Maura Magazine

I’m always loath to read stories that have the phrase “a new study” in their first sentence, but those news items pointing to the Halifax Insurance Digital Home Index this week gave me some pause, if only because I thought that its estimate of the current generation of kids spending 25 percent of their lives in front of some sort of screen was pretty low. Between movies, TV, computers, smartphones, and tablets—not to mention the rise of Google Glass, which (conveniently) marketed itself via hashtag shortly after the study was released—I wouldn’t be too surprised if the mediated experience somehow extended to the sleep phase by 2040 or so.

This issue‘s pieces view the world through screens as well: There’s my interview with Community writer Maggie Bandur, which looks at metacommentary on science fiction and the relative audiences of the internet and TV; Stephen Thomas Erlewine’s thoughts on the way television consumption has shape-shifted in the wake of the explosion of blogs and the rise of the binge view; and Jillian Mapes’s personal take on Catfish, the MTV show about online romances that are often different in real life than on the internet. For a different type of mediated experience, there’s also a lovely short story about a picnic that takes on new dimensions thanks to some brownies.

Meeting People Is Easy

By Jillian Mapes

Monday 2013-02-18, 5:00pm

I am not the type of woman you pick up in a bar. I am not a workplace crush. I’ve never browsed the missed connections on Craigslist, because that would require a successful interaction with a total stranger. I am the type of woman you meet online. I’ve had three long-term romantic relationships and all of them started over the internet. I’m not referring to online personals, which to me don’t really count; sites like OKCupid and eHarmony are, like their analog equivalents of alt-weeklies gone by, simply a way to facilitate meeting people as quickly as possible, whether for the purposes of finding out if a “real” connection is there or scoring an easy hookup. Instead, I met these men further out on the web, and the specific contours of our relationships could double as snapshots of the internet over the past 10 years.

In 2003, one month after I turned 15, I met my first boyfriend, C. He was a friend of a childhood friend; she’d known him through a message board for a couple of years, but never intended to meet him. At her urging one afternoon, I dropped him an instant message. A few years later, he’d dump me via email using the lyrics to The Smiths’ “Miserable Lie”; our fate was sealed by an argument over AOL Instant Messenger. (The damage: Immediately unfriended on MySpace and LiveJournal; blocked on AIM for a month or two; never friended on Facebook, mostly because he never joined Facebook.)

In 2009, six years after my first interaction with C, J added me on Facebook. The story behind that add, I later found out, was cute in a slightly stalker-y way. Our lone mutual friend had thrown a party, and he had seen my picture and profile after I RSVP’ed yes on the invitation. He claimed he went to the party in order to meet me, and when I didn’t show up, he took matters into his own hands. We’d later break up after he got into a relationship with a co-worker, seemingly out of the blue; that tangle also began on Facebook. (The damage: Blocked on Facebook; one snarky comment left, anonymously, on his Flickr account of bad iPhone drawings and contemplative, high-contrast selfies.)

In 2011, I met B for brunch, the culmination of months of ping-ponging tweets about Adele, the weak contenders for 2011′s Song of the Summer (LMFAO, GTFO), and flirty #twitterafterdark dispatches about butts. He had an ambiguous presence on Twitter, and I only found out his identifying details after he sent me a direct message about meeting. (This message caused me to promptly Google him and scour the results.) We recently broke up because, among other things, we had too many text-message arguments. (The damage: Unfollowed on both of his Twitter accounts for now; kicked out of my Facebook news feed.)

Ten years ago, it was easier to have a fake identity online; in part this was because there were fewer ways to detect if someone was stretching the truth. C shares a named with a Swedish computer hacker who’d been famously arrested, so Google was of little help; I went as far to request a phone book from the Long Island county where he supposedly lived. There was no Facebook—or Twitter, or Tumblr, or OkCupid—so the likelihood of figuring out his identity there was impossible. (Neither of us had MySpace until 2005, long after we’d met in person.) Reverse image search—which Catfish creator/mediator Nev Schulman uses in each episode of his MTV show about the veracity of online love, and which almost always unravels a fake story—was not introduced until 2011.

In other words, when I met this guy I was sure I loved a year or so after we first talked, I was only about 80 percent certain he wasn’t going to pull a gun on my “safety friends” and kidnap me. Oh to be young, in love, and with three hours of dialup internet access a day!

With J and B, the notion of deception honestly never entered my mind, yet it was all I could think about when I met C, more than a year after we’d started talking online and six years before the term “catfishing” had been invented by Schulman, who made a documentary about being taken in by his dream woman over the internet—only to realize that she was actually a figment of another woman’s imagination. I grew up in a town of 12,000 in northeastern Ohio; my mother still thinks the internet is not to be trusted. You can only imagine how rabid she was ten years ago.

Beyond fear, though, I felt shame. In 2013, meeting a suitor on Twitter is the stuff of Modern Love columns in the Times Styles section; in 2003, meeting a boyfriend over AIM was shameful. I couldn’t deal with the idea that my peers would assume I had to go online to meet a guy because I was weird and chubby, since the internet was where weird, chubby people could find likeminded weirdos and hide their chubbiness—so I lied about how I met C to my friends and my parents (hi Mom and Dad; please don’t hate me), and I did so for so long that I now strain to remember the real story. I told everyone we met when he attended a football game while passing through town with his older brother, who knew my friend’s older brother, (My friend, according to legend, introduced us because we both liked The Smiths.)

When Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o explained, in the aftermath of the scandal about his nonexistent online girlfriend Lennay Kekua, that he’d lied to his parents about meeting her in person, I understood a little too well. He feared, in equal measure, that his family would force him to end the relationship and succeed in convincing him that it was crazy to love someone he’d never met.

It takes both courage and foolishness to meet someone you’ve only ever known as a voice or a screen name, to walk up to someone who just drove 500 miles and kiss him on the lips in a restaurant parking lot while the friends you brought for safety watch. But what takes even more chutzpah is meeting someone from the internet while having a nagging feeling that he or she is not quite telling the truth—which is almost always the case on MTV’s iteration of Catfish. (The first season ends tonight.)

Catfish paints a picture rooted more in denial than in fear; that the potential danger involved with meeting a stranger is never discussed is the only thing I dislike about it. Yes, 2013 is different than 2003, and meeting up in real life with online pals and potential suitors is as commonplace as friending former classmates on Facebook. (Perhaps the forced mingling of friends in newsfeeds and on dashboards has fostered a more implicitly trusting atmosphere.) But—and I don’t mean to sound like my mother here—rule number one of meeting people from the internet is still the same: First contact needs to be made in a public place. Yet in almost every episode, Schulman, cameraman Max Joseph, and their attendant MTV crew travel with the protagonist to his or her suitor’s home. With all those people and cameras around, it’s highly unlikely that the “catfish” would try to physically harm his or her suitor. But it still sets a bad example for young viewers, who may be going through similar situations and who might attempt to recreate the show’s confrontational meet-up style.

That said, bad intentions are not the norm on Catfish. The deception doesn’t usually seem to come from an evil place—just a lonely one. (Well, except in Episode Four, in which the “catfish” turns out to be someone who’s spent years coldly executing revenge through online seduction.) Even when the tales are elaborately fictionalized (like in Episode Eight, where the young gay man Aaron pretends to be a beautiful girl in order to “date” the handsome jock Tyler), the deceiver is often just in search of a friend—and the recipient of the audience’s sympathy. While those who were deceived are rightfully pissed, I’m consistently amazed by their compassion just a few minutes or hours later.

Catfish has restored my faith in humanity and its capacity for forgiveness, but at its core it portrays denial. Why would the victims of these scams pretend to have never Googled their online suitors, and need Nev and Max to help them do the most basic online searches? I refuse to believe that the kind of people who would be internet literate enough to enter into an online relationship are neither web-savvy enough to use Google, nor deluded enough to think that all the lost chances to communicate further are the result of actual technological breakdown.

Habitually lying on the internet is not resigned to a certain type of person. I’ve known a number of perfectly lovely, attractive people who made up online personas and talked to many different people online all around the world. It’s a dirty little secret I’ve only learned after forging close, in-person friendships. The reasons for starting these relationships usually lie in loneliness, boredom, research, or a combination of the three. (One friend of mine spent her preteen years on a band’s message board, exploring their boundless imaginations by creating new personas with her sister. To this day, she remains friends with a few of the people she met there.)

One other emotion fuels Catfish: Hope. Once Nev gently reveals that the person they think they’ve been talking to most likely doesn’t exist, that emotion takes over. Nev, having been through this before, wears kid gloves as he follows through with the face-to-face meeting, no matter how bleak the prospect of truth. But that almost makes it worse. I’ve often averted my eyes when the “catfish” finally opens the door and reveals the fantasy to be just that. Watching the exact moment when someone loses hope and has his or her heart broken is painfully awkward, but it makes for some of the realest, most compelling television of our time—and judging by Twitter, I know I’m not alone in thinking this. I suspect that more people, especially those who came of age with social media and are in MTV’s target demo, have experienced online romance than are letting on. Not the fresh hell that is online dating, not “getting to know each other a little” before seeing how things go in real life—online romance. The kind that involves the fear, the doubt, and the embarrassment that transpires when two people care deeply for each other, despite never having breathed the same air.

Sweets For The Something

By Maura Johnston

Thursday 2013-02-14, 12:00am

I had this noble idea that I was going to give up candy for Lent, and it lasted for about 19 hours, or until the status updates about the day Ash Wednesday being not Valentine’s Day but “Half-Price Candy Eve” started rolling in. But the thing about Lent is that it’s 40 days, and stumbling on, say, Day One only sets you up for having a more satisfying Day 38, when you’re at the end of your rope and the pot of Reese’s Eggs at the end of the rainbow seems like it’s light-years away. (Never mind if your nobility is borne more of vanity than it is of testing how lapsed your Catholicism truly is.)

In keeping with matters Lenten and Valentine’s-related, this issue focuses on both the sugary and the acerbic, with J. Pablo’s look at New York hip-hop ice cream impresario Mikey Likes and a roundtable about Tegan And Sara’s exquisitely soul-rending new album Heartthrob bookending the two. Sitting between those two poles? Chris Molanphy’s look at how the Pretty In Pink soundtrack could have made The Smiths superstars instead of cult heroes. What Behind The Music episode we might have lost, of course, provides the sweet alternative to the bitterness of lost superstardom.

If you have Spotify, you can listen to a selection of music related to this issue.

Post-Menopausal Antiquing, Or: Please, Rick Moody, Just Quit It

By Maura Johnston

Saturday 2013-02-09, 9:30am

Somewhere along the way, editors got it into their head that Rick Moody was good at writing about music. Maybe he has a talent for a certain kind of description that resonates with people in power; perhaps he’s pleasant enough in person for party-sourced acquaintances to be encouraged to give him a shot; his tastes might be the “right” kind of tastes among certain literary types, reinforcing norms of What Is Real And Good while venturing just far enough into recent-release territory to make people feel that he was still Up On Things.

I have always found Moody’s prose overworked and his opinions in need of a contrapuntal eye-roll or two, and when he wrote about Taylor Swift in The Rumpus other people on the Internet were happy to send their eyeballs into overdrive. Because really, what he wrote was ridiculous, failing my test for writing about female musicians by comparing Swift to Natalie Imbruglia and Alanis Morissette (whose lyrics are apparently now the equivalent of “post-menopausal antiques,” which I think refers to bronzed Diva Cups, because there is no other reading of that line that makes sense, even if you bring Swift’s penchant for checking out old lamps into the picture), saying that she’s a pawn of her songwriters and PR types, accusing her of wanting to marry up, and comparing her music to both a flattened squirrel synthetic products that cause gastric distress. (Although he only writes about “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”—and he gets the song title wrong—so perhaps his deadline came before the rest of Red could make its way to his desk.) Oh, and he also got in the fact that She’s No Lena Dunham, because Lena Dunham is the one woman under 30 who is depicting her generation correctly, which is to say with aspirations toward Importance that should be torpedoed by her self-loathing more often than they actually are.

One great thing about the social-media-stuffed age, though, is that writers like Moody, who even 10 years ago would have had their say and been safe on their pulpits as they cashed their checks, now can hear the cries of “BULLSHIT” coming from those people who might not have the connections or social position he enjoys. The response to that piece was pretty, er, swift after its publication, with people seizing on the sexism dripping from every line, the condescension that was somehow commingled with a persecution complex (“Hey, it’s not my fault the rest of the world Lacks My Impeccable Taste, and that includes you, Kelefa Sanneh and Robert Christgau”), and all-around uninformed splenetic nature. It was a bit more fun than making hay of a dumb thing said by, say, Nick Hornby, when all was said and done.

Well. Rick Moody, important American novelist, is not pleased with the fact that the feedback loop in 2013 is so close to his ears. So he did what any wounded writer would: He took to Salon. (What is with Salon and hit pieces on Taylor Swift by middle-aged men? Grab for hits or something more sinister?) It’s a pretty unpleasant read, and any potential to bad for him for violating the internet’s first (and only) rule (“Don’t read the comments, just don’t“) is tempered by the fact that he comes off like a petulant brat who can’t believe that his opinions might not be seen as gospel by those who consider themselves intelligent. His piece starts off with a “usually I write about music I like” whinge and goes on from there, incorporating shock that people who read the “pretty intellectual and bookish” site where his Swift screed appeared would even care about a genre as lowbrow as pop-country, saying that his critics wanted him to die, and proclaims himself the arbiter of… well, let me just cut and paste the kicker:

Taylor Swift likes to collect names of musicians she admires (e.g., The Beach Boys, Fleetwood Mac), and to drop these into the public conversation. (And she mentions Pablo Neruda on “Red,” as if mere mention will make her bulletproof.) But that doesn’t mean she has what it takes to make the kind of art she admires. And the critical community, if it doesn’t call her out, gives her a pass simply because she moves units. Or so it seems to me. Which not only does us a disservice, it does her a disservice. Because how is she supposed to get better? By playing Joni Mitchell in the biopic?

You can kill the messenger, and I am happy to have as many poison darts await me, but the critical message in this case has merit, regardless of messenger, because the message is about not what works musically now, for a certain demographic, for a short while, but about what might work for everyone for all time.

Yes, that’s right, Rick Moody can see the future, and he knows what will last in the hearts of every person, man and woman, American and… whatever else, white and not. He knows things! He is in a Dante study group! And he deflects any accusations of sexism with a protest that, hey, he wrote about some female musicians in that column—although why he doesn’t consider this cri de coeur his own version of “collecting names of musicians he admires and dropping them into the public conversation” in order to make his dislike of her “bulletproof” I’m not sure.

But this is all part of a nastier trend in writing about music, one that resembles the dying yawp of a certain type of white dude who still believes in Real Rock And Roll and who is genuinely unnerved by the idea of women fashioning pop culture in their own image. It was also glaringly apparent in Bob Lefsetz’s horrifying post-Super Bowl horndog screed about Beyoncé, which, even while complimenting Adele mocked what he saw as her lack of a workout regime, and it’s in countless dumb pieces that lump together all women involved with pop music—including fans of non-”serious” acts like Justin Bieber and One Direction—as a monolithic unit, instead of as individual people. Which isn’t to say “Don’t criticize pop music, it’s off limits”—ask me sometime about my feelings on the Lumineers, or much of Rihanna’s recent output (musical and extramusical), or the numbing lack of wit in EDM’s particular brand of hedonism. But at least have reason for doing so that goes beyond “ew, girls are stupid and have cooties and wait they can’t run the world, can they.”

The subhead of Moody’s rebuttal asks, “Why do serious critics swoon for [Swift's] narcissistic, hackneyed pap?” Which is funny, because both of his Swift pieces had me wondering the same thing—only about those people who might smugly concur with Moody’s deeply purple prose and stuck-in-the-mud ideals of what music “should” be.

Let’s Hear It

By Maura Johnston

Thursday 2013-02-07, 12:00am

After a long period of endless album teasers and slow-burn promotional campaigns, the element of surprise has come back to big-tent music in 2013—David Bowie announced an album he’d been working on in secret for two years, My Bloody Valentine released the 21-years-in-the-making followup to Loveless, and Justin Timberlake returned to music. But my jolt came on Monday morning, when Fall Out Boy—the Chicago-bred arena-emo act who had been on hiatus since 2009, and whose last album Folie A Deux is one of the 2000s’ most undersung full-lengths—announced an imminent album and tour. Tuesday night they played the Studio At Webster Hall, the sweaty basement of the giant Village club, and the salutary effect it had on me was pretty much immediate; being in a room with a bunch of people who are just excited is still a great invigorator, although it helps that Fall Out Boy’s songs are like nuclear bombs of melody that dare you to sing along after only a single listen. This issue is all about things that we can hear, like the aforementioned My Bloody Valentine album (tackled by Chris Ott) and Taylor Swift’s body of work—and what happens when silence intervenes, as it will for the music blog Donewaiting, which is shutting its doors this month after a decade of operation.

Through The Glass

By Maura Johnston

Meeting People Is Easy

By Jillian Mapes

Sweets For The Something

By Maura Johnston

Post-Menopausal Antiquing, Or: Please, Rick Moody, Just Quit It

By Maura Johnston

Let’s Hear It

By Maura Johnston