why i like being a manic pixie

I’ve been hearing a lot recently about the Manic Pixie Dream Girl and, while I bloody love the name, the whole concept is beginning to bother me. It’s the way that this character type is beginning to spread, making the transition from page or screen to real life. I was quite happy with her/it while she existed solely in fiction, whiling away her days as Summer in ‘500 Days of Summer’ or Belle in ‘Beauty and the Beast’, but now the concept has been hauled into reality it presents a problem.

I was particularly piqued by Laurie Penny’s NewStatesman article about how she ‘used to be a MPDG’ (http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/2013/06/i-was-manic-pixie-dream-girl). I know I’m a bit late, because the article was ages ago. And I’m not only having a dig at Penny, but that article for me epitomises the way that the MPDG is penetrating reality.

Wikipedia tells me the MPDG is usually, open quotation marks, a static character who has eccentric personality quirks and is unabashedly girlish. They invariably serve as the romantic interest for a (most often brooding or depressed) male protagonist. Close quotation marks.

But according to Penny, her MPDG traits were the following: physically, she’s short, petite, pale, messy hair dyed fancy colours; she’s strange, sensitive, daydreamy, and believes in the ultimate decency of humanity, and likes music. And plays the ‘fucking ukelele’.

On page, the MPDG is two-dimensional, defined by eccentricities rather than a personality. A girl whose hobbies can be explained away as quirks. Which is fine when all you’re explaining away is a fictional character, but when you make the move into real life, that thing you’re explaining away is a person. At what point do someone’s physical attributes or hobbies become an eccentricity to be dismissed?

I can’t help noticing the huge similarities between me and the MPDG. I’m short, blonde, excitable and daydreamy, and my hobbies are painfully ‘quirky’. Arts and crafts. Crochet. I thought, my god I am ‘That Girl’. I thought, quick, drop the ridiculous hobbies, stop trying to get on well with people and dye my hair brown so people take me more seriously.

As Laurie Penny is so clear, we should change ourselves rather than the stereotype: “I try hard, now, around the men in my life, to be as unmanic, as unpixie and as resolutely real as possible, because I don’t want to give the wrong impression. And it’s a struggle. Because I remain a small, friendly, excitable person who wears witchy colors and has a tendency towards the twee”.

But then I remembered that the MPDG does not and cannot exist in real life: a real person can never slip into that two-dimensionality. And in dragging the MPDG into real life it becomes, rather than a place to arbitrarily dump fictional women, a restrictive and oppressive stereotype. And changing yourself and your hobbies in order not to fit a stereotype is as ridiculous as changing them to fit to one.

So I will be embracing the MPDG in me. I like that side of me, and I liked it before someone started  calling it ‘manic’ and ‘pixie’. And it’s my right to embrace the parts of my personality that I like, even if they are painfully and traditionally domestic, without being lumped into some degrading fictional stereotype.

some of my many favourite things about australia

A tiny insight into a massive country full of things and people and weird habits. Because this is the first time I’ve managed to be on a computer with a keyboard for an extended period of time, here is a small collection of my very favourite things about Australia (more will follow when I think of them):

• Council collection. Every month every household can dump whatever home furnishings they don’t want on the street outside their house, and the council will collect it. For free. The most wonderful thing is that for a couple of days it gives rise to the best suburb-wide scavenger hunt as people take to the streets in search of goodies. It’s like a real live free ebay. We picked up, off the street, for free: a dining room table, three clothes horses, two wardrobes, a chest of drawers, a wine rack (which has still never been used for wine) and a barbeque. That sounds like a cheapos version of the very hungry caterpillar. Nick got a bit stir-crazy and wanted to bring back some mangey old fishing rope to decorate our room with. Obviously for all the hits there’s bound to be a couple of misses.
• How much coffee everyone drinks.
• The colourful parrot things that live in the tree outside my window eating only the red flowers. I’ve since discovered they’re called rainbow lorikeets. But they seemed to have left now it’s winter.
• That apparently it’s winter now. Anything below 25 degrees is considered freezing.
• How dangerous everything is and how little people care.
• That one of their prime ministers (Harold Holt) went swimming one day, and was NEVER SEEN AGAIN.
• That my new favourite brand of tea is Billy Tea Campfire brew, you can taste the smokeyness.
• Their extortionate number of public holidays.
• The free book boxes. I don’t know who supplies these boxes of free books that hang out outside the supermarket, but I have furnished my very own library. Made up entirely of the most insane books I have ever read, my favourite taglines being: “always outnumbered, always outgunned” and “the novel changes lives”.
• The supermarket is Woolworths. It feels like the nineties. But the only thing I ever bought from Woolworths was a Chupa-Chup spice girls head-mic, and they don’t sell those here.
• Up until recently, another of the Australian prime ministers, Bob Hawke, held a world record for beer-drinking. Downing a yard of ale in eleven seconds. Apparently it helped him in his election campaign because the population are such enthusiastic beer-drinkers.
• The cafe I work in. The most welcoming cafe I have ever been in. While training me, they insisted I learn all the regulars’ orders so they don’t have to trouble themselves with asking for anything.
• The phenomenal ability to cast aside its pretty brutal history, which I still haven’t plucked up enough courage to ask any Australians about, because it summons a pretty frosty reception.
• There’s a gambling game called Two Up, which is essentially heads or tails, which it’s illegal to play every day except Anzac Day, when everyone gets drunk and plays it all day. Anzac Day is tomorrow, and I am excited.
• Everyone here is totally unflappable. I was literally naked in a park the other day and no one even batted an eyelid.
• Everyone makes the most of the entire day. After work, people go to the beach. Before work, people go to the beach. And they all get up insanely early to go running. And they all go out every evening. I don’t know when these people sleep.
• Everyone here is bloody healthy and crazy body-conscious, but apparently if you drive ten minutes out the city everyone is massively obese.
• Car insurance here covers anyone to drive your car. Including people that aren’t residents and have never driven in Australia in their lives. Driving in Sydney is hair-raising. Everyone who owns a car here is a maniac, and there’s no way of telling which way the cars/bikes/trams are coming from.
• For a healthy country, they have the most incredible array of chocolate varieties.
• Musk sticks. The most horrendous sweet known to man. When you eat it, the sensation is less of tasting something, than of smelling something heavily perfumed and unpleasant.
• In every suburb is a high street with incredible personality, and buzzing with people all the time.
• Chinatown
• The massive fruit bats that fly from park to park at night.
• The amazing way that the city has somehow merged with the natural landscape, rather than destroying it utterly. Producing the most beautiful city.
• That no one actually seems to work a full day. My flatmate didn’t work at all for the first three weeks we were here, despite holding down a steady full time job, and now seems to arrive home at 3pm most days.
• I get a ferry to work. Across the harbour, and under the harbour bridge.
• The harbour bridge.
• It’s kind of an unspoken fact that the opera house is a little overrated.
• The outdoor cinemas. I saw To Kill a Mockingbird in a big park surrounded by people on beanbags and giant bats, not on beanbags.
• The ibis that stalk the parks like big tame pigeons. I had to stop to let one cross the path in front of me last week, because it’d be damned if it was going to stop for me, and I didn’t want to have a collision with a large pre-historic bird with a scythe-like beak. Google one to see why I didn’t want to argue.
• The people here are the most obscenely friendly people I have ever experienced.
• 13th Street. The tv channel to end all other tv channels. All they show is Poirot, Miss Marple, Bones and Midsomer Murders.
• The truly terrible postal service.
• An annoying tax office to rival our own very annoying tax office.
• That I’ve only just realised there’s a lemon/lime tree in our communal garden. I suppose I won’t know which until the fruit ripens.
• The noise when the road-crossing man turns green is a very high-pitched, rapid nyoo-nyoo-nyoo, that sounds like you’re in a nineties video game

This is only the few I can think of now. I imagine there will be more installments, although my blogging frequency is always a little unreliable.

 

The devised

A Strange Wild Song, created by Lecoq trained theatre company, Rhum and Clay. Telling the story of a man piecing together his grand-father’s war experiences, after an old roll of camera film is found during the excavation of a bombed-out French village. The narrative flits between the modern day, as the grandfather’s photographs are examined, and the Second World War, as the photographs are taken. The small cast of four beautifully construct both dramatic worlds through high energy performances, hilarious physicality, and utterly convincing multi-roleing.

 
In the series of photographs, the grand-father’s meeting with three young French brothers is narrated, and it is these scenes that form the heartfelt centre of the production. Almost entirely free of dialogue, the cast can really show-off their Lecoq training. Through simple actions, the war-time games of the brothers come to life, as their army-of-three defend their already devastated village from invading armies, from the pile of rubble that is their fort.

 
The company seamlessly overlap the two time zones, with help from a masterfully designed set (Alberta Jones) that is constantly taken apart and reconstructed to create two different worlds, in full view of the audience. This technique of simultaneous construction and deconstruction of the imagined world is the driving impulse behind the production.  Everything is totally convincing, yet completely subverted: the children that we feel such affection for are in fact grown men; the invading army is merely sound effects provided by the onstage musician (Laila Woozieer); even the perilous air-battle is simply an actor wearing a chest of drawers, and cardboard clouds on sticks. But the production is full of the joie de vivre of childhood’s games, where even in the most desolate of war-torn landscapes, human compassion and the power of the imagination are victorious.

The fringe

Last week I went to the Edinburgh Fringe festival. As my second time at the Fringe, I feel I’ve picked up some valuable lessons in the best ways to avoid the total car-crash shows from last year: the most vital being to rely on word of mouth and to trust your friends (not necessarily the reviewers) to provide you with the best advice on what productions you really should see.  While I didn’t manage a massive quantity of shows, I definitely got the quality, and every production that I saw was a fantastic production in its own right, whether it was devised, new-writing, dance, silent, or a man battling firework-wielding aliens on stilts… Because pretty much everything I saw deserves a post of its own (there’s too much to say about them!), I’m going to do a series of them.

This could take a while.

prince harry and the prince of wales

As of last night I’ve started reading Bright Young People by D.J. Taylor (already a fantastic book, highly recommend it), about the Bright Young movement of the 1920s; because it’s a fascinating generation, and because I’m very interested in the parallels that it has with our own generation. Throughout both runs an absence of ideals and illusions, with a sense of an impending reckoning; a sense that, despite the failure of the attempts to ‘connect’, there nevertheless exists a human interest and a common goal.

Apparently, (and the reason for this post is because I wanted to share this passage) our royals also have some similar characteristics:

“The cult of the Prince of Wales. The future King Edward VIII was one of the chief media preoccupations of the 1920s. His clothes [or Harry’s lack of…] minutely itemised, his social engagements forensically set out, his dance partners avidly discussed, the ‘Little Man’, as the newspapers christened him, dominated front pages like no previous royal personage. Photographed during his 1924 American tour in Oxford bags, dancing, at the wheel of a motor boat or playing polo, his lifestyle- for press purposes- was that of the Bright Young Person in excelsis: extravagant, pleasure-seeking, fast-moving. The activities in which he involved himself, too, had all the characteristics of the Twenties stunt: students from the University of Southampton dancing round him to shouts of ‘Here We Go Round the Prince of Wales’; the owner of the Café de Paris assuring him that only his presence on the dance floor could arrest the establishment’s decline. Frequently at large in classic Bright Young Person’s milieux- the nightclub, the West End party- the Prince was, in a certain sense, the movement’s unofficial patron. There was an ominous symbolism, again, in his detachment from the world of his parents. Compared to his playboy son, George V, with his stamp collection  and his fondness for musical comedy, seems a figure from the remote past.”

Like the future King Edward VIII before him, Harry is a symbol of a changing monarchy; it’s time the royal family began to reflect the society of which they are a part, rather than existing as an autonomous and obsolete entity, detached and alienated from the younger generation.

PS. expect more snippets from D.J. Taylor- he’s great.

a thought on ‘blogging’

I’m a little slow on the uptake with blogging, but in my first forays into graduated life it has emerged as a smart thing to be doing. Previously, the act of blogging has bothered me, as it seems pretty egotistical to splatter yourself all over the internet. It seems to me a blog is just another act of self-assertion. That said, however, this is an opinion that I’m determined to overcome. My previous theory that all bloggers are narcissistic self-promoters has been proved totally wrong by the people that I know who have blogs. It turns out it’s actually a very effective way to express your interests and thoughts, particularly for someone, like me, who thinks that actually writing would be something they’d really like to get into. And it’s only read by those who want to read it anyway. A very simple and obvious conclusion to come to, really, but one that it has taken me a little while to reach.

 
So, let the narcissistic, aggressively confrontational, utterly non-consensual, self-promotion begin.