Tell Us Your Stories, Morning Glories!

(ABOVE: Here is Paul and Linda meeting each other; what song do you think is playing in the background? I feel like maybe She's About A Mover by the Sir Douglas Quintet. Right???)

Hey Pals! Remember how a couple weeks ago we posted the inaugural instalment of our SFW Survey feature and it was What's Your Favorite Beatles Song And Why? and it was fantastic and we all loved it? I do. I remember that. This is just a little reminder letting you all know that the unveiling of our second SFW Survey post is looming upon the horizon; the question is 

Which song do you most closely associate with the first time you fell in love? 

and we are welcoming submissions from EVERYBODY. In the world! Today is Sunday, by far the most boring day of the week, and I highly suggest that instead of sitting around being bored all day, you answer the hell out of this question and email your response to letitbebeautiful (at) yahoo dot com by the evening of Wednesday, August 15th so that next week you can be on Strawberry Fields Whatever! We are most interested in hearing about the story behind the song, but really just follow your heart and write whatever feels right. We trust you. 

Thing Of The Week: People Who Are Smoothies, James "Sawyer" Ford, Not Working

LIZ'S THING OF THE WEEK: People Who Are Smoothies

1. I'm in Massachusetts right now, I got here yesterday morning at 6 a.m. I'm drinking a Dunkin Donuts iced coffee with cream and one sugar and listening to the Elliott Smith songs from the Good Will Hunting soundtrack and eavesdropping on the housepainters next door, who are gossipy and hilarious. Yesterday one of them told the other he's not going to Stacy's jewelry party 'cause there were too many spelling errors on the Facebook invite ("Can't do it. Principles. Learn how to spell"). It's really nice here, wicked verdant with a constant pre-thunderstormy vibe that's bad for my hair but good for the soul.

2. I loved LJ & Erin's Stoned Movie Review of Good Will Hunting so much! It's so good. 

3. Oh my god yesterday I went to Big Y to get nectarines and a birthday card and a bag of rice and in the parking lot there were these little teenage punk girls sitting on the hood of their car, eating baked goods and blasting some sort of actual punk that I couldn't identify. They were so inspiring. While I was waiting in line I read part of this Vanity Fair feature on Ben Affleck from 1999 and it's kinda wonderful, especially the opening paragraph, when Ben puts the writer on his motorcycle (aka "The Blackbird Killer") and takes her to Koo Koo Roo. Koo Koo Roo! 

4. I found that article by Googling "ben affleck bitch i'm from hull." I was remembering this paragraph:

Given any opportunity, he will launch into full-voltage riffs about Boston landmarks - for Jordan's furniture commercials ("I think these sofas haffta go!") to the pride surrounding the brutal winters ("Stock up on wahta, it's the Noreasta!"). He endlessly amuses himself with the names of Massachusetts towns ("You don't know me, fucker, but I'm from Hull. Bitch, I'm from Lynn. You don't know Medfield, Come down to Medfield, then we'll see what the fuck's up!") 

I thought the line was "Bitch, I'm from Hull." I'm just gonna pretend it is.

5. My favorite part of Good Will Hunting, right now at least, is when they're at the batting cages and Will tells Chuckie he got probation and counseling for hitting the cop and Chuckie says "You're a smoothie." I'm going to start calling people smoothies all the time from today on. Everyone's a smoothie now. We are all of us smoothies. 

LJ'S THING OF THE WEEK: Sawyer from LOST

I am re-watching the entire series of LOST right now because there are no seasons of America's Next Top Model or Project Runway on the air and I don't care about The Newsroom or Breaking Bad and I already re-watched the entire series of Mad Men last summer and the entire series of Six Feet Under last fall and oh hey wait duhhhh LOST is fucking awesome. I am almost all the way through Season 1 and I'm obsessed with it. I think about it so much. I went to therapy this week and at one point I zoned out and my therapist was like "Why did that make you disassociate?" and I had to tiptoe around answering the question because really it had nothing to do with therapy and everything to do with how I was thinking about LOST. The first time I watched Season 1 of LOST I was deeply in love with Dr. Jack Shephard but my attitude has completely changed since seven years ago; this round, all I care about is SAWYER. Sawyer is so on point about how to best utilize one's time while stranded on a mystical desert island. Fuck building rafts and exploring terrain and helping people- if I were stranded on the LOST island, I'd just want to laze around hoarding mini-bottles of alcohol and reading paperbacks all day too. My friend Charlie came up with the genius point that if Season 1 Sawyer were a Clash song he'd be "Cheat". Basically if you took exact Season 1 Sawyer and then made him a writer instead of a con man (or maybe a writer in addition to being a con man), that would be my dream dude. 

JEN'S THING OF THE WEEK: Not Working Next Week Featuring Cape Cod Chips

I'm off from work next week!!!! No things matter this week. Next week is my only thing. I'm going to Cape Cod for a couple of days with some pals and I'm going to eat Cape Cod chips on the beach and go to the Cape Cod chip factory and get some Cape Cod chip merch. I'm also going to relax, I guess. And make artwork! OMG.

LAURA JANE'S QUITTING SMOKING JOURNALS: Week 1

BY LAURA JANE (ILLUSTRATION BY JEN)

I spend a lot of my time thinking about a version of myself who will never exist. She is 42 and pale, lying in a bed, dying of lung cancer. Her lungs hurt and she can't breathe. She’s sad about how she’s dying, or maybe she’s mad at herself for letting herself die like this, and she spends a lot of her time thinking about a version of myself who never existed: the me who decided to bet it all against smoking. The me who will never quit. 
         I wish I could bet it all against smoking and know for sure I’d win big. I don’t want anyone to think I’m quitting smoking because I don’t love smoking: I’m not; I do. Some smokers quit because they start hating smoking, or at least they say they do: they resent the coughing and the judgment and the money, but I don’t believe I’d ever get there. “I’d rather cough and smoke,” I’ve always said, “And I don’t give a fuck about other people,” “It’s money well spent!”- I just don't want to die. I’ve spent my whole twenties claiming I’ll quit smoking when I turn thirty, that my thirtieth birthday present to myself will be “not dying of lung cancer.” But at the beginning of summer, my dad told me a thing you can do. I told I’m so scared of dying of lung cancer, and he told me, “Don’t be scared of lung cancer! Lung cancer kills you fast and then you die. Emphysema’s what you really need to be scared of.”
         A person can live with emphysema for like twenty fucking years, and if you want to do know what those twenty unfuckingbearable years of your life will feel like, here’s what you do: 

 Put a drinking straw in your mouth, and plug your nose. Now walk across a room. 

I think that every person reading this who smokes should stop reading and go do that right now, because doing that made me realize that I don’t want to wait until I’m thirty. It made me realize that there is something in the world worse than dying.

STONED MOVIE REVIEWS: Good Will Hunting!!!!!!!1

BY LAURA JANE & ERIN (ILLUSTRATION BY JEN) 

My friend Erin and I like getting stoned and watching movies together. We're really good at it.

We recently decided that it's probably for the best if we start using this incredibly refined "skill" of ours to benefit the greater good, and so was born Stoned Movie Reviews. 

        We kicked off our cool new column by getting stoned and recording ourselves watching Good Will Hunting on a really great app called iTalk (highly recommended, if you ever need to record yourself), because IT'S NOT OUR FAULT that getting stoned and watching Good Will Hunting is a WICKED-awesome thing to do!!!!! ahahahahahahaha ;) ;) ;) #howdoyoulikethemapples

(ABOVE: Erin & me JUST KIDDING ew that's not us)

1. GOOD WILL HUNTING IS A STUPID TITLE

The night began with Erin and I sitting in her backyard smoking a joint and shit-talking the title Good Will Hunting. “It’s really on the nose,” Erin opined. 
        “What are the chances that his name would be Will Hunting?” I asked, which doesn’t make any sense. 
        “Is Will Hunting that good of a guy?” we wondered. If so, we certainly didn’t pick up on it- Will Hunting’s kind of an asshole, in our opinion. 
        “Are all the characters in Good Will Hunting supposed to be ‘hunting’ for ‘good will’?” we asked ourselves. “It doesn’t seem like it,” we decided, “Though kind of.” 
        All in all, we concluded: “It’s a weird pun. It doesn’t relate to the, like, themes of the… movie.”   

2. THE OPENING CREDITS ARE "BORING," REALLY BAD," AND "HEARTWARMING" 

The opening credits felt like they lasted about an hour. We kept asking the television to “cut to the chase.” 

        “It seems like movie credits are less like this now,” I posited. 

        We got into a convo about how weird it is that movies have to begin by telling the audience all this boring information they don’t care about, ex. the name of the Director of Photography or the Casting Agent. When you go to a concert, or, like, a “sports match” (that’s what Erin called it), they don’t make you sit through “And the sound engineer is…” “The waterboy’s name is…” 

         “It’s out of respect!” I said, like fifty fucking times. I remember feeling very connected to such respect. I wanted writers to be as respectful to their colleagues as filmmakers. I felt like writers were fucked-up people, maybe, for not beginning all of our books by shouting out the guy who laid out the pages on InDesign. 

 3. WE HATE GROSS LAMBEAU

(ABOVE: Ew, look how gross and smug he is. Don't you just want to hit him in his smug fucking face?) 

Thing of the Week: No. 1 In Heaven by Sparks, A Beatley Message from Lukas & Cookie Monster, Christian Marclay's The Clock

LJ'S THING OF THE WEEK: No. 1 In Heaven by Sparks

I never thought I would fall in love with No. 1 In Heaven. It's the Moroder Sparks album and I don't much care for Moroder. My favorite things in music are guitars and raw emotion so I've never had much use for that guy. 

I forced myself to listen to No. 1 In Heaven a few weeks ago. I love Sparks so wildly much it kills me and I knew that if I put enough energy into digging through the layers of Moroder-sound I'd find the Sparksiness within. I knew I could love it the way I love every other Sparks album, and I was right. I initially found the hidden Sparksiness in the lyrics "You're the only bank that's open all night" and "Didn't look too good in shorts/ Got divorced when I was four." Ron Mael's great gift is for non-precious whimsy.

But then I started getting into the Moroderiness of it and now it's almost all I listen to, the most beloved record of my right now. I'll hear it in five years and it'll make me think of this summer and I wonder what this summer will seem like, how I'll remember it, in five years. Like the sky was always pink, maybe- this music sounds exactly like a pink sky. My favorite song on the record is The No. 1 Song In Heaven. It's a nod. It's totally going on a nod. It's closing your eyes and letting a feeling of calm so calm it chokes you wash across your face and shoulders. You are blissing too hard to waste your muscles on smiling when they could be resting. They need it. They need rest. And I appreciate how the words and concept are extremely morbid. It tells you that if you die you'll hear this song, and I feel like how could that possibly not be true. I'd be mad if I died and this song didn't play. 

LIZ'S THING OF THE WEEK: A Very Special Addendum to Our "What's Your Favorite Beatles Song & Why?" Survey (via Lukas & Cookie Monster)

This is Lukas. He's six-years-old and he loves the Beatles. I dropped the ball so hard and forgot to ask Lukas to take part in the first-ever SFW survey, so his mom Danielle shot this little video in which Lukas and Cookie Monster tell us about their favorite Beatles song:

Lukas also made this picture to illustrate his favorite Beatles song for us:

"Doctor Robert" is such a cool choice! Thank you, Lukas (and Cookie!).

JEN'S THING OF THE WEEK: Christian Marclay's The Clock

I started to freak out last weekend because I realized The Clock was going to leave Lincoln Center in days and I hadn’t seen it. I NEEDED to. I really needed to. So I went after work on Tuesday and waited on line for 2.5 hours. The wait really wasn’t so bad. I was reading a book on meditation which seemed like too much to me. Reading about meditation for 2.5 hours while waiting on line to watch time in cinema in real time? Come on. Mostly I just pretended to read the book so no one would talk to me. I was too anxious about getting in to concentrate or meditate.

            I got in! You guys, it’s so good. It’s brilliant. It’s perfect. I loved it. I watched from around 7:30- 9:15 PM. I was starving and freezing so I had to leave but under better conditions I could have stayed all night.

        The Clock is a 24 hour video piece by Christian Marclay that depicts exact moments in time in film using clips from all film/TV history. It’s amazing. At 7:46 IRL it’s 7:46 on the screen. There’s a clock or someone is referencing time.  Around 7:49 there’s a clip from a Pink Panther movie and they make a call to confirm the time and Mulder answers. It’s a dream.

            Oh! The sound is really amazing, too.

The SFW Survey: What's Your Favorite Beatles Song & Why?

Here's our new thing: we're asking everyone in the world to answer song-related questions for us so that we can share your responses on Strawberry Fields Whatever and then all get to know each other so much better. Our next question is "Which song do you most closely associate with the first time you fell in love?" If you'd like to answer, please email your response here, sometime before August 13. We're most interested in the story behind the song. Tell us your stories, morning glories.


For this week: WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE BEATLES SONG & WHY?


"Tomorrow Never Knows" 


-Laura Jane


"You Never Give Me Your Money"

-Liz

Today my favorite Beatles song is "Don't Bother Me", but I don't think it's my overall forever favorite. Here is a brief history of some favorite Beatles songs:

"I Should Have Known Better" was my first favorite Beatles song. I liked it because of the whoa-whoa-I and hey! hey! hey! parts. I was 10. There's also the harmonica and the scene in A Hard Days Night where they're playing cards and singing it with girls staring and grabbing at them, which I loved. I think I was also super into "Happy Just to Dance With You" at the time. George. Fun. Cute. Eventually I was in high school feeling weird, angsty and dramatic so I liked "Happiness is a Warm Gun" and "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" the best. A few years ago I was out at some show or something and heard "Don't Let Me Down" and it hit me in a super emotional way. I loved it. That was my favorite Beatles song. 

-Jen

my favorite beatles song is honey pie, because my dad used to sing it to me when i was little and also because it's just one of those beatles songs that they obviously were trying out some weird shit for funzies. the whole white album rules (yes, i am one of THOSE PEOPLE) but honey pie is just cute and happy and lovely and doesn't make you feel like anyone's on drugs and that's the best to me. this is probably a very predictable answer coming from me.

-Kitty Pryde (rap game Taylor Swift, Laura Jane's spirit animal)

You ask this because it's a tough question, right? I'm not some typical Beatles fan with a quick answer to this; I love the Beatles, like a lot of people, but having been a little kid right when the Beatles were big, it's for sure part of the soundtrack of my childhood (I don't often listen to them regularly now), and therefore the answer is complex. The Beatles in general remind me a lot of moving to New York City and playing with my cool first grade friend Liz Lewis whose mom was an artist and painted her living room orange one week and black the next (my mom was an opera singer, our room was done in tasteful velvet and toile and we did not listen to the Beatles in our house). So I'm going to just pick this one and you should know that after you print this I'll probably decide I was wrong and wish I'd said "Norwegian Wood." But today: "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." Mostly because of the melody (for me, it's almost always melody, except when it isn't). Because I mean come on: (I look at the world and I notice it's turning/while my guitar gently weeps/With every mistake we must surely be learning/still my guitar gently weeps). Did I actually answer the question? 

-Elizabeth Crane (novelist, We Only Know So Much)

The Strawberry Fields Whatever Diet, Pt. II: Exciting Things Consumed in the Month of July

BY LIZ

1. My amazing friend Cathy De La Cruz is moving to Tucson from L.A. today to get her MFA in creative writing, which is so exciting. Sunday was her going-away party and this was my gift to her: a Big Gulp cup filled with Skittles and a package of Arbor Mist STRAWBERRY WHITE ZIN 'FROZEN WINE COCKTAIL'. I didn't try any frozen wine, but I did eat lots of the Skittles.

2. At Cathy's going-away party, at the Senor Fish in Little Tokyo, I had some rad fish tacos and a jalapeno margarita. "Just make me something spicy," I told the bartender when ordering. I was feeling spicy. The margarita bit my mouth.

3. Sunday I also had an iced coconut coffee and pineapple empanadas at Cuscatleca, which is this great Salvadorean bakery in Silver Lake. I went to Cuscatleca for iced coconut coffee on Saturday too, and Patty Schemel was in front of me in line. She has crazy-jacked arms -- probably cuz she's one of the greatest drummers in the history of the world.