It's time to abandon Cereal Monogamist and head off into the jungle in the direction of my new blog, Cultural Civilian. Follow me (or my helpful link) to my new presence at Wordpress.

(And for God's sake, keep moving! They could be right behind us. And it's gonna be dark soon.)

Initial Thoughts

One big bonus of the second half of the first season of The X-Files: the introduction of Assistant Director Skinner! The Skinman! He only appears in one episode (“Tooms”), but apparently he made enough of an impression that he became a regular starting with Season Two. And this is back when we were all supposed to haaaaaaaaate Skinner. See, Skinner eventually becomes Mulder and Scully’s ally, in an awesome moment where he told the Cigarette Smoking Man to “bend over and kiss my ass,” but before that happens, he’s in league with the mysteriously oppressive government forces.

Another big bonus of the second half of the first season: Scully Pregnancy Watch! Yes, Gillian Anderson managed to get herself knocked up in the first year of the show, leaving her costumers with little else to do but drape her in mannish suits and an enormous trenchcoat that becomes omnipresent at the tail end of the season.

"Scully, do you have something to tell me?"
"No, Mulder, why do you ask?"

Brilliantly, the show wrote around it by having Scully be abducted by aliens in the first part of season 2.

Now that I have (amicably) ended my association with Case, I am moving to Wordpress. I'm still figuring things out over there, customizing and whatnot. When it looks how I want it, I will point everybody in that direction.

So, in short, here's what's on the horizon:

• New blog address
• New blog look
• New blog title!
• Same old prattle about Lost and cookies

In the meantime, keep checking me out here! For lack of anything else substantive to say, let me leave you with this video of Parks and Recreation's Leslie Knope filling time at a telethon by talking about classic 90s sitcom Friends.

I just read Edith Wharton's Roman Fever and Other Stories, a post-semester pleasure for me.

Everything about Edith Wharton's work is stately, like an antique fainting couch in a museum, its frame hand-carved, its fabric delicately embroidered. But somehow, the stories are not stifling. Some are sly and humorous, like "Roman Fever" and "Xingu," which both make fools of people who think they know more than they do.

What I really love about Wharton, though—and The Age of Innocence, arguably her most famous work, is a great example of this, too—is the way she lays out her characters' conflicts quite transparently, all so readers can admire how inevitably people misunderstand and unwittingly abuse one another. You want to take her characters by the shoulders and translate for them.

I especially love how she dissects marriage, the roles that couples play for each other and how restrictive they can be. "Souls Belated" is an amazing story about how you build a new relationship out of an affair--if you flouted the convention of marriage once, do you just jump back into it? Do you invite the same people to your dinner parties and pretend things haven't changed? "The Other Two" is about a man trying to feel disaffected about doing business with his current wife's last husband. In a way it's all very old-fashioned, but it's also incredibly relatable.

Wharton also never fails to comment on the way people and habits evolve over time. In "Autres Temps..." ("Other Times...") a woman who left her husband twenty years ago, and regretted the social isolation that followed, overhears two young women talking. Through their conversation she discovers that in the ensuing decades, behavior has become so much freer that leaving one's husband for another man has become the thing to do:

All of their friends seem to be divorced; some of them seem to announce their engagements before they get their decree. One of them—her name was Mabel—as far as I could make out, her husband found out that she meant to divorce him by noticing that she wore a new engagement ring.

The only legitimate criticism I've ever heard of Edith Wharton is that her work is exclusively rich and white. I once read a Marxist critic who complained that "the worker" wasn't present in Wharton's work, that the servants toiled behind the scenes. This is really not to be denied. (Well, I think one of the ladies in The House of Mirth works in a hat shop, but, you know.) Still, I don't find that a valid reason to discount the work she did. She had a narrow lens, sure. But can't we admire the depth of focus?

Betty White will be hosting Saturday Night Live tomorrow, and if her interview with Jimmy Fallon is any indication, she's going to rock it. Everyone needs to watch this NOW.

Isn't it weird how you can love something and forget about it for awhile, and then have it be immediately rekindled when you experience it again? It's been like three years since the Dixie Chicks put out a new album, and I hadn't listened to them in ages. Then, today, I clicked over to the AV Club and saw this: Dixie Chicks, Badass Motherf**ckers. Yes, that's really the title. It's a write-up from Nathan Rabin, one of their music guys, who's trying to educate himself in country, as he realizes that just because the Dixie Chicks are cute doesn't mean they're not awesome.

I read the thing, I watched all the embedded videos (haven't seen "Goodbye Earl" in awhile?), and then I was seized by the desire to rewatch Shut Up and Sing, a documentary about the band trying to come back from the unexpected controversy that was generated over an off-the-cuff remark during a concert in 2003.

Rabin seems to be positioning most of the vitriol that was directed at the Chicks as based on them being women—pretty, (mostly) blonde, popular chicks. They're supposed to be wholesome, they're not supposed to have opinions at all, and certainly not divisive ones. Watching the movie again (which, of course, I did), I think Rabin is really on to something.

I want to buy a new TV—a small one, for my bedroom, so that I can move the one that’s currently in my bedroom into my kitchen. I’ve decided this is a necessity based on the fact that ever since I discovered The X-Files was on Netflix Watch Instantly, and that my laptop fits very nicely on a corner of my kitchen counter, my dirty dishes have been cleaned much more regularly. (While I’m still locked into finals, my deal is that I’m only allowed to watch The X-Files if I’m also cleaning the kitchen. See how my mind works? I have to trick myself into doing things like I’m a kindergartner.)

Anyway, I was looking at various online deals, when I suddenly had a guilty little urge to check Wal-Mart.

I don’t shop at Wal-Mart. I have been indoctrinated to think Wal-Mart is terrible. I know that everything in there is way cheaper than you will get it anywhere else, but I also know WHY that is—price gouging and cheating their employees out of health insurance are their main strategies, but, of course, there’s a lot more unnecessarily evil things they are doing.

I ran the search on TVs, and now I have to sit here and know that they have this well-reviewed 19 inch Sharp for about 75% of what other stores are charging for similar products. I want to show integrity and not buy my cheap TV off the backs of the working poor.

But I’M poor! I’m a soon-to-be-unemployed grad student! I hem and haw about whether I really need to buy the name-brand cheese or not!

But…Wal-Mart Watch! Nickel and Dimed!

Now I feel bad for wanting the extra TV at all.

Initial Thoughts

So I’m about halfway through the first season of The X-Files right now. (If my academic work were finished I would probably be done with the whole series at this point. Right now I’m basically on an episode reward system and plodding slowly through.) Though something like seventeen years has passed since the first season of this show (1993, people) it’s only been around five or six years since I’ve seen it. At that time, the show was in pretty regular rotation on SciFi and TNT, and I watched all the time. (Specifically, I think that episodes aired at 5 and 6pm on weekdays, and that I watched them when I got home from work. Foolproof way to get me hooked on a show is to air it in syndication at such a convenient evening hour.)

Still, the first thing that struck me on this rewatch was the passage of time. Why? Notably because Season One is pre-internet. Not only are Mulder and Scully carrying and trading around like, manila file folders with all their research and evidence in them, but the research and evidence is compiled via microform readers! You know those things? They’re teeny-teeny photos of old texts (like newspapers) which you thread into this thing, and it magnifies the image, and you turn a knob to turn pages and scan through the information that way. I have only done this once in my life; I found it fussy and headache-inducing. I imagine people who were in grad school as recently as 10 years ago used to do this almost every day. Anyway, Mulder and Scully are microform experts; they rock the archival research. They also record witness interviews on cassette tape. They still communicate via cell phone, but the phones are preciously large. Not quite reaching Zack Morris brick phone proportions, but …

The other extra-special blast from the past occurs in the second-ever episode, "Deep Throat." Mulder and Scully drove many rental cars of many makes and models over the years, but in this episode, they drive the same car I drove throughout college: a tan Cutlass Ciera.

Look at 'em go!

Click ahead for more about Scully's clothes, Duchovny's acting, and that blasted myth-arc.

So that was all just a preamble to this (enjoy):

From Tomato Nation

So Sarah posted this letter with a link to Zeus's blog. Within ONE DAY the dog's surgery was paid for, and then some.

It really is amazing--the amazing feats of kindness that can be achieved via grassroots efforts like this one. The fact that it is all due to a blog (which have such reputations for self-centeredness). Also, the level of compassion that people feel for their pets. Just looking at Zeus's blog makes me want to race home and give my girl Skylar a hug. (Look at the picture on that last entry I linked to. We have that exact same orange ball, though lately Sky's been favoring a blue frisbee.) I want to contribute money to the SPCA or something.

All the more impressive because Bunting herself is a cat person. Click here for one of my favorite of her essays, about meows in translation. This is my favorite: "I ate a leaf and you said not to and I ate it and it tasted bad and now I'm angry."

(Skylar says: "What's this 'your bed too' nonsense?" Also, "Hope you're feeling better soon, Zeus. And give back my orange ball.")

Some of the blog writers talk about works of literature, film, and art that changed their tastes fundamentally—that made them say, “if a movie can do this, how can I be satisfied with a movie that does less?” and so on. And I have a few of those: The Philadelphia Story, Flannery O'Connor, Arrested Development.

But somehow, my immediate reaction to this question was to remember my experience with Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility.

It came out in 1995, when I was a freshman in high school. Even though I was already mostly an oddball, not interested in skating along with what was popular or cool, at fourteen I was still feeling a selective kind of peer pressure. I had my small group of friends, and I believed that my tastes needed to be in line with theirs. If I took a step in a direction they didn’t agree with—well, they would drop me like a hot potato, wouldn’t they? When you’re fourteen and everyone around you allies themselves based on shared tastes, liking the wrong thing is fatal. The logic is unimpeachable, so long as you haven’t lived to know better.

So anyway, one day I was watching TV with Jamie, my best friend at the time. A commercial came on for Sense and Sensibility, and it was all British, and full of straw hats and gowns and fancy dancing. Please be aware that this was Pulp Fiction times. Absolute baseline requirement for coolness at the time was subversion—drugs and violence and swearing, the harsh, the crude, the angry. (I’m talking of course about popular culture, because in our own lives we were totally suburban honor students.) And Jamie scoffed at the commercial, because Jane Austen was clearly a tool of The Man. Any movie you could see with your mom was officially lame.

As it happened, I had seen Sense and Sensibility with my mom, and I had dug it immensely. And at that moment, all my teenage frustration and righteous anger—and outright exhaustion with the effort of trying to keep up with who and what I was supposed to be—overcame me, and do you know what I said? “I loved it. And I bought the book, and I’m going to read it.” I didn’t hedge, I didn’t hesitate, I may have said it in the timid mouse-voice I was mostly using at the time, but damn if it didn’t feel monumental. And Jamie? She considered for a moment, then shrugged and said, “That’s cool.”

And thus it started. Half my lifetime ago I came to a realization: if I like something, that’s justification enough to like it! In fact, it’s cool of me to be sincere about what I feel! It shows strength, and people respect it! And never again have I apologized for liking anything. My tastes—broad and diverse—are all a part of the strange and sometimes contradictory sum of me.

I have sometimes gone almost too far in the opposite direction, sharing my opinions much too freely. I remember discussing movies with someone once, a person I didn’t know that well, and getting a little bit too excited, and responding to one of their recommendations with, “No way—that SUCKS,” and then having that person look at me very confused and insulted. I sometimes have to remind myself that not everyone communicates this way.

But we all should! I’d like to inspire everyone to express a controversial or embarrassing opinion about art today, and to not care what anyone else thinks about it.

Note: I wrote this entry a few weeks ago, and waited to post it to coincide with the finale. I had chosen my top ten and I really didn’t think that any amazing outfits were going to creep in there in the interim. I was wrong! So I am opening my top ten favorite Project Runway outfits with an honorable mention from last week.

11. (honorable mention) Emilio’s circus dress

Damn that Emilio! He has one of the biggest egos that has ever appeared on Project Runway and that is SAYING SOMETHING. He has been driving me crazy this entire season, becoming more and more inflated with self-importance with every one of his wins (and there’s been many) and in last week’s episode, he was grandstanding as much as ever. Sets my teeth on edge, that kind of behavior.

But did you see the dress he made? Holy crap.

The challenge was to make a fashion-forward outfit that was “circus-inspired.” Two designers sent ridiculous costumes down the runway, and two of them kind of boring outfits in circus-y colors. Only Emilio did exactly what was requested (and won the challenge without any hesitation on the part of the judges): he made a dress that was beautiful on its own, but which also was reminiscent of the circus (the stripes, the polka dots, the trapeze-y poof of the skirt). “It looks like the circus! And it’s BEAUTIFUL!” That’s what designing is about, isn’t it? (Now just quit giving Tim lip, Emilio! He’s there to help!)

Having dispatched of that, let’s get to my preexisting top ten!

10. Sweet P’s denim dress

This season four challenge was to create an outfit made entirely out of repurposed Levis. One of my favorite designers from that season, the strangely loveable biker chick Sweet P, started out envisioning a long, flowing denim wedding gown. But when Tim Gunn suggested it was too “hippie-dippie,” she chopped it off at the knee and made the most adorable Little Blue Dress you could imagine. Michael Kors said it had “voodoo” and Heidi chimed in, “Slimming voodoo!” She then said that any of them would be eager to wear it, though she couldn’t speak for Michael. He replied, “Well, with the right shoe…”

Why it didn’t win: Branding. The guest judge, a VP from Levi’s, complained that it wasn’t recognizable enough as Levi’s. They instead gave the win to crying Ricky, who was gone the next week.

Click ahead--unless you have dial-up, in which case don't bother, because there are pictures galore!

I have two papers to write in the next five days, and I just discovered that the entire run of The X-Files is on Netflix Instant View!

In this moment, I am desperate for some supernatural investigation and mid-nineties style. (Oh, Scully. The poofy hair. The big burly business suits. She was only 25 in the first season of that show, but she looked 40. Of course, Gillian Anderson looks awesome now, and Duchovny is crawling with sleaze.)

I occasionally catch The X-Files playing at 2am on the no-longer Sci-Fi channel, what is it again? but that's not exactly a prime time to catch up on my high school viewing pleasures.

When these papers are written, I am hitting Season One SO HARD! "Tooms"! "Beyond the Sea"! "E.B.E." and the introduction of the Lone Gunmen! Not to mention the awesomeness of playing Spot the Now-Famous Bit Player! (Oh, right, Jack Black was in this episode! Hey, is that Lucy Liu? I think that high school boy is Ryan Reynolds never mind he's already dead!)

P.S. One of my favorite current shows, Breaking Bad (in its third season on AMC right now! how about some money, AMC?) is heavily populated with X-Files alumni behind the scenes. Both shows are thus similar stylistically even if their content is pretty different. Just a word to those who might not have known of the connection.

P.P.S. And now back to, you know, the work.

Basically, what happens is this. Lew Ayers meets Greer Garson on vacation, gets quickly engaged to her and brings her home to meet his best buddy Robert Taylor. Of course, Taylor and Garson fall in love instead. Ayers has apparently not seen his own movie, Holiday, in which almost the exact same thing happens when Cary Grant meets this woman on vacation, gets quickly engaged, and she brings him home to meet her sister, Katharine Hepburn, prompting Grant and Hepburn to fall in love (but, then, Ayers is the drunk brother in that movie, so that would account for him not remembering it). Anyway, Garson and Taylor fall in love and, with Ayers’ blessing, get married themselves. It doesn’t work out, and they’re soon divorced, but LUCKILY, Ayers and Taylor work for an advertising company that is developing a campaign for a forgetfulness serum. Ayers feeds the serum to his terribly depressed best friend—and Garson gets a hold of it somehow, too, I forget how—and, just like Joel and Clementine in Eternal Sunshine, the pair meet again and fall for each other again.