jenni miller dot net

When I was in London over the summer, my friend got me hooked on Lady Gaga. I mean, I was aware of the phenomenon, generally speaking, in the way that I am sort of up on today’s music because of the stuff my gym plays, even though I usually have no idea who the artists are. I’m so notoriously late to the show when it comes to music, I can’t even tell you. Three years later, and I can be like, “Hey! This Lily Allen gal is pretty neato!” Anyway, so Lady Gaga, I’m digging her, especially the new song “Bad Romance,” from which the title of this entry is taken.

I’m not sure that LG’s music would stand on its own without her videos and overall persona, but her songs are awfully catchy. But it’s her overall style that I love. The production design on her videos and outfits are always 100 percent over the top and somewhat shockingly fetishistic for a mainstream pop star — think Madonna in her Exotica phase with a Cronenberg twit. “Paparazzi,” for instance, goes from a romantic, ’40s vibe with fetishy details like her corset-laced stockings, latex gloves with the fingers cut-off, and old-fashioned corset, to a full-on medical fetish freakout with her in a wheelchair, bejeweled neck brace with a nurse-y red cross on the front (and don’t miss the fact that she’s also dancing in the wheelchair) to a sleek steel exoskeleton and arm braces. The black geisha-style lipstick and Minnie Mouse-y outfit at the end is totally awesome too.

There’s also a ton of gender-bending in her videos — she herself is so wonderfully extreme that it could be read as female drag; that is, a woman so extreme in her presentation of femininity that she is actually a type of drag queen. Plus, she dressed up as a vampire in a leotard simply to get off an airplane. Where the hell did she change into that? You can barely turn around, even in first class bathrooms. I wonder if she just shucked it all off and changed right there in the aisle. Because who flies in a leotard and fishnets on Transatlantic flights? That’s just gotta chafe.

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Last night I went to the book party for Cassette From My Ex, which is a really neat book all about, you guessed it, the cassettes we traded with boyfriends and girlfriends when we’re at the height of infatuation — the addictive, buzzy high that makes you not care if you’re the most disgusting couple on the sidewalk, walking by with stupid hearts coming out of your eyes… I digress. My fabulous friend Emily has an essay in the book about a cassette from her ex, but the problem was, she had to listen to it before writing about it, then send it in to the editor, who would also listen to it. And she has no cassette player.

For some reason, I have a cassette player. In fact, what we huddled around nervously, waiting for her ex’s voice to boom out from the past, was a cassette-to-cassette player that you could use to dub tapes — to each other, to CDs, to a record player too, if you’re that old school. (I’m not. The only records I have worth mentioning are a Tiny Tim record that is from my childhood and a Nina Hagen “Nunsexmonkrock” album I bought off the street when I first moved to my apartment and appropriately nailed to the wall.)

We held our collective breath. It’s never easy traveling back to the past like this. The voices we’d nearly forgotten, the scents, the in-jokes. It can turn your bones to jelly and make your joints ache 20 years later. We braced ourselves. But we lived.

Here comes the funny part.

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C’mooooon. Come to America. You might like it here.

This clip shows Julian Barratt from The Mighty Boosh giving the main characters dog’s milk.

“This is Cow. She has most productive teat of all my bitches.” And then he suckles from a dachsund.

More here…

As you can see, this blog has been left rather unloved lately. I can’t decide if I want to update it with links to the things I write or things I’m thinking or whatever it is people blog about these days. I do plenty of self-aggrandizing on Twitter and Facebook, and I’m sure that linking to my stuff here would improve my SEO hoodly-hoo but, like, I don’t know. You tell me.

How much to live in public or not has been a question in my mind for quite some time. I started my own website with a tilde in the URL in, according to the Wayback Machine, 1998. (I personally think it was before, but I can’t remember.)

I ranted about things that no longer make sense to me, (who is this person I dubbed the C.H.U.D.?) I demanded a marsupial pouch, I wrote about two guys my friends and I dubbed the do-it boys, the trials and tribulations of midnight breakfast gatherings at my alma mater, and so on.

This particularly tickled me:
“i myself, personally, know people who are my age who have graduated college. furthermore, i also know people who are approximately my age whose jobs require them to have cellular phones and whose paychecks could pay for at least two years of college. somehow, i don’t think i’ll be getting one of those jobs. maybe i’ll just sell vibrators in the east village.”

(Obviously, we all know by now that life plan didn’t quite shake out.)

But at that time, search engines were pathetic, and no one knew that everything would live on and on and on online.

I later went on to keep a few different blogs, some public, some not-so-public. People’s feelings get hurt. TMI occurs. It can get ugly. And now that my name is more easily Google-able in a way that connects me with what I’ve written, I’ve been hesitant in using this site as anything but a self-promotional vehicle.

We talk about branding and social media and networking, and I understand and value the ideas behind these ideas, but at the same time, THIS is my “brand.” My niche, if you will. Someone who likes to write about movies and music and feminism and pop culture; someone who likes to play video games and watch horror movies; someone who occasionally likes to go out to a club and tie one on even if there’s a weird guy who wraps himself up in carpeting and lies by the bar so people can step on him (and I do step on him!); someone who thinks gold teeth are super cool; someone who likes getting people to talk about what they are passionate about, what they’re making, and what they’re doing. Want me to write about those things? I’m your girl.

And sometimes, I just let it rip. Because that’s part of my “brand” too.

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Get it? Look closely. Okay, never mind. I’ve got a plane to catch.

The Frisky points out the latest female trend piece courtesy of Australia’s Herald Sun. Ladies such as myself — career-oriented, not waiting to get hitched or have a bebe just yet, although more than happy to pat the tummies of those who are and snorgle the sweet-smelling scalps of other people’s bebes — are apparently TWITS, aka “Teenage Women In Their Thirties.”

“Just like men with Peter Pan-syndrome who are not ready to grow up, TWITs are putting serious relationships and parenthood on hold, instead choosing to continue partying and enjoying the freedoms they discovered in their teens.”

I’m not really even sure what to say about this, probably because my blood sugar is a bit low and I need to eat lunch and also pick up a cable for my new laptop. (Why didn’t I know that the new FireWire ports are smaller than old FireWire ports and I’d need a cable to connect the two?) At first I thought it referred to people who Twit too much. But those would be Twats, no?

I don’t really “party” and it’s entirely possible, though none of your business, that I’m not “single,” but that doesn’t mean I can’t have fun even though I’m over 30. In fact, I demand it. I demand fun. All fun, all the time, including when I’m working and when I’m sleeping. I demand work I enjoy (so far, so good) and I demand wonderful dreams when I sleep (well, that’s a toss-up), and I demand not to be given a stupid fucking nickname for it because a writer had to write a trend piece about something kicky and female-oriented.

I know we all have to pay our bills, and sometimes that means writing about dumb shit, and sometimes editors take what you’ve written and crap all over it, but is it really necessary to make up yet another way to label and infantilize women and their lifestyle choices?

No, no, it is not.

Holy crap! It’s been months since I’ve updated. That’s because I’ve started writing regularly for Cinematical a fine online destination if there ever was one. I would suggest you bookmark it right this second. Some of my favorite recent posts are Our Favorite Sex Creeps, Could Great Video Games Finally Get Great Movies?, Getting Fed With Julie and Julia, The Crazy World of Comic God Alan Moore, my interview with Peter Sarsgaard, and, well, a ton of other stuff.

I’ve also popped up over at MTV to write about Comic-Con and The Blair Witch Project and other movies that made me carsick, among other things.

And then there’s the August/September issue of BUST, which I wrote a big fat fall preview for (plus some other goodies you can find in the magazine here and there). Get a preview of it, buy it at your local bookstore, or order it online in a sweet digital format. The Q&A with Diablo Cody is also not to be missed!

Plus, I’m over at PlaySavvy, AOL’s video game site for parents who wanna be up to speed in the world of video games.

So, there you go. That’s what’s shaking and baking in my world. Summer is almost over. Eloise is still chubby. I’m still addicted to Diet Coke. Life is damn good. Damn, damn good.

I’m sorry, dusty little blog. I’ve been ignoring you in favor of, you know, working. So here’s what I have been up to lately.

Heeb Loves You, Man! Jason Segal and Paul Rudd dish on ILYM. I’m pretty sure you can guess which are my questions. Tee. Hee.

Apparently, I make BUST readers irate, or else just chatty. They liked my post on Rashida Jones in I Love You, Man but were foaming at the mouth about my post on cupping, acupuncture-stylee. And let’s not even discuss my post on women and Watchmen. That’s cool, I love my BUSTies, and if the Internet isn’t about sharing your opinion, well, I’m gonna pull that WiFi chip out of my arm right now.

My review of Sunshine Cleaning on The Rumpus, a really cool site you should bookmark.

And I’ve started Twittering. Professionally.

I have other things up my sleeve, but I can’t tell you about them until they’re done/live/published. Word.

I’m getting up to speed on updating my page ‘o’ clips, and I added a bunch today. These aren’t all of them, by any means.

Peep ‘em here and you can always access them by that little tab up top that says “Clips and More.”

Happy Friday!

This isn’t a review. No spoilers. Nope. Well, maybe a little at the very end, but mostly this is just a tale of a two writers, a glass wall, and a nose. I’m one of the writers, obviously, and it’s my nose hitting the glass wall.

Picture this. A friend and I were cabbing it up (early) to see Watchmen. Well, we thought we were early until we saw the line, but I’m getting ahead of myself. We were talking about a very cool young actor who is probably best known for a very sexy sex scene with an older woman and his (real-life) (male) best friend. For some reason, when my friend told me that both of them have children now, I was too busy staring at her in utter shock (and dismay) to realize that what I was reaching towards and pushing on wasn’t a door by any means but a glass wall, and one that the side of my shoulder and nose soon slammed into.

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