and forced them to torture each other. That’s major, major trauma. But the show almost entirely elides that. Instead, in the episode after the girls escape, it focuses on the lasting impact, the thing that seems minor but is, in fact, the point: their own rooms are ruined for them, now.
A. takes their sense of home and safety as surely as she took Emily’s home in her own body, seasons and seasons ago. A. is in some sense the threat that all girls live under: that as long as you are pretty– as long as you are breathing– someone will always be trying to make a home inside of your head.
Anyway, my favorite parts of the show are the ugly or unsympathetic ways that the Liars respond to this particular kind of trauma. When A. tricks Spencer into believing her boyfriend is dead, she checks herself into a mental institution. She’s been the show’s type-A genius and resident good girl, and the show has been good about revealing the toll that takes on her, but we’ve all seen the valedictorian on pills before. PLL actually lets Spencer fall all the way to pieces. It gives her an unbearable truth and lets us see what happens as she fails to bear it.
In an episode a few weeks ago, in the aftermath of the bunker, Emily took her father’s gun to a shooting range. Her mother found out and screamed at her, and told her never to do it again, and she went back anyway. She knows and we know that target practice won’t save her from A., but response to trauma is not linear, or useful. Sometimes it’s just squeezing the trigger until you’ve dissolved enough of what’s inside of you to keep going another day.
Hanna was the only one who actually destroyed something. She peeled the wallpaper off her walls and took her room apart. She sat on the floor at the empty center of the place she used to live, which she’d made as ugly and uncomfortable as she needed it to be. She didn’t run away from it. They’ve all learned, by now, that there’s nowhere to run. There’s only how you live with it, what you make of it, how bearable it seems, on any given day.
This isn’t David Lynch’s all-American surrealism, in which the suburban sits like a mask over the poisonous and strange. In Pretty Little Liars, beauty is a fact in the world just like everything else is. It never considers that it’s strange that beautiful girls should suffer, because it knows that temptation– bright desire, ugly need– is the law of this and every land.
I’m a lucky bitch bc I get this kind of shit in my inbox, and you’re all lucky that Zan puts it on her blog sometimes.
As A would say to the Liars: ACT NORMAL BITCHES
I’ve been feeling like a barrel of toxic waste lately but I’m...
I’ve been feeling like a barrel of toxic waste lately but I’m not I’m not I’m not I’m Alex Mack and even if I’m covered in toxic waste it’s not going to ruin me, I’m just going to get superpowers
July 6, 2015
rachelfershleiser:
doubledaybooks:
What’s in your book of...
What’s in your book of nightmares?Take our quiz to find the story that touches your deepest fears. To start…
Are you more afraid of the paranormal or real life monsters?
HORROR QUIZ!
This is fun and then it gives you a book rec at the end -> choice
emchughes:
thegirlintheredsunglasses:
mymissus:
The...
The incomparable emchughes made these for me for $20 each and she just might make something for you, too. She does basically anything, and it’s insane.
Don’t even think about removing the credit.
EMILY I WANT SOMETHING BUT I DONT KNOW WHAT
Let’s talk, crumbnut. (Also hi I love both of you so much.)
Wait Emily, are you inundated right now? Because I really want something too…. xxx
July 2, 2015
the-unwrinkled-ear:
Our interview with catiedisabato on...
Our interview with catiedisabato on kchungradio can be heard anytime here.
We discuss her new book The Ghost Network and so many things that are within it and that it points to. Plus you hear these songs as the need arises:
Molly Nelson - City of Atlantis
Moody Blues - Lazy Day
Jordan Sparks - Tattoo
Janelle Monáe - Violent Stars Happy Hunting!
Baxendale - Music for Girls
Taylor Swift - Style
Neil Diamond - Porcupine Pie
Girl Talk - Play Your Part (Part 1)
Xiu Xiu - Only Girl (In the World)
Check out my interview with Andrew Choate on
kchungradio! Andrew is my buddy and he fed me some very dry white wine, so I felt super comfortable to open up about the autobiographical elements of the novel as well as my deep sadness. Doing this interview was such a joy and I hope you like listening.
Behind the scenes info: Andrew had never really heard Janelle
Monáe before, so I got the chance to blow his mind a little bit.
July 1, 2015
bussykween:
Where can I get that headphones earring?
mandatory...
Where can I get that headphones earring?
mandatory reblog of One Of Our Best Scenes of Reality Television
June 27, 2015
catiedisabato:
pitchfork:Carly Rae Jepsen’s “All That” is named...
:
Assuming this song is indicative, I’m gonna go bat shit for the Dev Hynes produced Carly Rae Jepson album.
UPDATE: I’ve listened to nothing else the past three days except the new Carly Rae Jepson album and I’m pretty sure I never need to listen to anything else ever again
