pantryslut

It's Wednesday and I haven't even made it to last Saturday yet. Whew.

Saturday morning was the final session of my "So You Want To Be A Music Journalist?" class at the Media Alliance. This was the class where our final project was to stand up in front of a panel of Real! Live! Editors! and deliver a pitch. Sort of like American Idol for music journalists.

My instructor (Jeff Chang! ) had already declared me the ringer of the group, and those of you who know that I've written the music page for Girlfriends for a couple years now might think the same thing. But taking the class was immensely valuable for me nonetheless.

I stumbled into my music gig. I wrote a couple of reviews for Girlfriends when I was still working in the office, but I didn't get a regular slot until Erin Blackwell joined the editorial staff. She thought that it made ore sense to have a regular voice on the music page the same way that they (at the time) had a regular voice on films (Judith Halberstam having written for them from the beginning of the magazine). She advocated for me to take it on, and I've been writing ever since, even though Erin is long gone from the magazine herself (and moved on to better things, I'm sure).

So the first thing that the class gave me was an overview of the music journalism scene, which has by the way changed significantly in the time that I've been doing it, thanks to Maxim and more importantly its offshoot Blender. I found out that there are three typical lengths of pieces: the 100-word review, the 600-word review, and the feature (whose word rate varies). Well, I've been writing one 600-word review and 4-5 100-word reviews for Girlfriends! So I have a lot of experience with those forms. Which is good for me -- that's something I can parlay into getting other gigs.

I also learned, on Saturday, that I'm better at pitching than I thought. I listened to some of the other students' pitches, which in most cases tended toward the vague "I want to write about this but I haven't found an angle yet." For them, working out an angle was the valuable feedback they got.

But for me, well...if you don't have an angle, you don't have a pitch yet, as far as I'm concerned.

The thing is, I've pitched Girlfriends several times -- and they never buy my pitches. Oh, they'll send me assignments, especially if another writer has flaked. I make a great pinch-hitter.

I think I'd been assuming that if the folks I write for regularly wouldn't buy my pitches, nobody would. They should be my easiest market to break into, right? I must suck at pitching. But now, after this class, I think something else is going on. The Girlfriends people have known me since I was starting out as a freelancer. I was their intern, and probably at some level they still think of me as the person who was their intern, not the person I am now.

Was that worth the price of admission? You bet.

So now I feel all pumped up and ready to spread my love (and my biting musical insight) to the world. Good class.

Steven treated me to a graduation meal at Luna Park, which we'd never been to. They had mussels and fries on the menu -- not as a special, but on the regular menu, indicating they had great confidence in the dish.

And it evoked memories of Belgium, even though it is one of my few regrets in regards to that trip that I never actually had mussels and frites while I was there (not enough time spent near the coast). So I made up for it with this huge bowl of delicious shellfish and broth. Plus mayonnaise for my fries. On a rainy, cool day, very reminiscent of the weather in Antwerp.

After lunch, we went to the SF-MOMA for the last day of Reagan Louie's controversial exhibition of his photos of Asian sex workers, plus the Diane Arbus retrospective. I will save my thoughts on Louie's photos (and the crowd viewing them) for another post, if I get around to it, but right now I'll just say that I appreciated that the museum included two rooms of "Reagan Louie in Context," with examples of art that has inspired Louie throughout his career and especially in regards to this project.

I made it home just in time for G. to pick me up for Writers With Drinks.

As far as I am concerned, Yayne Abeba was the star of this installment. Everybody was fabulous of course, and I don't mean to short folks like Pat Murphy and Matt Bernstein Sycamore, but, well, I've seen them read before.

G.'s soon-to-be-ex-wife was at the event. (I note that they are getting a very amicable divorce.) She paid me the biggest compliment I may ever get by telling me a story:

I've read at Writers With Drinks, a couple years ago now. I was the second-to-last reader, and I read my piece "Test Driving The Celebrity Cock," always a crowd pleaser. (In fact, I just got fan mail from someone who stumbled across it online.) It's about my adventures with product reviews and those huge celebrity dildos.

She was in the audience for that event, along with her father. Her father the pastor, visiting from Ohio.

She told me that as my reading got raunchier and raunchier, she checked in with him. "Are you OK?" she asked. He paused. "Well, she's a good writer," he replied.

Awww.

Shortly after that, she apparently asked G. what we were up to for the rest of the night. "We're going to go back to Fremont and fuck," he said.

And so we did. But there's one more thing we did before that that I must mention. I hadn't eaten dinner yet -- I didn't have a chance to before getting picked up. So we stopped off in Fremont at Krispy Kreme just ast the "hot" light came on, and took a dozen home.

Is there anything more decadent than sitting in bed, eating warm Krispy Kremes with your lover? I can't think of anything.