Mehitobel Wilson: writer, reader, chronic curmudgeon.

Tomboy bombshell cowgirl; lover of funk, attracted to roadsides.

Besotted with spots.

Friend to sleaze.

Admirer of filthy films, fleshy steaks, Hong Kong rap, new felt and pocket-knocking 8-balls; prefers 10 gallons of hat and 4 fingers of Jack.

Procrastination here breeds urgency there. Urgency begets sharper fiction. The dream: hone it to a splinter, and sink it deep.

So I'm here.

Truth (and salty lust)

This Jayson Blair strikes me as a disturbed kid that needs the aid of a mental health professional. And I gotta say, I'm just flat-out disgusted that he'll get a book deal, like Stephen Glass got a book deal. Like Janet Cooke was paid well for giving an interview to the New Yorker, if I'm remembering correctly, and she wants a movie deal, too. Like Boston Globe columnist Patricia Smith secures an agent and crows when she makes the gossip columns. I'm wondering if there's a mental illness (or at least, glitch) that spurs people to do outrageous things in the public eye, then claw their way into the spotlight again, to explain or seek penance. And then what? Will they all, like Cooke did, swear that they've changed and should be reporters again?

Why change? "Straight" reportage is rarely different, these days.

Selective reporting (hush, I know it's impossible to cover everything) and bias galore has similar results as embellishment or outright lying. These days, I prefer essays and editorials, because their writers know full well that they're giving opinions. "News" reporters either worry about straight reporting making them look uncreative, or, worse, they think they're telling clean truths.

I'd like robots to be my reporters. I want no qualifiers and unnecessary adjectives. I want clarity. I do NOT want speculation. The TV news sickens me - with every network trying to be the first to break the story, they'll sit on camera and run down (ahem, GUESS) every possible rung of the speculative ladder. Dig our last Presidential election, September 11, the DC sniper case, the entire war. When there's a big story, I feel like I have to read every possible article, and then boil them down in my own head to the probable grit of the story - but there's no guarantee whatsoever that any of us got it right.

There should be "news," and there should be "stories." I'd be okay with that. "News" could be boring, but to the point: "Nathan F-, a 26-year-old male resident of New Haven, was mauled to death in his home on the morning of April 9th by three dogs of unknown breed. Four adult witnesses were present at the time of the attack. The dogs, owned by 98-year-old neighbor Frances W-, were removed from the premises by Animal Control." Blah blah blah.

A "story" could be like this one, from the current Newsweek: "An air of somnolence hung over Saddam Hussein’s former Republican Palace along the Tigris River. In the sweltering streets outside the gates, desperate Iraqis lined up for meager rations of gasoline, armed looters prowled the charred ruins of ministries and banks, and another power outage paralyzed the capital." It could describe the sense, the scene (using a ratio of 1:1.7 adjectives to any other words.) But such description is opinion, such detail is in the eye of the beholder - and that's storytelling.

Granted, I'm the gal that goes insane in the Vortex of Truth, researching backwards as far as possible. I focused my academic study on Latin for eight years because I wanted to be so proficient in the language that I could easily read the original texts on which so much of our own current political systems and social constructs now are based. I'd learn every language, modern and ancient, if I could. I want to read it all as it was written, not as it was translated; translations are often massaged, too, for "flow." Even then, the writer is human, and the text is part of a moment in time, influenced by the cultural situation at that time, so I'd also want to read other work contemporary to the piece I was examining, to better frame it... see why it's a vortex? My lust to get to the bottom of the bottomless is salty: every "fact" is seasoned by both the person presenting it, and the person receiving it.

These lying journalists aren't much different than the ones who believe they are telling the truth. News? I trust none of it.
posted by Mehitobel Wilson at 1:55 PM

Love, Hate

Love: Jeff Dahl. Hard-steamed oysters after work (with cold PBR.) Going to the mailbox and retrieving a package from Russia (cigarettes) and one from Singapore (Fred Perry shirts.)

Love/hate: getting signing sheets for Dangerous Red.

Hate: signing them.

My signature is long. M-e-h-i-t-o-b-e-l W-i-l-s-o-n. I never use it. In this era of drive-through gas pumps and debit cards, cash machines and online bill payment, I never, ever have to sign my name. Now and then I'll sign a tab at a bar, but that doesn't count, because if I'm drunk enough to pay, I'm too drunk to write my name. When I write friends, I sign my name "Bel."

My "Wilson" is easy - it's just a W and a squiggle which looks meaningless but is quite important. There's usually a dot for the "i" and sometimes a little peak that represents the "l" and "s."

The "Mehitobel," though, is always hilarious. What a mess this name is. I lose control of it halfway through. It's a consistent loss of control, though: I derail at the same place every time. All my signatures are recognizeable (to me) as mine. But they also all look like they say "Marthlish W----."

Marthlish?

Tony and I got a wee tad too involved with (crack) Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance recently. I seriously weighed the dangers of leaving work early to meet him and finish the game. We have a date this Fall ("third quarter" or "fourth quarter" or "holiday," say the dastardly developers, who don't trust their teams to perfect anything by any specific time) for the release of DAII, and I'll take vacation days to play it.

Speaking of crack: admission: I watch Survivor. I miss it. However, I've now discovered Surviving the Iron Age, and am digging it - on Survivor, nobody is forced to butcher their own food to survive. Nobody's suffering from nicotine withdrawal. CHILDREN aren't present and given uncooked chicken for dinner. Nobody gets food poisoning. Nobody quits in a huff. And there's no real historical value. The Iron Age show is pretty neat (though I had to miss it tonight because of Hitler.)

There's a tv commercial for GE Wind Energy (?!) that has a bunch of big Viking-esque dudes rowing intently, and a ship (full of chicks listening to Carribbean music) sails past them. I saw it and yearned for those big growly berserker guys and then blinked and thought, jeez, I already have one of those. (Admire the zombie-killin' helmet.)

Oh, right, I saw Matrix 2 last Wednesday (seems that if a movie ends on opening day, it counts as playing on opening day - hence a 10pm May 14th showing) and thought it was weak and corny. The fights alone were good; I like fights. The big problem with Western attempts at Asian-style fight scenes is that we don't trust our actors (witness Shanghai Noon, with Jackie Chan, whom we should motherfuckin' trust) and the camera zooms in too close, leaving most of the action out of sight. Our cameras will focus on a body region of the striker or the attacked, rather than pull back to landscape and show the fight in its entirety, with plenty of static screen in which the players can maneuver. Matrix 2 didn't make this mistake, and I therefore stayed awake. The expository parts unnerved me; they were so long and bizarre that I worry that part 3 will be Ayn Rand-esque worldview preaching. Some of the effects were rubbery. Some things just made me crumple under the weight of the cheese - you know, if someone resurrects me, no matter how much I love them or want to wrap my thighs around their jaws, I'm not going to pop conscious and make out with them. I'm going to be baffled for a while, then want a nap, then get the whole thing explained to me, then use the shock of FREAKING RESURRECTION as a good excuse to stay in bed and eat broccoli for a couple days. Look, making out is great, absolutely. But, jeez.

I'm working on four stories at once. And signing tipsheets. And never, ever sleeping enough. This, dears, is how it is.


posted by Mehitobel Wilson at 12:55 AM

It's not a nearly-30 thing

... because it started when I was 23. The day I got hired at my job, they said, clean up. I was tremendously depressed when I stood in front of the mirror, my porcupine hair brushed out, my face less metallic, my eyebrows the color of human hair, my entire self pinstriped in a ridiculous business suit, my poor feet in girly shoes - I felt stripped, and really low, like I'd been caught doing something delicious and would have to due public penance in the stocks.

The other crappy part is, even when I'm not at work, I don't feel comfortable switching back *into* the physical persona that makes me most comfortable. I don't want to feel like I'm putting on and removing costumes.

What an odd thing to whine about, I know. I just feel like I've let my life be crammed into a box that doesn't suit me: the environment, schedule, and tasks are exactly opposite to my element, plus my physical appearance is at odds with who I've always been. And after 7 years of full-body, full-mind disguise, it's starting to frustrate me.

Plus, I hate the self-centeredness of this whole thing: I'm so uncomfortable with who I'm supposed to be every day, faking the whole thing, that I focus on the discomfort & the possible solutions far too much. I'd much rather hate a bunch of stuff outside of my own sphere. You know, OTHER people, and what they do to each other.
posted by Mehitobel Wilson at 11:57 AM

MEHITOBEL ALL-OUT MONSTER TANTRUM

I bought the WRONG MOTHERFUCKING GAMING PLATFORM.

Before Robert and I committed financial/social suicide and chipped in together on the system and games last summer, I did all the research. I made sure that the system I got would have the most games that I wanted (Tekkens galore. GTA, though Robert took to that one more than I did, I just drive as suicidally/murderously as possible. Soul Calibur 2.) I'm unmoved by most Nintendo titles, though the GC engines looked great - so I vacillated between XBox and PS2 for a very, very long time. But the XBox wouldn't play my PSOne games (Thrill Kill!), so PS2 it was.

That's all well and good.

Except GODZILLA: DESTROY ALL MONSTERS MELEE is available for every platform BUT mine! I flail. I gnash. I make multitonal warbly roars of agony-tinged rage.

I really am going to pout fiercely for quite some time now. The only - and I mean ONLY - thing that's keeping me from doing something completely ridiculous, like selling my digital camera in order to buy an Xbox JUST so I can have this game, is the fact that Baragon isn't in it. Guess he just hasn't been in enough films, isn't popular enough, or wouldn't do much they'd find interesting. He was in DESTROY ALL MONSTERS, though, so he ought to be in the freaking game.

Nope, not helping, actually.

Now I have to drive home. My keyring is a big Godzilla. I will wince with woe every time he hits my knee.

Fuck the camera, I need MELEE.






posted by Mehitobel Wilson at 5:36 PM