smile, sweetheart

2007-01-03T09:33:00.000-12:00

In Seattle, Aradia Women's Health Center is closing.

Writer Tillie Olson is dead at 94.

There are mannequins with giant boobs.

Tomorrow at this time Katie and I will be here. Not that I've bothered to pack, yet... (And are these not the scariest white children you have ever seen?)

2007-01-02T15:40:00.000-12:00

princesses and sluts

2006-12-30T08:08:00.000-12:00

Currently among the top ten most emailed articles on NYTimes.com...

-- The New York Times Magazine, December 24th
"What's Wrong With Cinderella?" by Peggy Orenstein

“They’ve been begging to come to this store for three weeks,” [Anne] McAuliffe said. “I’d never heard of it. So I said they could, but they’d have to spend their own money if they bought anything.” She looked around. “Some of this stuff is innocuous,” she observed, then leaned toward me, eyes wide and stage-whispered: “But ... a lot of it is horrible. It makes them look like little prostitutes. It’s crazy. They’re babies!”

As we debated the line between frivolous fun and JonBenét, McAuliffe’s daughter Rory came dashing up, pigtails haphazard, glasses askew. “They have the best pocketbooks here,” she said breathlessly, brandishing a clutch with the words “Girlie Girl” stamped on it. “Please, can I have one? It has sequins!”

-- The New York Times Editorial page, December 29th
"Middle School Girls Gone Wild" by Lawrence Downes

They writhe and strut, shake their bottoms, splay their legs, thrust their chests out and in and out again. Some straddle empty chairs, like lap dancers without laps. They don’t smile much. Their faces are locked from grim exertion, from all that leaping up and lying down without poles to hold onto. "Don’t stop don’t stop," sings Janet Jackson, all whispery. "Jerk it like you’re making it choke. ...Ohh. I’m so stimulated. Feel so X-rated." The girls spend a lot of time lying on the floor. They are in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades.

-- The New York Times Styles section (surprise!), December 31st
"The Graying of Naughty" by Sharon Waxman

De’Bella - or Debbie, as everybody calls her - decided late in life to become a porn star. This year she turned 50, time, she knew, to chase her dream.

"I love sex," she explained, biting into a Burger King special before embarking on her scene for the day at a rented house in the San Fernando Valley. She was wearing a bright pink satin and black chiffon nightie with a matching thong and heavy makeup.

2006-12-30T08:04:00.000-12:00

So, aside from the ever-worsening Clamor/Infoshop disaster, Kitchen Sink is shutting down, too. But that's more sad than disastrous. Especially since they're positioning it as the conclusion of the Neighbor Lady Community Arts Project's "pilot program" instead of as the death of yet another indie publication. And um, they're not taking anyone else down with them. But they do need money to print the final two issues...a call that's becoming all too familiar.

it's been awhile

2006-12-29T16:31:00.000-12:00

More than once lately, I've thought that the year that's about to end is 2007. Which I guess only shows how fast time has been moving. So how about some predictable Best of 2006 listing to get back into this long abandoned blog?

Movies...

Mutual Appreciation, Children of Men, Babel, The Queen, Little Children, The Science of Sleep, Little Miss Sunshine, Friends With Money. Huh, I thought there would be more than that. I guess Fast Food Nation and Shortbus are in the honorable mention category. And there are a bunch of things I still haven't seen that I know will be great, like Half Nelson, Old Joy and Volver. And I have a feeling that Heading South is going to make the list when I watch it later this weekend. I also finally saw Last Tango in Paris this year, and loved it... what a sexy, sad Marlon Brando.

Music (I actually bought some of these albums)...

Joanna Newsom, Ys
Seeing her play in November was without a doubt the best show I saw this year, though that distinction is kind of meaningless, since there's really no way to compare what Newsom does to anything else. Webster Hall was sold out, and everyone stayed completely, reverently silent as she played, transfixed by her hands flying over her harp, and the way these songs sound like absolute art when they're performed. After she finished each song, there was a moment of silence, like everyone had been holding their breath. When she played "Emily" I actually cried. This new album is seriously Great, accomplished and beautiful and even humbling, in the way that things made by people of insane talent can be, when they are wonderful and ambitious without seeming put on. The Milk-Eyed Mender will forever make me think of Hale Street, of hearing Emily play it for the first time on one of those fresh, almost spring days when we had the doors open and were gardening in the backyard.

The Lemonheads, The Lemonheads
It's not that this is so much a stand out record, but I'm really happy it exists. And seeing them play a few weeks back, after buying the tickets months ago and anticipating a perfect night of delicious pop music with Allie back in town, was a great time. They played almost everything I wanted, including a long set where Evan plowed through some of my favorite songs (including "The Outdoor Type" and "Stove") by himself, without stopping and without ceremony.

The Decemberists, The Crane Wife
Cat Power, The Greatest
The Gossip, Standing in the Way of Control
M. Ward, Post-War
The Hold Steady, Boys and Girls in America
Belle and Sebastian, The Life Pursuit
Also, new stuff from Thom Yorke and The Blow. And approximately two and a half songs from Mirah's new remix album, Joyride.

The best books I read this year...

The Thin Place by Kathryn Davis
Rose of No Man's Land by Michelle Tea
The Seas, by Samantha Hunt
La Perdida by Jessica Abel
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, by Nick Flynn
Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir, by Joe Meno
Adverbs, by Daniel Handler
A Fictional History of the United States with Huge Chunks Missing, edited by T Cooper and Adam Mansbach
Whose Art Is It? by Jane Kramer
Absolute Convictions, by Eyal Press
After I resisted reading it because of so much hype, it turned out that Nicole Krauss' The History of Love was really good.

There was also a ton of amazing reading for school, including the aformentioned Jane Kramer book, a giant book of film reviews and essays by Pauline Kael, and C. Carr's collection of pieces about the East Village performance art scene in the late 80's and 90's, which I'm still relishing.

Last weekend when every person I know was either out of town or had family around, I holed up inside and read Wonder When You'll Miss Me, by Amanda Davis. It wasn't as good as I wanted it to be. Still, I went back and read the many, many tributes written about her at McSweeney's, and it was mind-blowing to see how many people she touched and befriended and inspired, how many people admired her as a writer and a person. I still have her short fiction collection, Circling the Drain, to read. It might be just the kind of depressing gem that will make perfect Arubian beach reading...along with the other books of critical essays I'm taking. What a nerd.

2006-12-29T16:18:00.000-12:00

once there was a wedding...

2006-12-29T15:55:00.000-12:00

2006-08-07T09:41:00.000-12:00

Sesame Street is unveiling a new character, and she's a girly-girl. A fairy, actually. What's really bothers me (and okay, there are a few things) is that her "pink skin" makes her pretty obviously a white girl, and who needs that?

For all the educational consultants and child psychologists the show could have enlisted, the success of the character seems to rely largely on the one simple quality no other Muppet can claim: she’s very, very pretty. As played by Leslie Carrara-Rudolph, a new Muppeteer, she’s enthusiastic, eager, occasionally bashful but never coy (and certainly never divalike along the lines of Tinker Bell).

...In the past the show has bent over backward to counteract stereotypes, with the tomboyish Zoe or the highly opinionated Elizabeth. “But political correctness hampers creativity,” Ms. Nealon said. “Abby Cadabby owns her own point of view, but she’s also comfortable with the fact that she likes wearing a dress, and as we’d tried to model strong female models, we neglected that piece of being a girl.”

this is what a PR coup looks like

2006-08-07T09:25:00.000-12:00

Bitch in the NYT Magazine? Fucking awesome. Deborah Solomon applies her characteristic skepticism to Andi Zeisler. It's a little annoying/condescending, but Andi holds her own.

DS: Did you and your co-founder, Lisa Jervis, have any magazine experience before you started Bitch?

AZ: We were both interns at Sassy.

DS: As opposed to Savvy.

AZ: Savvy was earlier, right? Maybe there will be a magazine someday for older women called Saggy.

2006-07-31T02:40:00.000-12:00

Ashlee Simpson appeared on the July cover of Marie Claire magazine extolling the virtues of appreciating one’s body as it is — then she had a nose job.

Marie Claire readers erupted in fury at what they said was Ms. Simpson’s hypocrisy and the magazine’s “cluelessness.” They wrote 1,000 letters in protest to the magazine, according to Joanna Coles, the new editor of the magazine. And she agreed with them.

In the first issue (due Aug. 15) over which she exercises full editorial control, Ms. Coles gives expanded space in the letters column to readers to vent against Ms. Simpson. Ms. Coles adds in a note: “We’re dazed and confused — and disappointed — by her choice, too!”

I don't think I've ever read Marie Claire, and it's not like I'm going to start, but this is kinda cool. The first issue under this new editor also has a really hot photo of Maggie Gyllenhaal on the cover. Nice selling point, at least to me...

love for savage, again

2006-07-30T12:56:00.000-12:00

In New York, the court ruled in effect that irresponsible heterosexuals often have children by accident — we gay couples, in contrast, cannot get drunk and adopt in one night — so the state can reserve marriage rights for heterosexuals in order to coerce them into taking care of their offspring. Without the promise of gift registries and rehearsal dinners, it seems, many more newborns in New York would be found in trash cans.

...A perverse cruelty characterizes both [the New York and Washington state] decisions. The courts ruled, essentially, that making my child’s life less secure somehow makes the life of a child with straight parents more secure. Both courts found that making heterosexual couples stable requires keeping homosexual couples vulnerable. And the courts seemed to agree that heterosexuals can hardly be bothered to have children at all — or once they’ve had them, can hardly be bothered to care for them — unless marriage rights are reserved exclusively for heterosexuals. And the religious right accuses gays and lesbians of seeking “special rights.”

2006-07-27T05:39:00.000-12:00

Yet as consumers young and old tire of being marketed to, the skull appears to offer a kind of antidote: the ultimate unbrand, one that belongs to no one. Curiously, then, what began as an outlaw anti-logo may as well be viewed as the death rattle of an underground aesthetic.

...or something.

beach day.

2006-07-26T06:04:00.000-12:00

2006-07-21T08:17:00.000-12:00

The screenwriter Don Payne, a writer on “The Simpsons” here earning his first big-screen credit, may not have had [Glenn] Close, much less the Sonic Youth frontwoman Kim Gordon, in mind when he wrote this film. But he might as well have since, unwittingly or not, it perfectly expresses what Ms. Gordon once called the “fear of a female planet.” In “My Super Ex-Girlfriend,” G-Girl rockets around saving the day in skirts and high heels like some nitro-fueled Carrie Bradshaw, outshining her dweeb of a boyfriend at every turn. So of course he dumps her.

Okay, so a female superhero is only allowed in a movie if she a) it's clear from the title that she is only important as she relates to a guy and b) only uses her powers to exact revenge on said guy. These are the lessons apparently learned from movies like Aeon Flux and Elektra, which no one saw not because a female superhero can't carry a movie, but because they were bad movies. I'm so tired of this shit.

some fictional gossip

2006-07-20T08:41:00.000-12:00

When Betsy moved back to Brooklyn last month - which, by the way, was one of the best things to happen ever - I went over to her new place and hung out while she unpacked. Randomly among her books was My So-Called Life Goes On, which is exactly what it sounds like: not a mere novelization of the TV show, but a "novel based on the characters from the award-winning television series!" (Not a mash up of My So-Called Life and Life Goes On… that might be worth reading.) I started reading it mostly by accident, and was about 80 pages in before I knew what was happening – though this says very little about its quality, there are about eight words on each line. So now I know what happened to Angela and Rayanne and Jordan et al the summer after the show ended, at least according to the limp prose and lame imagination of one Catherine Clark. The answer? Not much, but what there is, is stupid. For example, Brian Krakow loses his virginity to Rayanne's mom (yes, he really does), Ricki Vasquez is still in love with ambiguously gay boy Corey Helfrick (he of the rainbow-painted shoes, see episode #17), and, OMG, for about 5 minutes Sharon Cherski thinks she's pregnant.

Inspired by this delicious badness, I started to write about punk rock YA novels (loosely defined) for last month's Bookslut column, but various things got in the way and what I'd written was too craptastic to do anything with. I read a bunch of newer books for that column though, including Frank Portman's King Dork and Rockstar Superstar by Blake Nelson.* I was thinking about how so many of the books I really connect with are punk rock-ish coming of age stories, and how you might expect less traditional gender roles or breakdowns in these semi-subcultural settings. Oh well. Many of the books with boy protagonists are populated by blow job-happy teenage girls, while the boys are obsessive music nerds and care mostly about their bands. In books with girl protagonists, the girls are more likely to be angry and bad ass (see Rose of No Man's Land and Manstealing for Fat Girls), the boys mostly sensitive and dorky (see Thumbsucker, the movie). Both are outcasts, but of different kinds. Maybe the girls have more to prove. And it seems like these books with boy protagonists are loved by kids and "adults" of both genders, but the stories that follow a girl's high school travails are much less likely to be picked up by boys. I'm totally generalizing here, obviously...

I read Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir by Joe Meno (of the amazing Hairstyles of the Damned) a couple of weeks ago, and it was one of the best short story collections I've read. I have a copy of his upcoming book from Akashic, The Boy Detective Fails, which I'm trying to save for my vacation. But its hard - the title alone kills me. Right now I'm reading Adverbs by Daniel Handler, and it is beautiful, a book about Christian rock called Body Piercing Saved My Life by Andrew Beaujon and Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine. On the back burner are The Nimrod Flipout by Etgar Keret and Joan Didion's The White Album. Next up are the anthologies This Is Not Chick Lit and A Fictional History of the United States With Huge Chunks Missing. Yes - this is what it looks like when I try to "reduce" the amount of books in my apartment. I did give my parents two boxes to stash in their attic so I'd have room on my shelves for incoming school books, but somehow others have already taken their place. It's truly a sickness.

**a lil Blake Nelson footnote: his first book was 1994's Girl. It was written in the rambling first-person style that makes teenage girls sound kinda dumb, but its descriptions of music and sex and groupie-dom rang too true for me to take it for granted. It was later turned into a predictably terrible movie, but I still love the book. Nelson's second book - Exile - was about a guy being a writer-in-residence at some college, doing a lot of coke and fucking his students. It was dumb. Apparently he wrote a third one, called User, also about boys and drugs. When I looked him up online for column background purposes, I found out that more recently he's written several YA books, a couple with titles like Prom Anonymous and The New Rules of High School (and obviously Rockstar Superstar, which was basically a boy-centric Girl, but flatter and much less interesting).

The Sassy magazine mix: Sebadoh "On Fire," PJ Harvey "C'mon Billy," Joan Jett "Bad Reputation," Liz Phair "6'1"," Buffalo Tom "Soda Jerk," The Lemonheads "The Outdoor Type," Teenage Fanclub "Your Love is the Place That I Come From," American Music Club "American Music," Matthew Sweet "Sick of Myself," Juliana Hatfield "Choose Drugs," The Breeders "Cannonball," Cibo Matto "Beef Jerky," Lucious Jackson "Angel," REM "Try Not to Breathe," Ben Lee "How to Survive a Broken Heart," Portishead "It's a Fire," Daniel Johnston "Come See Me Tonight."

2006-07-19T09:49:00.000-12:00

I know I've said it before, but I'm addicted to the The Stranger's blog, and you should be too. The whole staff blogs, which means you get constant updates, ranging from news to travelogues to random rants and videos. Dan Savage is on there all the time, obviously, but the rest of the staff is also awesome. And the comments on each post are more interesting and entertaining than they are anywhere else.

I'm a little obsessed with Seattle.

But this is my favorite story of the week.

2006-07-19T09:44:00.000-12:00

Things suck for women and culture now, at least according to Carlene Bauer at Salon, who uses Sleater-Kinney's break-up to reflect on what she sees as "the end of an era."

I've been listening to music and going to shows for more than half a lifetime now, watching indie rock devolve into backward-looking, fashion-damaged pop, while the culture grows ever more unwilling to admit feminism did anything but give women delusion, heartbreak and resentment. In this blue moment for indie rock fans and feminists alike, I need to pay my respects to three women whose noise never sounded like anyone else's and kept getting louder and larger the older they got....I need to be reminded that my peers and friends are living correctives to those who believe that it's useless to free yourself from the bonds of biology, history and society, and that you can indeed live a life according to principles that pundits with nannies want to make you believe are quaint unworkable utopian relics of the '60s and '70s. I need to watch three women issue a billowing cloud of noise and in doing so defiantly redefine what it means to be female and an adult.

I know what she means, but is it really as bad as all that? The first time I saw Le Tigre play live, I was really struck by this feeling that we were in a great and shining moment for awesome feminist punk, that things were really happening. There's maybe less of this now, even a few short years later. But that doesn't mean there's nothing. Just because the world is falling to pieces - which it is - doesn't mean there isn't still amazing stuff going on. It's too easy to be mopey and nostagic about riot grrrl. And let's not heap all the burden of keeping this golden ideal of momentum alive on Sleater-Kinney. Seriously. They are one band - a brilliant, amazing band, and probably my most favorite - but they are not the only kick ass feminist rock band. The best, maybe, but not the only.

And just when we need to wage war against the right wing, we're also losing a soundtrack to that fight. Which means that the '90s are officially over, and it might be a while before there's another comparable surge of challenging, exhilarating female voices. Exit Sleater-Kinney.

Come on. Our fight still has a soundtrack, too long and too good to burn a representative song from each band onto a CD. Does the end of Sleater-Kinney suck? Hell yes. Is it the end of the world? No. Not even necessarily the end of an era (though people manage to claim that about pretty much everything).

2006-06-22T15:43:00.000-12:00

Kelefa Sanneh continues to dote on Chris Carraba in the Times, while Nerve is, predictably, interested in better things.

With the Replacements on in the background, plenty of not-so-smart things seem like wonderful ideas....Westerberg's sensitivity worked because, as much as he was a nice guy, he was also a bad boy: always drunk, falling down, unreliable. He wouldn't have been a good boyfriend. For starters, he would never remember your address ("Can't Hardly Wait"). But from afar, he would watch you walk through a city in winter ("Skyway") and would not be shy about mauling you on public transportation ("Kiss Me On The Bus").

Awww. Then there's this assessment:

And if Paul Westerberg hadn't been such a smoldering antihero, he still would have owned the '80s alternative world by default. The stars of the college rock scene were about as asexual a crowd as have ever made music. Billy Bragg and the Johns from They Might Be Giants? Hardly sex gods. Michael Stipe? Too shiny and happy. The Spin Doctors' Chris Barron? Too boorish-pothead. Pavement's Stephen Malkmus? Too damp-handshake pretentious. The Violent Femmes' Gordon Gano? Too hippie-neighbor sleazy. Guided By Voices' Robert Pollard? Too sleepy-sloppy. Jonathan Richman? Too neurotic (and word was he only went for suicidal strippers, anyway.) And if you don't retch imagining yourself in bed with Evan Dando, I don't want to know you.

2006-06-22T15:41:00.000-12:00

Danielle Teplitsky, newly graduated from high school in Port Washington, N.Y., is the owner of about 150 [lip] glosses, she said. Last Sunday, she stopped at Macy's in Herald Square to slick on the new Pink Lollipop gloss from Lancôme.

"It needs to be shiny and it needs to taste good," said Ms. Teplitsky, 17, who likes to reapply gloss about every 20 minutes. "But most of all it needs to make my lips look pouty so my boyfriend will look at me."

2006-06-21T09:42:00.001-12:00

Bath and Body Works is having a sale and I just went there and tried out about 10 different kinds of lotion and body spray, and now I'm greasy and reek so strongly of lemon-berry-butter-cream-sage-coconut-mango-basil-creme brulee-pear-mint that Betsy might make me shower before we can hang out and be writerly.

solstice is a nice word

2006-06-21T09:13:00.001-12:00

-- The Mermaid Parade is on Saturday... but it is going to rain.

-- Ever try the Wikipedia "random article" function? It takes "learn something new everyday" to new levels of excellent-ness.

-- On the front page of the Observer, Sara Vilkomerson investigates the rising acceptance of male "flabbiness," a la Vince Vaughn and Jack Black, and some people wandering around Union Square.

Jill and Michael, a trendyish-looking couple strolling through the Greenmarket last Friday, seemed to embody, literally, the whole man-flab acceptance movement. “He’s my ideal,” said Jill. “He’s big and strong and has something to grab onto. It’s the whole being-protected thing—not that I think about that consciously. You want to be with someone who can protect you.”

“I like to work out. I like to eat. I work for a living, so I don’t have a lot of time to think about those things,” said Michael, who sported a beard and chin-length long hair in addition to a bit of a belly. “I’d rather eat and drink a beer than starve myself to look like some Chelsea boy.”

BUT!

Hollywood starlets, on the other hand, shouldn’t hold their breath for a reversal in body image. “It’s never going to stop for women,” said Ms. Stern.

-- And also at the Observer, a piece arguing that The Break Up was actually smart and perceptive about modern relationships and their superficiality.

In their final fight, Ms. Aniston cries so hard she can’t speak—and when she does, it’s not about how much she loved him. “I’ve gone above and beyond for you, for us, I’ve cooked, picked your shit up. I don’t feel like you appreciate any of it.” The absence of personalized affection suggests that modern relationships are often built on these fantasies of roles. But, even then, they’re obsolete fantasies when everyone knows they can move on and find someone who fits into their idea of a relationship just a little more cozily. What terribly banal disappointments! How familiar it sounds.

It still wasn't a great movie, but I kind of agree. Naomi was annoyed because it didn't leave her with the sugary magic of usual crap romantic comedy, but the lack of a fairy tale ending made me a lot happier than a "happy ending." This one left me wondering why movies don't focus on break ups more often... on the break up itself instead of characters' success at finding true love afterwards. The actual break up, with all the addendant drama and nastiness, is much more interesting than watching pretty people frolick through their cute n' temporary misunderstandings.

-- Maybe I was just really bored today, but I was totally entertained by New York magazine's feature on NYC etiquette. Especially the pieces by Amy Poehler and David Cross.

-- Tricia Romano reports in the Voice:

It's doubly hard to square the frequency of gay bashings with the public perception that it's OK to be gay. "Just because we have gay TV shows and all that, these things are just a fantasy," [DJ Honey] Dijon says. "It's like two different realities. It's like The Matrix. There's the virtual reality and what's happening in the real world. And what's happening on the street is a reflection of what our larger government and religious institutions are doing. What's the difference between what the government did in Iraq and what they did to Kevin Aviance? One is sanctioned and the other is not?"

-- Also, yesterday Salon had a article about straight girls who make out with each other. Omigod, this is breaking news!!!

These women say it's no big deal to kiss another woman -- especially if alcohol has loosened inhibitions all around. Same-sex behavior is more accepted, particularly on campus, and proving that you're "cool enough" to kiss another girl without worrying that your peers will question your sexuality is an example of how open our sexual culture has become. But is this staged bisexuality really a testament to a type of hypersexualized girl power -- or a statement on how far gals will go to please a generation of guys weaned on online porn? And what does it mean to girls who are actually coming out as queer to see straight girls playing bi for male pleasure?

Ummmm....Girl power!

2006-06-06T10:08:00.000-12:00

Kitchen Sink has a new blog.

2006-06-06T10:01:00.000-12:00

If you're procrastinating and looking for something to read, how bout spending some time on Fresh Yarn? I just found this essay by Elise Miller, about how she slept with the lead singer of Depeche Mode when she was 15, and it is hilarious and wonderful. I love stories about smart women's groupie pasts...

I think I have eye contact with David at least three times but I'm not one hundred percent sure. I do, however, feel a connection with him, as if it's me up there on stage, as if we're interchangeable, as if I'm the famous one everyone envies, which they would, if I could tell them I met the band and have a backstage pass. That, however, would be tacky. David swivels and gyrates to the point where I'm practically drooling with heavy duty lust. I lean in and shout to Karen, "I'll bet he's great in bed!" Karen nods and grins like, we are so fucking cool, which we are.

By the way - and this is old-ish news - Steve Almond resigned from his teaching post at Boston College because of their decision to have Condaleeza Rice speak at graduation. You can read the open letter he wrote about it that was published in the Boston Globe here. Choice quote:

I cannot, in good conscience, exhort my students to pursue truth and knowledge, then collect a paycheck from an institution that displays such flagrant disregard for both.

And then there's Steven Colbert speaking at Knox College's commencement. Reading the transcript makes the world seem like a better place, even if only for a moment.

A wall...across the entire southern border. That's the answer. That may not be enough -- maybe a moat in front of it, or a fire-pit. Maybe a flaming moat, filled with fire-proof crocodiles. And we should probably wall off the northern border as well. Keep those Canadians with their socialized medicine and their skunky beer out. And because immigrants can swim, we'll probably want to wall off the coasts as well. And while we're at it, we need to put up a dome, in case they have catapults. And we'll punch some holes in it so we can breathe. Breathe free. It's time for illegal immigrants to go -- right after they finish building those walls. Yes, yes, I agree with me.

2006-06-05T14:30:00.000-12:00

Bitch magazine has a sweet new Web site! And their anthology comes out in August. Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay.

2006-06-05T14:23:00.000-12:00

Caryn James spends more than 1,000 words picking at Jennifer Aniston in the Times. It's a seriously weird sort of tirade, kind of catty (and I hate that word) disguised as critical:

The relationship with Mr. Vaughn itself may have cost Ms. Aniston sympathy. In terms of her image it doesn't even matter if that relationship exists; the public believes it does. And while replacing Mr. Pitt with a new trophy guy would have seemed like vindication for the wounded princess, instead she has reached beneath her on the celebrity food chain. Mr. Vaughn seems smarter than his on-screen persona, and his mega-hit "Wedding Crashers" gave him some Hollywood clout. Still, nobody says, How did she get him? Just the opposite.

Speaking of Jennifer Aniston, I love what the av club has to say about The Break Up:

It's like watching the "we were on a break" episode of Friends stretched to feature length, and without the blessed relief of commercial breaks or the promise of Seinfeld around the corner.

Gwynne Watkins has a cool take on that movie Hard Candy, which looked like it could be good, if not for... well, some of what she points out.

Recently, a Dateline special got parents up in arms about the dangers of MySpace. The fear: those suggestive photos teenage girls may be noticed by, well, men looking for suggestive photos of teenage girls. Yet considering how badly they want to protect these girls, neither the MySpace protestors nor the producers of Dateline nor the makers of Hard Candy seem interested in what the teenage girls are thinking. And that seems to me to be a crucial oversight. Why is a fourteen-year-old girl's totally normal sexuality more frightening to look at than the stunted deviance of a pedophile?

The fancy new issue of Bookslut has interviews with Anthony Bourdain, Hal Niedzviecki, Hillary Carlip, Salvador Plascencia, Charles De Lint and George Saunders, and the column I wrote wherein I help prolong the debate about that stupid "best work of fiction in the last 25 years" list (Mike Schaub calls it "the New York Times' most regrettable decision since hiring Judy Miller").

2006-06-05T14:11:00.000-12:00

I just finally filed my FAFSA and paid my electric bill! And my apartment is so clean and verging on organized that it's freaking me out how much I resemble a productive member of society. I got rid of 2 huge garbage bags of clothing this weekend (this after letting various people pick over the piles, the contents of which ranged from awesome-but-does-not-fit-and-maybe-never-did, to who-even-knows-what-this-is-and-what-kind-of-psycho-would-willingly-buy-it), plus another 2 huge bags full of papers I'm finally managing to part with. This included a not insignificant stack of administrative shit related to the Review - budget papers and office contracts etc. It felt pretty amazing to kick this stuff to the curb (or to the clothing donation bin). Not that I didn't manage to keep a lot of crap, too. But enough is gone now that it makes a real difference, both to the space of my apartment and the space of my brain.

I saw An Inconvenient Truth last night. It was really well done and pretty excellent overall. I don't really know what to think of all this noise about Gore running in 2008. The movie is definitely worth seeing... at the very least, it's gratifying to see Gore spin the climate crisis issue so convincingly (ie, positioning it as a moral issue), since that kind of strategy is so seriously lacking on the left. But it does a lot more than that, too. It's powerful and scary and fascinating, and also dorky in a way that I like. The fact that Gore keeps refering to his presentation as a "slide show" despite the fact that it's animated and on a computer (and the guy knows something about computers) is pretty cute.

2006-05-30T10:07:00.000-12:00

Anya Kamenetz has been writing about "generation debt" for the Voice for over a year, and since I'm about to enter a life of debt myself (at least once I get around to applying for those student loans), I'm getting interested. Her book - Generation Debt: Why Now is a Terrible Time to Be Young - is just out, and I might need to read it. Except I'm sure it's horribly depressing, like most doses of reality. Also, she is also my age, and a columnist for the Voice, and has written a book, so it makes me feel a wee bit inadequate. But I was talking to someone a few weeks ago who said that the national debt has been shifted onto students in the form of interest on our loans... and shit, that is an important thing to think about. Anyway, in yet another accomplishment she has an editorial in today's Times about shitty internships. I'm glad to see it. I've never had an internship and don't really want to. You can do internships in my grad program ("my" grad program... weird), and are encouraged to, but um, I'd rather work. You know, for money? Kamenetz writes, "Instead of starting out in the mailroom for a pittance, this generation reports for business upstairs without pay." Nicely put, and what a crappy deal.

Hey, how'd you like to read a totally depressing feature about men dealing with life after coming back from Iraq? What if I told you it came with new photographs by Eugene Richards, my most favorite photo man?

Yesterday Audrey and I had a beautiful day hanging out in Central Park. Then we went to a random Irish pub, where we met 2 marines who were in town for Fleet Week, and proceeded to drink with them for about three hours. Aud managed the military small talk like a pro, but I had to have two drinks before I could figure out that particular kind of banter. The best moment was when Audrey said, completely straight-faced, "So, what's the most powerful weapon you've ever fired?" Now I know more than I ever wanted to about the symbolism of a marine dress uniform, along with a few other things. In case you were wondering, those shiny shoes hurt their feet a whole lot. I told them they should try stilettos (as if I ever do), and my North Carolina soldier looked down at my legs, which ended in $3 flip flops on my filthy feet and said, "Yeah, but stilettos make y'all look a lot better than we do in these." Touché.

the irony never ends...

2006-05-26T05:38:00.000-12:00

Condaleeza Rice spoke at Boston College's graduation, where she was - surprise surprise - greeted by protest. But she didn't ignore them:

She acknowledged the protests, receiving applause after urging graduates to consider perspectives different from their own.

"There is nothing wrong with holding an opinion and holding it passionately," Ms. Rice said. "But at those times you're absolutely sure that you are right, go find somebody who disagrees. Don't allow yourself the easy course of the constant 'Amen' to everything you say."

...Because, ya know, the Bush administration is always happy to consider "perspectives different from their own." A similar thing happened when John McCain spoke at the New School graduation:

After yesterday's event, Mr. McCain told reporters he felt "fine" about his reception. "I feel sorry for people living in a dull world where they can't listen to the views of others," he said.

Yes, John, I feel real sorry for them too.

grrrrrrrr.

2006-05-11T03:13:00.000-12:00

There's nothing like some good old fashioned rage at the literary establishment to get a girl's blood pumping on a gray Thursday morning:

Early this year, the Book Review's editor, Sam Tanenhaus, sent out a short letter to a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify "the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years."

According to those surveyed, the winner is Toni Morrison's Beloved. Hooray, I guess. What a huge surprise. But that's pretty much the last time a woman writer appears on the extended list. Out of 4 runners up and 17 "Books That Also Received Multiple Votes," Philip Roth is cited 6 times, Don Delillo cited 3 times and Cormac McCarthy twice (for a total of 4 books - including a trilogy). There's also John Updike and Raymond Carver and Denis Johnson et al, but the only other woman is Marilynne Robinson for Housekeeping, a "book that also received multiple votes."

Aside from this tally being pretty disgusting (but - blah blah - not surprising), a good question is, why bother? WHAT IS THE POINT of choosing one book that is the very best out of the countless numbers published in the last 25 years?

A.O. Scott has some interesting things to say about that in the accompanying essay, but he also never stops to wonder about the lack of women on the list, though he does note the lack of young(er) writers. He's usually one of my favorite critics, partly because he is so damn smart and versatile - he's the film critic, and he writes for the Book Review all the time! He was on book leave, writing, it turns out, a book about the American novel! But come on. I don't understand why people do surveys about things with such obvious and terribly boring results.

For the record, the judges consisted of 38 women and 86 men. I don't necessarily think that more women judges would have meant more women as "winners," but I do want to point out that 38 to 86 is not any kind of balance, even if it looks a lot like it when compared to the results that group came up with. Not that anything as simplistic as "balance" is the goal here anyway.

2006-05-10T10:12:00.000-12:00

If I could travel through time, I would go to the 50's and get people to make dresses that did not have teeny tiny waists, so that I could buy them on ebay right now.

2006-05-10T06:45:00.000-12:00

Last Friday: Steve Almond and Julianna Baggott read from the new novel they co-wrote, Which Brings Me to You. I looooove Steve Almond, but had never heard him read before. He was just as hilarious and crass as I wanted him to be. His short stories (check out collections My Life in Heavy Metal and The Evil BB Chow) are observant, tender, funny and smutty. His nonfiction book Candyfreak is also pretty excellent. So, he and Julianna hardly knew each other but really liked each other's writing, and she had this idea for a book that consisted of two characters writing confessional letters back and forth to each other, so she asked him if he wanted to write the book with her. As he tells it, he was in a bad place with his own writing at the time, so he said no. She wrote the first chapter anyway and sent it to him, and then he said he'd do it because he loved what she'd written. In full self-deprecation mode, he writes about the process of collaborating on a book in the new issue of Poets & Writers.

Julianna read from that very first chapter, and she is tiny and manic and obnoxiously funny, and Steve, predictably, read 3 sex scenes from different parts of the book. He is so good at that shit. The reading was great, largely because they didn't treat their book like a sacred text. They interrupted themselves and made snide comments and talked to the audience, and it made hearing them read totally different than reading their work on the page, which is how I think readings should be. Afterward, a guy asked if they could record an audiobook that included all of their verbal footnotes.

Last night was T Cooper, Emily Barton and Paul LaFarge at Bluestockings. They made it "love to hate it/hate to love it" night, with each of them reading something from their own work (that they presumably loved) and then something else that they either loved to hate or hated to love. Emily read from Neuromancer by William Gibson, T read from Ethan Hawke's first novel, and Paul read some lines from an earl stage/experiment in writing what would ultimately be his seriously beautiful book The Facts of Winter. This was such a smart and entertaining way to organize a reading. It could even carry a whole reading series...

Speaking of books (um, when am I not?), here's the latest Bookslut column. It contains mention of poop. And here's my review of La Perdida. You really have to read this book. I'll even sell you a copy, when you come see Jessica Abel at the Grace Reading Series at Mo Pitkins next Tuesday, May 16th at 7pm. Deal?

the most smartest

2006-05-08T08:09:00.000-12:00

I heart Kurt Andersen, always, but especially for his new New York magazine article:

The schadenfreude also has a righteous tint: Just as the Duke-lacrosse-team case confirms ugly stereotypes about privileged white jocks, Kaavya Viswanathan, the only child of a brain surgeon and gynecologist, confirms the invidious stereotype of privileged meritocrats gone wild. She is a flagrant example of the hard-charging freaks that our culture grooms and prods so many of its best and brightest children to become, a case study in one sociopathology of the adolescent overclass.

2006-04-28T05:29:00.000-12:00

We are squinting at each other and I start to keep on walking, but then we both sort of stop.

"Hey," he says.

"Hey," I say, taking off my sunglasses. "How are you? Um.... when are you at the store these days?"

"Oh, I'm not today, I have the day off," he says.

"I mean, when are you there in general?"

"I don't work at the store, I hang art. So I'm mainly outside. It's good." Pause. He looks at me intently. "You look good."

"Thanks."

He laughs. "I'm hung over, going to get some coffee."

"Yeah, I wish I was, instead of going to work." I point up the street.

"So, maybe I'll see you over at Odessa Bar sometime."

"Yeah, maybe."

"Are you going there tonight?"

"Probably not."

"Okay. Well... it was good to see you."

"Yeah, I'll see you around."

How often is it that 2 people both think they know each other, but have in fact never met before? A few seconds into this conversation - which happened in the middle of 5th street on this insanely gorgeous and good mood-inducing Friday morning - I realized that this guy was not who I thought he was. And I have no idea who he thought I was, except to infer that he probably thinks we slept together. Pretty funny, since I am really never mistaken for anyone else (except occassionally Sarah Gilbert from Roseanne, which I still don't get). I let him keep talking because it was just easier than telling him that I never go to Odessa and have no idea what he's talking about. Also, I enjoy receiving compliments at 10am when i'm walking to work with wet hair (other than those shouted in passing by men licking their lips), and because he was pretty cute, if not the ambiguously gay boy of my casual acquaintance I originally thought he was. Oh well. Those skinny pale boys with black frame glasses really do all look the same.

friday dumping of the links.

2006-04-28T05:23:00.000-12:00

-- What does it say about me that I get so much happiness from a critic absolutely slamming something that deserves to be slammed? The best example this week is Ben Brantley, who must have had a blast writing his review of the new musical Lestat:

Joining the ranks of Ambien, Lunesta, Sonata and other prescription lullaby drugs is "Lestat," the musical sleeping pill that opened last night at the Palace Theater....Hugh Panaro, in the title role, resembles a slimmed-down, foppish Fabio, the onetime top paperback cover model for such fare. And there is plenty of dialogue to match. "Whatever happened out there with the wolves has changed you, Lestat." Or: "I will never find solace! She was my solace! She stood between me and the abyss!"

-- This whole Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarism drama is ridiculous and entertaining. But once again, the dirty secrets of publishing kinda fascinate me.

The company that eventually became Alloy was founded in 1987. It had its first hit with the "Sweet Valley High" series. The company, then known as 17th Street Productions, was sold in 2000 to Alloy Inc., a large media company that owns the teenage-oriented retailer Delia's, and changed its name to Alloy Entertainment. Since then it has become a 'tween-lit hit factory.

-- Ginia Bellafante notices that books about Mommy-ing have gotten a little out of control.

Five hundred or so years from now, graduate students surveying our national library will wonder: So what was with all the mommies and babies? Had babies come before? Or was it simply that millennial Americans produced better babies, power babies (maybe)?

-- Then there's Janet Maslin's weird and not too convincing article about chick-lit:

Dizzy doesn't necessarily mean dopey. It means rejecting a caricatured version of feminism, studiousness or ambition in favor of even more caricatured womanly wiles. And it cuts a wide swath, from housewives to high school girls, from Bergdorf's all the way to Botswana.

-- Clare Zulkey interviews Michelle Tea. I knew Rent Girl was in development for TV, but did not know that Jill Soloway might be writing/directing.

-- Oh yeah, and on top of everything else, American Apparel is fat-phobic.

2006-04-25T08:14:00.000-12:00

The New York Times Magazine this weekend featured a profile of Dov Charney, a couple years after the rest of the world had one (oh yeah, and after their own Style section wrote about him and American Apparel in November 2004, and Alex Kuczynski wrote about him in her "Critical Shopper" column last June). It presents him as a curiosity, when his weirdness has already been kind of beaten to death in the media. The difference is that this profile was largely flattering.

It's practically impossible to make the guy seem uncontroversial, but the writer of the article seemed more impressed than disturbed, interested in the ways Charney pushes boundaries and the positive implications of his obsession with style and youthfulness. I can see how Dov Charney can be seductive, both as a person and as a symbol, and how American Apparel is in many ways a great and innovative company. I want to believe that there can be socially responsible, "youth-driven" companies that treat their workers well and don't fuck up the environment and make stuff I want to buy. I even want to believe that someone like Dov Charney could be the one to do it. But I don't really think he is.

Charney's taste is fairly eclectic, but there are certain things at which he draws a hard line. Makeup is one. Plucked and trimmed eyebrows are another. To my surprise, short hair is a third. Looking over some fetching snapshots of a pixieish U.C. Santa Cruz student, "half-Japanese, half-white," showing herself off in a polka-dot bikini and biting into a strawberry, Charney nixed it on account of her Audrey Hepburn haircut. "You never see a girl we shot with short hair," he said. "That's unnatural."

Whereas your handlebar mustache, douche bag, just "naturally" grew on your stupid face like that?

Today I went out to get lunch (for a change), and stumbled on a brand new coffee shop on Mercer Street. It's called "think coffee," so it already gets points for a good name and a cute logo. It's also 100% Fair Trade (which, while it's not Rainforest Alliance Certified, is maybe the next best thing), and they're donating 25% of their profits to neighborhood charities. Which is A LOT. On top of that, the coffee is delicious and the place itself is huge - a serious plus since it's impossible to find a seat in a cafe around here. AND, it's open till midnight, unlike most of the places close to my office. So I think I have a new favorite place.

2006-04-24T14:21:00.000-12:00

Shit. I just realized I missed Nan Goldin's latest show.

I saw Friends with Money this weekend (in an actual movie theater!), and thought it was brilliant. Lauren and I hated Nicole Holofcener's last movie, Lovely and Amazing (we now refer to as "Stupid and Insulting" or "Insipid and Annoying"), but it's bothering me that I can't remember why. Almost enough to see it again, except probably not. I also watched A History of Violence, which was good, but I'm not really sure why it's supposed to be this amazing commentary on violence and society and identity. In one of the special features they show the difference between the US and international release versions of 2 very violent shots: basically, the MPAA thinks American audiences can handle oozing blood, but not spurting blood. So the international audience got to see a little bit of spurting, while in the US version we were only allowed to see blood slowly oozing from the face of a guy who had his nose bone or whatever slammed into his brain. I'm so glad they're looking out for me.

I got home from Bluestockings yesterday before 5pm, for maybe the first time ever, and was amazed that there was such a long night ahead to get all sorts of things done. So I did the huge pile of dishes. I put away the mountains of clothes that were all over the place, and sorted through a ton of mail and pieces of paper. I went through stacks of magazines and organized them, kind of, or at least put them in new piles. I'm waaaaaay too attached to all this stuff. But I don't know what to do about it. And then, last night Emily asked me if I had a particular issue of the Review that she needed something from, and I got excited thinking that some of this obsessively archived crap might actually be useful, and then it turned out that the issue she wanted was the only one I didn't have.

2006-04-24T07:32:00.000-12:00

New York magazine has a short thing about This American Life's upcoming Showtime show. Says Ira,

It’s like two worlds colliding, right? Pay cable and public broadcasting. But it’s been a really happy thing for us. We kept waiting for the meeting where they say, ‘Okay, when do the girls take off their tops?’ But that meeting never came.

I had no idea they were moving to NYC to do this! It actually makes me a little sad. Kind of a serious loss for Chicago.

didja miss me?

2006-04-18T06:05:00.000-12:00

I haven't blogged in a month. While I was not blathering away on the interweb (or at least not on this blog), I was getting accepted to grad school (wheee!), getting a stomach virus in Guatemala, going to my parents' for Passover, unsuccessfully shopping for a bridesmaid dress in New Jersey and playing house with Betsy, among other exciting things. More on all that later, maybe.

I'm writing something a little different for Bookslut this month, less a review and more of a meandering thing about traveling and and books. And I'm having fun writing it, for a change. I came back from Guatemala with more than just illness... I have stories and pictures, some of which I'll post here and some which will probably make it into a zine. In case you want to get up to speed, here is last month's Bookslut column, and here is my review of The Seas at Grace. The reading series is tonite, by the way... Ellis Avery and Shari Goldhagen, 7 pm at Mo Pitkins, if yr interested. If you come you will get to see me doing my very best merch girl impression, while wearing this cool skirt I got for cheap at TJ Maxx this past weekend in the NJ. The NJ can be good for things like this. That and breakfast at Le Peep, even if Lauren always berates me for never eating all my food, and also for Lauren herself, even if she is the reason I was at three bridal shops in one day. I was very well behaved. She seemed surprised.

2006-04-18T05:54:00.000-12:00

Here's a good piece from Nancy Goldstein, based on this genius cartoon:

I wasn't sure whether to use chorizo or bacon in my paella last weekend, so I called South Dakota state senator Bill Napoli and asked him to make my decision for me.

And Analee Newitz's column this week at Metroactive is excellent:

My friends said: Ignore it. They said: Those guys are morons. They said: Let's just read and write things in other places where men aren't dicks. But slowly I began to feel about their comments the same way I feel when a right-winger tells me that if I want to promote socialism, I should just move to another country. The problem is, I love my country. It fucking rocks. And I love Slashdot, too. I don't want to run away. This is my home, and I want to stay here and fight for justice. I want women to get excited by all the cool articles on Slashdot and not get driven away by a community that values them for their bodies instead of their thoughts.

v for verdict

2006-03-17T06:23:00.000-12:00

Anthony Kaufman at Alternet says, Above all, "Vendetta" should be enjoyed as the first true anarchist movie Hollywood has ever made.

While at the Times, Manohla D spits, The more valid question is how anyone who isn't 14 or under could possibly mistake a corporate bread-and-circus entertainment like this for something subversive. You want radical? Wait for the next Claire Denis film.

Hmmm.

2006-03-17T06:17:00.000-12:00

Plaintive punk has become the soundtrack of white adolescence... Kill me. Kelefah Sanneh hearts emo, ponders gender at the Times:

A genre that was once mocked for its supposed earnestness is now home to some of the most flamboyant boys in rock 'n' roll....emo bands are doing something unlikely: they're reviving the fierce, fey spirit of glam rock, complete (sometimes) with eyeliner and lipstick.

He eventually concludes:

...no one can claim that these emo boys aren't putting on an enormously entertaining show. Here's hoping that, somewhere in America, a budding pop star is watching it all, and taking all of it much too seriously.

I don't know about K Sanneh's take on emo being somehow subversive, or "exciting." Flamboyance and theatricality are not inherently interesting, especially when paired with boy-as-victim love songs, and they are still whiny straight boys underneath all that eyeliner. At least he mentioned Jessica Hopper's genius emo-is-sexist essay.

Hey, here's my boyfriend talking about people talking about DIY abortion. How much fun is that to say? DIY abortion. (I didn't know The Stranger had a blog! Fuck.)

2006-03-15T07:02:00.000-12:00

Sure, Naomi and I were asking for it when we went to see the universally panned Failure To Launch last night. We knew it. The nice thing about going to a movie and expecting that it will make you violently ill is that it's hard for it to be as bad as you think it will be. Yes, it can happen. But this one was more a case of sitting there marveling at the insipid plot, two unlikeable characters, SJP's digitally enhanced scary blue eyes and constant piercing shrieks, and Matthew "Douche" McConaughey's sweaty, orange face. Coulda been worse. Sort of.

The much worse part were the previews: apparently, the anticipated audience for this movie can also be expected to shell out $10 for a tween melodrama. We can look forward to Akeela And The Bee, yet another inspirational spelling bee movie, this time produced by Starbucks Entertainment. When that logo flashed across the screen it might have finally been enough to pry the cinammon dolce latte out of my hand. (You can read the press release about Starbucks' latest move towards world domination here, but you should do it on an empty stomach.) Offense #2 was a preview for some shitty gymnastics movie a la Bring It On, with lots of skinny girls running around in leotards, incorporating craaaaazy moves into their routines and luring boys to gymnastics meets through the enduring power of lycra and dance music. Jeff Bridges plays the coach - a sacrilege - and the main girl character, who starts off a bad-ass (signaled by her Black Flag t-shirt and skateboard), is very obviously at least 5 years older than the other shiny blondes on her high school team (who are not exactly high school age themselves). On top of this, there was a prolonged commercial for some new energy drink from Coke, which ended with the tagline "Let Your Man Out." The design on the can looks like the tribal tattoo on the arm of every dude you hate. And this was all before the brilliant film even started.

For balance... two good movies I just saw are The Beat That My Heart Skipped, and My Summer Of Love, which was probably the most beautifully shot movie I've ever seen. It was like a Justine Kurland photograph come to life. I wanted to lick the screen.

2006-03-15T07:00:00.000-12:00

Claudia Goldin tries to set the record straight on the "opt out" revolution. Are women giving up their careers to stay at home with their kids? Totally. No way. Yes. No. All the time. Never. Blah blah blah. Let's go write another book about the mommy wars!

girls, grrrls.

2006-03-13T11:08:00.000-12:00

Here's Naomi Wolf writing about Young Adult fiction for girls in the Sunday Book Review:

But teenagers, or their parents, do buy the bad-girls books — the "Clique," "Gossip Girl" and "A-List" series have all sold more than a million copies. And while the tacky sex scenes in them are annoying, they aren't really the problem. The problem is a value system in which meanness rules, parents check out, conformity is everything and stressed-out adult values are presumed to be meaningful to teenagers.

It's not such a new thing to be disappointed by Naomi Wolf, but this article doesn't say a whole lot. Yes, these stupid books are bad for girls - I don't even think there's much redeeming value to kids reading about the junior high A-list instead of watching it on TV. Yes, they reproduce double standards about sex that girls have to deal with off the page, too (and not helpfully). They make girls grow up "too fast," and they're obsessed with shopping. It's true that these books are far from Little Women. And?

I'm really glad this shit wasn't around when I was a kid (there were the craptastic Babysitter's Club books, and the Sleepover Friends series, but at least the girls in those books weren't constantly trying to undermine each other). I was obsessed with Norma Klein, who I was just telling Emily about. She wrote a ton of stuff that was totally genius and full of unrepentant sex. At least that's how I remember them (the genius part, I mean. There's no question that they were smutty). And they were meant for teenagers. Which meant a lot of us read them when we were 13. I remember hoping my mom wouldn't look at them too closely in the giant pile of stuff I was checking out from the library.

Speaking of books that don't suck, here's my review in this month's Bookslut of Michelle Tea's new book Rose of No Man's Land, which may or may not be a YA book, but is fucking great either way. Michelle will be reading at Bluestockings on April 13th (with Katia Noyes, who's book Crashing America also looks awesome), and also at the Happy Ending Reading Series on the 12th (with Heather McGowan and Yannick Murphy). You should come.

Also: next Thursday 3/23, Jennifer Baumgardner and Gillian Aldrich are screening their documentary Speak Out: I Had An Abortion at Bluestockings. This is connected to Jennifer's "I Had An Abortion" t-shirt project (which she wrote more about here), and should be cool. My fellow volunteer Dee will also be showing her film Pink Minute, an experimental narrative about a woman having an abortion. She rocks.

admissions.

2006-03-13T10:26:00.000-12:00

Waiting to find out is funny. There's all this energy that goes into trying not to think about what it would be like if I got the outcome I wanted, convincing myself that I don't really want it anyway, all these stern attempts to be realistic. All these ways I try to get control. There's all sorts of energy that goes into not talking about it, keeping semi-secrets, postponing sending certain emails until I have an answer. There is the idea that if I acknowledge it, I might create some kind of crazy cosmic coincidence and thereby protect myself from news I don't want to hear. Then I wonder if I might be risking something by even writing about it in the abstract. But it doesn't matter how hard I try to make this all scientific, how hard I try to avoid admitting what I might want. Sometimes I like to let my oh-so-vigilant guard down and imagine the answer being yes.

surrender.

2006-03-03T10:56:00.000-12:00

Now, I love Nikki McClure, but the March illustration of this year's calendar is just... I don't know. I can't say I don't like it, even though, well, I really don't. It's raining down on some big tree, that I guess is maybe kale (does kale grown on trees?), since the inspirational saying for the month is "eat more kale," which I thought was funny for a minute, but now, when it's hanging here above my desk, it just makes March seem like a bleak month. It seems like for 2006 Nikki's gotten more demanding in general. April says "make a run for it." That will be very very tempting.

last day of february notes.

2006-02-28T09:03:00.000-12:00

Poppy Z. Brite is interviewed about New Orleans at the Village Voice. She's known lately for the books Liquor and Prime, about a couple of guys who own a restaurant in New Orleans. I haven't read them yet, but my copies of her goth-y, gay books Lost Souls and Drawing Blood are falling apart from my reading them each at least a dozen times when I was about 14. I was reading her blog for awhile when Katrina first hit, since she's the writer I've always associated with New Orleans, and I knew she had something like 20+ cats in her house down there. She and her husband ended up leaving town at the last minute before the hurricane, completely torn up about having to leave the animals, but amazingly managed to find most of the kitties with various rescue organizations when they got back. Their house was pretty much destroyed though.

Also at the Voice: Rachel Kramer Bussell has a kind of bizarre column, where she talks about whether guys should pay the check on a date. It's funny to see her writing about this now, since I just started reading Money, A Memoir: Women, Emotions and Cash by Liz Perle, which is about the different relationships men and women have to money and power. I'm not far enough into it yet to have an opinion, but it's pretty fascinating (if not totally surprising) stuff. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Thanks partly to the completely gut-wrenching Modern Love column last weekend, and partly to downloading Beatles songs while I was in the throes of procrastination last night, I really really want to watch Help! (ie, Beatles movie #2, the one in color), which I haven't seen since the hundred or so times I watched it as a kid (Zach and I had a very serious Beatles fixation for awhile there. It will surprise no one that John was always, always my favorite). But it doesn't seem to be out on DVD. So Netflix doesn't have it, and VHS availability is limited. Which of course only makes me want it more.

I'm listening to The Life Pursuit, the new Belle and Sebastian record. It is even more sugary than Dear Catastrophe Waitress. But I don't really care if people are whining about that. I could listen to "Funny Little Frog" and "To Be Myself Completely" on repeat all day. And I just might. These songs are sooooo fun, they work like caffeine. I wish I could go to one of their shows this week - especially since they're playing with The New Pornographers, who I'm totally in love with - but they've been sold out for a long time. It might actually be good that I can't go to the show, since if I heard B&S play live in in the same night as The New Pornographers, I might overdose on poptastic happiness.

2006-02-23T08:56:00.000-12:00

Do yourself a favor and go pick up the March issue of Harper's and read the article "My Crowd," by Bill Wasik, who "invented" the flash mob. I haven't even finished it yet but it is blowing my mind. They're serializing it here, but you really need to read it all at once. If you don't feel like buying it, email me and I will scan and send you a copy.

Consider the generational cohort that has come to be called the hipsters—i.e., those hundreds of thousands of educated young urbanites with strikingly similar tastes. Have so many self-alleged aesthetes ever been more (in the formulation of Festinger et al.) “submerged in the group”? The hipsters make no pretense to divisions on principle, to forming intellectual or artistic camps; at any given moment, it is the same books, records, films that are judged au courant by all, leading to the curious spectacle of an “alternative” culture more unanimous than the mainstream it ostensibly opposes. What critical impulse does exist among their number merely causes a favorite to be more readily abandoned, as abandoned—whether Friendster.com, Franz Ferdinand, or Jonathan Safran Foer—it inevitably will be.

2006-02-23T06:08:00.000-12:00

Yeah, when I mentioned South Dakota yesterday? Maybe not so much.

And so I stand by trying to turn craftsters into abortionists. Can you picture that Very Special Issue of Readymade?

2006-02-23T06:04:00.000-12:00

Phoebe Connelly looks at the political potential (or not) of crafting:

Is the resurgent craft movement a new form of consumption, albeit with more felt and assembly, or is it a bold political act that challenges the way we think about gender roles and how we engage with our commodified world?

Oh jeez. It's an ethic people, tied to a culture that is supposed to care about things like politics and civil rights and all that. No, "an iPod cozy alone isn't going to protect the right to an abortion," but the drive that goes into making those things - and choosing to make them, maybe instead of, or at least in addition to, dropping a ton of money at the mall - is related to the drive to organize. Like crowds of kids at punk and hardcore shows, people involved in these communities are in a position to be politicized, because the arts and crafts and music they are involved with have roots in political engagement. The realization that you can literally Do It Yourself can be (though is obviously not always) revolutionary. This is not so complicated. What is complicated, is figuring out how to get these craftsters to take the next step. Maybe they can knit a giant straightjacket for the White House. Maybe they can be more visible or active in giving a shit about recycling, or small businesses. Hey, maybe they can be on the frontlines of DIY abortion.

2006-02-22T10:25:00.000-12:00

I spent this morning searching for stock photos of people shopping in supermarkets, something to illustrate "consumer behavior" for the Annual Report. Now I have to decide which one to use. There are a lot of pictures of people talking on their cell phones as they walk around with their carts full of food, people groping fruit, cuts of meat, semi-cute kids sitting in shopping carts, that kind of thing. Then there are some random weird ones... a couple making out next to a cooler full of gallons of milk, some nudity in the produce section. A whole mess of photos of Hilary Clinton grocery shopping in 1994.

It's funny how schizophrenic I am when it comes to work. Friday and yesterday I was very into my job, being super efficient and smart and productive, and thinking to myself the whole time, "Wow, I am really into my job today." But today I can't make myself do anything. Still, those two days felt pretty good. I get all these emails from kids doing research projects on the rainforest, and I got one the other day from a girl who basically just sent me the entire list of questions her teacher had obviously handed out, and asked me to answer them. This is the part where I get to sternly say things like "I am sure that this information is available on the Web or in your school library."

While I'm procrastinating I'm reading Khaela Maricich's blog, which I haven't read in awhile, and which you should read if you don't already. The second photo down on this page looks like exactly where I feel like being right now, on a road on the way to somewhere I haven't been yet, with open fields out to both sides, in a car with some people that I love. I wouldn't need to lay on the road like in the picture, but I could if I felt like it. But this particular road is in France, and if I have a choice that's not where my road would be. I mean, France is okay, but I would rather be somewhere like Vermont. Though that sounds boring when compared to Europe. Maybe somewhere in Canada - Vancouver? - or some really random state like South Dakota. If international, I don't know. Switzerland was really beautiful. Ann always raved about Sweden. Wait, forget it - Washington state, definitely. Up in the mountains, and we could stop at the coffee stand where they sold everything made with lavendar, including lattes and honey.

I'm behind in updating the blog because, well, I've been watching a lot of figure skating on TV and had a lovely busy weekend which included seeing Allie and Lauren and then spending a large part of the next day crying about how much I miss them. I am just really emotional about the whole thing - about Allie being far away, and about the really hard situation she's in, about time together having to be like an event instead of just a fact. I am just a fucking wreck lately when it comes to thinking about my friends, I am responding like I'm watching Sophie's Choice or something. And really, that is a stupid comparison, not least because I haven't even seen that movie. But I also got to go out with Katie, and then today I made plans in the next week with both Alice and Betsy, and there is almost nothing better than seeing good friends who you never get to see. Except for seeing them all the time, I guess. I would definitely give up the novelty factor for routine when it comes to this.

Somewhere in between all the triple lutz combination spins by girls in spangly costumes, I saw a preview for an Amanda Bynes movie called She's The Man, wherein Bynes disguises herself as a boy and then falls in love with a dude while still passing as one. OMG! It opens next month. I might have to pay to see this one, I'm so intrigued. Even though I, like most other people, cannot stand Amanda Bynes. Maybe she'll be better as a faux boy. It's possibly (and surely loooooooosely) based on Twelfth Night, because Bynes' character is named Viola and there's the whole gender disguise thing. I can't imagine it will be anything by sickening, but I still want to see how gender bending is handled for the tween set. You can watch the trailer here.

Someone who I do not know wrote something very nice about my zine on her blog! I feel a little bit fame-ulous.

2006-02-22T10:21:00.000-12:00

The Observer has an interesting profile of New York Times Magazine writer Daphne Merkin (who, somewhat irritatingly, wrote about vaginal rejuvination surgery a couple of weeks ago as if she were the first to notice that it exists), that gets at some of the thorny issues of being a woman writer who wants to write about both Serious Issues and also more personal things:

Ms. Merkin’s productivity is remarkable at a time when many magazines look like all-male reviews, save for the random communiqué from a woman on blowjobs or work-life balance. One could argue that women are unfairly penalized for baring their souls or, on the other hand, hired solely for such soul-baring. But Ms. Merkin manages to write about W.G. Sebald and Henry Roth, all while disclosing her experience of getting plastic surgery and discoursing on her own bad taste in men.

...Once, women who wrote about women and feminine concerns were considered feminists. Now it seems that women writing about women are in danger of bringing down all of womanhood. If the very subject that a woman writes about suggests her level of seriousness—i.e., her feminist chops—sometimes this might not include the subject of self.

2006-02-21T09:47:00.000-12:00

Having a daughter makes parents more liberal than having a son.

In Germany, two-thirds of people who switched their political affiliation in the year after having a son moved to the more conservative party. The ratio was flipped for those who had a daughter.

In Britain, the two left of center parties, Labor and the Liberal Democrats, do much better — 11 percentage points — among voters with three girls and no boys than among voters with three boys and no girls.

How is this surprising?

2006-02-15T10:52:00.000-12:00

I went out to buy rainboots and one of those brilliant devices that holds a piece of paper upright so you can type it's contents onto your computer without killing your neck (does anyone know what this is called? I felt like an idiot explaining it to 3 different people at staples, but I know it exists!). I came back with polaroid film and jelly beans.

I'm not going to my class tonight because I'm feeling kind of shitty and so I need to curl up on the couch with some tea and probably the Olympics, which I've been strangely obsessed with. I don't ever care about the summer olympics, but I think the winter games are so cool. Some of these sports are just insane. Bobsledding! Aerial skiiing! Luge! All sorts of crazy skintight costumes and boys wearing glitter. I used to live with a girl who was a former luge athlete from Lake Placid, and all of us in the house were completely in awe of this. Does anyone ever think about people who do luge, aside from a couple weeks every four years? Well I am here to tell you that they exist. We used to make her tell us stories and explain all sorts of things, and of course I don't really remember any of it except that she once got pulled over when she had her luge sled in the back seat of her car, and the cops were confused.

Also, the Olympics is the best background TV I have ever experienced. You can really watch it, while not really watching it, while cutting up magazines or making some new drawings, or, say, listing the contents of the Times Style sections over the past few months to use in an article you are writing. So I could even say that the Olympics have made me productive, and not be lying. And it doesn't make you feel nearly as stupid as other stuff on TV, even if the commentators are always saying things like "There must be something in the water in Switzerland that makes you spin well" and "The Chinese are always such strong jumpers" and "the Russians will always dominate this event." It is so quaintly global, if such a thing is possible. Also, Johnny Weir is seriously entertaining.

Other things beckoning me home tonight are a giant valentine's day cookie and the very last of the super buttery pasta I made the other day. Things I am less eager to come home to include my very very dirty floor, the mountain of clothes on my desk chair, and the giant hole in my bathroom wall.

2006-02-14T04:57:00.000-12:00

Okay. I understand that the people who gave me Starbucks giftcards for the holidays were just trying to be nice. They were looking out for me. They were trying to indulge me. They were being thoughtful. They were not intentionally trying to undermine me.

Starbucks is one giant corporate business that I've been able to successfully avoid most of the time, and this is no small feat considering the number of Starbucks in NYC, and particularly, near where I work, dangerously close to the famous twin Starbucks of Astor Place. But I've done it. There really are a million indie coffee shops around here too, often in the shadow of a Starbucks, and you usually don't even have to search for one. And they are so much nicer and happier. And more noble. There's a Starbucks in the lower level of my office building, and after working here for a year and a half I had set foot inside only once, and it was to use the bathroom.

It's because of the mere $25 that made up those Starbucks giftcards that I discovered the cinammon dolce latte at all. And now I'm fucked. The gift cards ran out a few weeks ago, and now I'm stuck making excuses about why I need a $5 corporate coffee drink that comes in a cup with too cute philosophical musings printed on the side. I hate hate hate them for making a drink this delicious. I am ashamed. I need to detox (from Starbucks, not from coffee. Please). And I need to do it the serious way. I need to stop buying my morning coffee from the very nice guys at Coffee Master too, buy a new travel mug that isn't crusty and gross, and start making coffee at home like I used to do before I got lazy beyond words, back when I used to get to work within ten minutes of when I was supposed to.

So thank you, gift givers. Thank you for revealing me to be an unprincipled sucker. Now i'm going to go cry into my bourgie coffee, emblazoned with "The Way I See It" #76. Happy fucking Valentine's Day.

2006-02-10T05:27:00.000-12:00

Dan Savage has another brilliant Op-Ed at the Times:

Evangelical Christians seem sincere in their desire to help build healthy, lasting marriages. Well, if that's their goal, encouraging gay men to enter into straight marriages is a peculiar strategy. Every straight marriage that includes a gay husband is one Web-browser-history check away from an ugly divorce.

2006-02-09T08:32:00.000-12:00

Mattel concedes that a new and improved Ken, however dashing and fashionable, and his pending reconciliation with Barbie, however dramatic, is not the solution. But it will give the legions of girls who play with Barbie the kind of new plotline they crave.

It's been awhile since I played with Barbie, but I don't remember ever having a problem thinking up plotlines, so long as Barbie and Ken's clothes could come off. It didn't even matter how douchey he looked.

And I didn't know that Barbie and Ken split up 2 years ago! For an Australian surfer named Blaine? Shit. Apparently, Ken, heartbroken, traveled the world in search of himself, making stops in Europe and the Middle East, dabbling in Buddhism and Catholicism, teaching himself to cook and slowly weaning himself off a beach bum life.

Sounds like too many guys I know.

here i am on the interweb.

2006-02-07T10:44:00.000-12:00

Over at Bookslut you can read what I ultimately had to say about Self-Made Man, that mediocre book by Norah Vincent. And here's my review of The Thin Place, a sparkly magical book by Kathryn Davis.

manohla, i really do love you for your mind.

2006-02-06T10:21:00.000-12:00

I'm smiling so hard after reading this Q&A with Manohla Dargis, NY Times film critic and my personal hero. And it's no secret that I fucking love the stupid Oscars, and the fact that Jon Stewart is hosting them is almost too much for me to handle. Some choice excerpts:

-- As to “Mrs. Henderson Presents” – yeah, well, I like British accents, too. But isn’t it time Dame Judi started working for a living?

-- Q. Why do you think Bill Murray's performance in “Broken Flowers” was overlooked this award season?
A. Maybe because the various organizations realized that it wasn’t any good.

-- About why Crash was nominated for Best Picture:
What could better soothe the troubled brow of the Academy’s collective white conscious than a movie that says sometimes black men really are muggers (so don’t worry if you engage in racial profiling); your Latina maid really, really loves you (so don’t worry about paying her less than minimum wage); even white racists (even white racist cops) can love their black brothers or at least their hot black sisters; and all answers are basically simple, so don’t even think about politics, policy, the lingering effects of Proposition 13 and Governor Arnold. This is a consummate Hollywood fantasy, no matter how nominally independent the financing and release.

-- There is only one possible explanation for why Terrence Malick’s glorious film [The New World], one of the most aesthetically and intellectually ambitious, emotionally devastating and politically resonant works of American art in recent memory, was overlooked by the Academy: with the exception of my few dear friends in that august body, they are idiots.

2006-02-06T07:59:00.000-12:00

Daniel Mendelsohn gets it right in the New York Review of Books:

The real achievement of Brokeback Mountain is not that it tells a universal love story that happens to have gay characters in it, but that it tells a distinctively gay story that happens to be so well told that any feeling person can be moved by it. If you insist, as so many have, that the story of Jack and Ennis is OK to watch and sympathize with because they're not really homosexual—that they're more like the heart of America than like "gay people"—you're pushing them back into the closet whose narrow and suffocating confines Ang Lee and his collaborators have so beautifully and harrowingly exposed.

2006-02-06T05:56:00.000-12:00

CNN was on the TV in my coffee place this morning, with the senate panel hearings on the eavesdropping "program." The guys in there had it on mute, but I swear, it looked like Gonzales was trying (though not very hard) not to grin.

I just don't understand why people think a couple making a new last name for them both to have in common is any weirder than a woman giving up her name and taking her husband's. Sunday Styles was a bit radical this week, huh? They also had this article about the lack of changing tables in men's restrooms.

Ummmmm, the new Pink video, "Stupid Girls"? Maybe it's a little bit hilarious that she makes fun of Paris Hilton and Jessica Simpson et al in a video airing on MTV, but it's not cool for her to spend so much time calling them stupid. And are these specific "stupid girls" really the only ones to blame for the lack of women in leadership, as a powersuit-clad Pink seems to insist? I think not. In real life, the little pigtailed girl at the beginning and end of the video, who is shown to be so impressionable (with a non-slutty Pink as the angel on one shoulder, and a gyrating stripper-type as the devil on the other, in a totally bizarre bit of messaging), wouldn't learn anything from these oversimplified put downs. But at the very end of the video, she picks up a football instead of a barbie. Hooray! See, boy things are just better - and smarter! - than girl things.

It's also a wee bit convenient that Pink can use her own hot body to convincingly imitate these "stupid girls" in their bikinis and lingerie and daisy dukes, managing to show skin in her video while condemning other women for doing the same. Is this really what a girl pop singer has to do to differentiate herself?

2006-02-05T14:02:00.000-12:00

The Times has been running announcements for gay weddings since 2002, but I think this is the first time the big feature wedding story has featured a gay couple. A nice milestone, but it must be said, the sight of two women in frothy white wedding dresses is even more ridiculous than the sight of one. Ugh.

And Betty Friedan died yesterday, on her 85th birthday. Today a woman at Bluestockings was telling me something about how in Jewish mysticism it's very meaningful to die on your birthday. Well, whatever. Today, I'm going to remember this:

Though in later years, some feminists dismissed Ms. Friedan's work as outmoded, a great many aspects of modern life that seem routine today — from unisex Help Wanted ads to women in politics, medicine, the clergy and the military — are the direct result of the hard-won advances she helped women attain.

...but there'll be more to say later.

2006-02-03T10:52:00.000-12:00

I took yesterday off. I highly recommend doing this. A Thursday off is especially good, because you basically only have a 3-day week to deal with, and then you only have to work a single day after your day off before the weekend, which is totally managable. I'm full of these elaborate schemes and philosophies about how to best arrange personal days and vacation time, and whether a Friday or Monday is a better day to have as a 3-day weekend (it's totally Monday). It would be nice to have more opporunity to put this in action though.

Anyway. Yesterday was great, two museums and then to a taping of The Colbert Report, which was just as fun and hilarious as you'd hope. The set/studio were much smaller than they look on TV, kind of like how famous people are always shorter in person than you think they'll be. The Colbert himself is actually tall, though. Watching as he watched a pre-taped segment where he interviewed representative Gerald Nadler was very cool. He was leaning back in his chair and grinning, so pleased with himself. Christie Whitman was the guest. She was okay, since, although she's a Republican - of the new "it's my party, too!" species - she's not a complete psychopath. Listening to her defend the Republican party, though, while at the same time saying that they are wrong on many social issues and are alienating lots of people and don't have much of a mandate for what they're doing to this country, made me want to throw something. You know? Moderate republicans are fiiiiiine, sure. Make nice. They don't mind the gays and theoretically support abortion rights (until it comes time to vote for a Supreme Court justice, apparently). But all of this is invalidated by their support for Bush. All these New Yorkers think Bloomberg is such a nice guy, but he was the biggest donor to Bush's reelection campaign. So is he any better? Not so much. Because when it comes down to it, you can bet Mike and Christie would happily sell you and you uterus and your deviant sex life out to protect their money and keep getting invited down to Crawford.

Speaking of your uterus, go read Rebecca Trainster's article, aptly named "What the Hell Happened?" at Salon. All I can think of now is that we need to get a lot more scary. We're pretty much on the verge of this... much as conservatives hate queers and feminists and single parents and environmentalists and civil rights activists and immigrants (and on and on), they also find us terrifying, and the kind of fear we inspire in them is a different kind than they inspire in us. There's something useful in that somewhere.

There's a show on at the International Center of Photography called, "Che: Revolution & Commerce," and it's worth checking out. It's basically an exploration of how the iconic Che Guevara image "Guerrillero Heroico," which may be the most widely reproduced image in the history of photography (just think about that!), has evolved and been used. Maybe the coolest part was seeing an enlargement of the contact sheet with the original "Guerillero Heroico" image on it, seeing where it fit in with the rest of what Alberto Korda shot that day. The show's not all about commercialization, either, or the irony of that image being used to sell things. There's a lot of that in there, but there's also a lot of protest art, and the show ultimately doesn't take a position on the pros and cons of commericalization (though you can buy a t-shirt of the show in the museum gift shop - the image on it is the uncropped photograph that is the basis of the show, which I guess says something about ICP's take on authenticity and their position on the whole reproducibility thing).

The "Obsessive Drawing" show at the Folk Art Museum was also pretty amazing, mainly because of one piece that left both Alex and me absolutely reeling. That piece, a 35-foot long, insanely detailed pencil drawing by Chris Hipkiss, isn't on the museum's or the artist's Web site, and if it was, it wouldn't compare to seeing the actual drawing anyway, which isn't behind glass, so every smudge and tiny square feels personal. I can't even begin to comprehend how he made this piece. But what I keep thinking about (aside from Hipkiss' work, which seriously makes my brain short circuit), is this: the show was made up of examples of obsessive drawing by 5 male artists. I would have been interested to know if this version of obsessiveness is something that tends to be acted out specifically by men (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is supposedly diagnosed in men and women equally, and much of the work here was clearly a product of OCD), but there's no way to figure this out based only on the gender represented at the show, since in the art world - as in so many other places - men are still the rule, and women the exception. A show called "Obsessive Drawing" that featured all women artists would be seen as some kind of statement about women... namely, that they're crazy. So, does women's absence from this show mean only men are crazy?

2006-01-31T17:46:00.000-12:00

You need Times Select (or a real, newsprinted newspaper) to read it, but Sarah Vowell, my pick for Mayor of NYC, is guest columnist-ing at the Times all through February.

...it has been said that God is currently angry with America. But according to God's publicist, the Supreme Being would like to clarify that He's not angry, but that "He would like His name taken off the credits."

lover don't turn yr head

2006-01-31T07:50:00.000-12:00

The first thing we noticed about Evan Dando on Saturday night was that his hair was clean. Really clean. When he played at Maxwell's 2 years ago, he was wearing an old man cardigan and a hat over a scuzzy ponytail. This time his hair was all shiny, and he had bangs. He kind of looked like a shampoo commercial. But not in a recovered rockstar kind of way. More like maybe he's healthy and not doing lots of drugs. Good things.

Evan! Thank you for starting your set with the booger song! Thank you for finishing with "Big Gay Heart." Thank you for a supply of happy bouncey music and stripped down acoustic sets and the simple radness that is Baby I'm Bored, for making me think about Sassy magazine's Cute Band Alerts, and the greatness that was and is and maybe will still be The Lemonheads.

For a little while longer, you can still smoke in bars in New Jersey. It's been awhile since I've come home from a night out with my clothes smelling like cigarettes, where that kind of thing used to be my badge of honor. It was disgusting, but also nice, like most kinds of nostalgia. Oh, New Jersey.

Have you heard the new Gossip record? Holy crap. It's slightly more polished than their first 2 (as these things go) but it is Just. So. Good. I can't stop listening to it, and marvelling at 1) how just one guitar and drums backing the vocals can sound so explosive and 2) how that keeps their sound from being too clean or overblown, keeps them sounding vaguely dirty and garage-y no matter how perfect the production is. The Gossip. Don't-fuck-with-me punk, with soul. I love listening to them when I'm walking around late at night, scowling and grinning at the same time. As soon as Beth Ditto starts to sing I start to swagger. I start to be really conscious of my hips, if that makes any sense.

I'm also loving the new Cat Power, and slowly getting into Jenny Lewis' solo album. 3 ladies with voices in one week, the first CD's I've bought in a few months, since I finally started downloading music from the interweb, only about 6 years after everyone else figured it out. By the way, did you catch Ben Ratliff in the Times awhile back referring to Chan Marshall and Beth Orton as "the sad slacker divas," in contrast to the "great female singers of exultation -- Mary J. Blige, Mariah Carey, Beyoncé"? He meant it in a good way, but it's still incredibly dumb. Why are they slackers? Because their music is laid back and they don't over-sing their songs (oh, and they write them themselves)? Let's start calling Ben Gibbard and Conor Oberst and the legions of less interesting emo dudes who persist in making albums "weepy freeloading [something... I can't think of the male version of "divas"]." Nothing against Ben or Conor (mostly). But come on already.

I picked up the February issue of Spin because Jessica Hopper and Julianne Shepard have an article about the various lawsuits and troubles going on with SuicideGirls. I haven't read that magazine in a million years, long enough that I was actually shocked to see how tiny and flimsy it is now. I remember it being a direct competitor to Rolling Stone. I guess now Spin is actually putting bands on the cover of their magazine while RS is publishing pin-ups of Jessica Alba, hence the size differential. Anyway, the magazine does not totally suck, and even though it's super skinny, it's surprisingly light on ads (relatively). There's an interview with Jenny Lewis by Chuck Klosterman, and it's largely about Blake Sennett and very gossipy (with the obligatory reference to her being a former! child! star!), but you didn't hear me scream because it was pretty entertaining. Or maybe I was just really tired when I read it. There's also an article about radical marching bands which I haven't read yet. Weird how much interesting content there was. I wonder if it was a fluke.

2006-01-26T08:24:00.000-12:00

I am wearing a really ugly sweater. Not ugly in a good way. It's also scratchy. This was one of those mornings where I woke up way too late, couldn't decide what to wear and then ran around all panicked putting one thing on and then taking it off and throwing all my clothes on the floor. So this sweater was maybe my fourth try. I would have changed again if I knew it would be so itchy.

Things are happening and my brain is busy. I started a new writing class at The New School - non-fiction this time - and even though the instructor mumbles when he reads in this way that drives me nuts, I think its going to be really interesting and motivating. When I came home I wrote four pages, just like that. Of course, I'm not getting to the million things on my immediate to-do list, like the book review that was supposed to be done last Friday, so I guess tomorrow night will be a chain-myself-to-my-desk kind of situation. Except that the latest Todd Solondz movie just showed up in my mailbox from Netflix. Shit.

Tuesday night I went to hear Mary Oliver read at the 92nd street Y. I was trying yesterday to write about what it was like to be at that reading, but I can't really do it justice. I could mention that it brought me to tears - which is true - but that just sounds so dramatic and empty. All I can do is tell everyone to go read her poems. She read in an auditorium that I've been to before, and hate because it has a border of names of famous dead white guys (Lincoln, Jefferson, Moses, Shakespeare... you know the list) just below the ceiling, and therefore positioned over the stage. So there was Oliver, so humble and brilliant and amazing, standing at a podium underneath that list of names, a woman telling more truth than those guys ever did. And if that's an overstatement, too fucking bad. It's rare that you see a juxtaposition like that, one that SO cleary spells out a dynamic that we usually have to convince people even exists.

My new tote bag just arrived from Queen Bee so I can finally start carrying around the large amount of crap that I need to, instead of packing my dumb girl purse so full that it's like a brick.

some things from today, and some from not today.

2006-01-26T08:18:00.000-12:00

"My Father's Abortion War," an essay adapted from Eyal Press' forthcoming book (which looks really good).

The fabulous Elizabeth Merrick is interviewed in Venus.

An interview with Steven Colbert - out of character and totally on point - at the av club.

Really good news: Daniel McGowan has been released into the custody of his sister, despite the "urgent plea" from the prosecutor to keep him locked up until trial. Reports indymedia:

Incredibly, the DA had attempted to assert that one of the factors showing that McGowan was unworthy of being released was the fact that he had supported political prisoner Jeff "Free" Leurs. Apparently, the judge was not buying that.

things about men, mostly

2006-01-25T07:26:00.000-12:00

I really really want to believe that I was NOT hearing a musak version of "Get Up, Stand Up" in Au Bon Pain just now, but I guess I shouldn't live in denial. On this same lunch break, I got asked out by a dude who was hawking his CD's on the corner. I'm always slightly disturbed by how easily and quickly the "I have a boyfriend" lie rolls out of my mouth, I don't even have to think about it. And I always resent that I have to use that excuse at all, as if that's the only reason I would turn down having dinner with this guy... but it's really just the easiest way to diffuse a situation and get the guy to let go of my hand. Whatever works, I guess.

Had a meeting this afternoon with the designers of our Annual Report, who I've worked with for a year and a half and who are great. After we'd gone over the project we were talking more generally, and one of them said (not completely out of nowhere), "I just got off the phone with my wife - she's an art director and used to work for me - and I realized that because we used to work together, I am pretty much always telling her what to do." I didn't know what to say. Congratulations? That kind of insight usually comes after lots of therapy? He's a pretty subdued guy, and was clearly awed by this revelation. The other designer is the one I do more work with, and he is Britsh and adorable and I have a huge embarassing crush on him. It's usually easy to handle because we communicate mainly via phone and email, but when we meet in person I spend the rest of the day smiling stupidly.

There are a whole lot of things I love about the Sunday Times, and one of them is the "Modern Love" column in the "Styles" section. Sometimes it's sappy, sometimes crazy, but always - ALWAYS - entertaining. Sometimes it's even beautifully written or painfully relatable, though I don't think this last thing is ever really the point. After a couple of not so great ones over the last few weeks, this past weekend's kind of blew me away. It was suspenseful and spare and raw and gorgeous. And the subject is along the lines of something I've been thinking a lot about, and scribbling down notes for some eventual essay about... the way "older men" function in relationship to "younger women," how it seems like so many women that I know have at some point formed relationships with much older men almost as a rite of passage, and how this dynamic is all over a lot of fiction I read as a kid/teenager. Abby Sher's piece - "So He Looked Like Dad. It Was Just Dinner, Right?" - is more specific about her motivations, and so worth reading.

This piece about scoring massive amounts of free shit by posing as journalist is hilarious (and horrifying), and makes me even sadder that this is The Black Table's last week in existence.

i might need to get cable.

2006-01-23T08:14:00.000-12:00

This American Life has some amazing news!

Last week Showtime made it official: we're going to produce a series for them, a television version of This American Life. We shot a pilot last year, and the full series will begin broadcasting in the fall or winter of 2006. We'll continue making the radio show while we do the TV show. Again: the radio show will stay on the air.

What we can say about the series: It doesn't look a TV newsmagazine. It's shot to look like a movie. Widescreen. Beautiful lighting. And the stories feel just like the stories on the radio show. When we started the pilot, we weren't sure that'd be possible. Now we're convinced it is. We'll give more details – and hopefully some previews – in the coming months.

sunday

2006-01-23T07:53:00.000-12:00

Yesterday at Bluestockings was one of those great, busy days where there are a million people buzzing around high on books and caffeine and that certain Sunday afternoon feeling, and everyone is in a good mood. Then it was off to eat dinner uptown with my favorite cousins and back down to meet someone for a drink, who it turned out didn't generally like to drink. He changed his mind about that after the first round, but in between there was the pizza place where the guy stood next to our table shaping the dough for a new vegan pie with his hands, hanging just a couple inches from the floor, and telling us stories. That was the best part of the night. That, and the lights still on in the bookstore at 1am and Jeffrey there to commiserate. Other than that it was mostly me sitting and staring at the tin ceiling and stabbing at the lime and ice at the bottom of my glass.

On the way from one thing to another, I totally had a missed connection, Village Voice style (or maybe more Craig's List, these days). Except that it was someone I already knew instead of someone I sensed I was destined to meet. Waiting for the uptown V train at 2nd avenue late Sunday afternoon, a girl waiting for the F. From a good distance away, she already looked a lot like a girl who I went to summer camp with and was good friends with and totally loved. So I kept staring. And looking away. And staring again. She definitely saw me and nothing registered, probably not least because last time I saw her I had super short spiky hair. Her train pulled in and she got on, and right then I decided that it definitely was her. But by the time I ran to get onto that train (which I could've taken in the first place) the door closed and she was gone. And then I remembered that the V wasn't even running. So I had a nice cinematic missed connection AND I was late for dinner.

The last time we talked was about 6 years ago. I was in Seattle and she was in Portland and we were trying to figure out a way to meet up but didn't, and that was it. She was living in Berkeley and then ended up at school in Boston and I looked up her email address there a couple years ago but did nothing with it, and now it's too late because even though I'm sure it was her yesterday, Google turns up no useful contact info.

Other Google snooping revealed awhile ago that another friend who I had a mysterious, fucked up and still pretty unsettling falling out with when we were 17 is most definitely living in Brooklyn. One day in the land of sleep deprivation and caffeine overload (otherwise known as work) I wrote him an email that I don't ever plan to send. It's still waiting in my email draft box though, with the placeholder subject line "an email to send to D if I'm feeling adventurous." But it's not adventure, just curiosity. I need to keep reminding myself that that is just not enough.

2006-01-20T06:36:00.000-12:00

I'm listening to "The Swimming Song" by Loudon Wainwright, which I swear is just about the greatest song ever. It is Friday, and tonight I have to go out and be a girl, and feign interest in something that I already know is just not going to work. When really, I just want to go home and watch Erin Brockovich on TBS. And play with my brand new Print Gocco! I'm so excited about this thing. I have visions of semi-mass producing lots of art and selling prints on cool paper for cheap. But I guess I can do that on Saturday too.

New York magazine profiles Chan Marshall:

Many artists with stage fright avoid the stage. So, why does Chan travel the world performing all the time? "That's something I can't answer," she says. "I don't know what else to do. In a perfect world, I would be in love and have children and have a reason to stay in one place and not do this anymore."

I finally read Linda R. Hirshman 's piece in the American Prospect that Patricia Cohen wrote about last weekend. Even if her emphasis on the elite class and fancy jobs is irritating and the way she defines success almost exclusively in terms of capitalism makes me cringe, the article really is pretty much as great as some people are saying (what a recommendation, right?):

In interviews, women with enough money to quit work say they are "choosing" to opt out. Their words conceal a crucial reality: the belief that women are responsible for child-rearing and homemaking was largely untouched by decades of workplace feminism. Add to this the good evidence that the upper-class workplace has become more demanding and then mix in the successful conservative cultural campaign to reinforce traditional gender roles and you've got a perfect recipe for feminism's stall.

Seriously though. Go read it and then we can fight about it.

And, I want this woman's job.

2006-01-18T09:26:00.000-12:00

Trying to get back to work and not get caught by one of the overly earnest kids freezing their asses off standing out on the sidewalk trying to get people to give money to Children International or CARE or the Northshore Animal League or some other deserving organization that I don't have $120 for, even if that's "just ten dollars a month." I really don't know how these people get anyone to pledge money on the street like that, especially when the weather is this shitty. The worst is when they say things to you like "Excuse me, do you have a minute for gay and lesbian rights?" It crushes my heart. Today I had to half-hide behind a mailbox and then duck underneath some construction awning to avoid a Children International guy who had staked out the doorway to my office building. Another guy standing right outside smoking a cigarette nodded at me like, "Nice maneuver." I don't actually feel guilty not giving them money, but I do feel self-righteous about it sometimes and then that makes me feel like shit. Like, "I work at a non-profit! Give me a moment's peace!" Occassionally I'll get sucked in to talking to them, and then I try to ask them things that I genuinely want to know, like do people actually give them money? Then I'll tell them that I've spent my share of time knocking on doors and standing out on sidewalks shoving leaflets into people's hands and begging them to sign things or pretend to care, so see, I understand that their job sucks. But that isn't enough. They still try to sell me on the plight of homeless kittens or hurricane victims or starving children and what pisses me off is their guilt trip, as in, you CAN give $10 to this cause. You KNOW you can. If you don't, you are a heartless loser. I guess they have to convince themselves that they believe in it in order to withstand the elements and lots and lots of jerks who say things like "I hate animals" as they walk by. And I'm probably one of many people they talk to every day who tries to empathize with them while still not writing a check, and this is maybe even more annoying than the people who just ignore them or pretend to talk on their cell phones (I'm one of those people, too). I'm just glad that they mostly wear brightly colored nylon jackets so they're easily idenifiable, and that I've perfected my laser vision so I can see where they are even a block away.

Also: If I read another interview with Jenny Lewis where she's asked about her acting career and/or her former relationship with Blake Sennett, I am going to scream. You might even hear it, wherever you are. I am looking forward to "Rabbit Fur Coat" though.

yeah, maureen dowd, and what?

2006-01-18T09:25:00.000-12:00

To lead, and not just conduct campaigns that parrot the liberal elite's editorial pages, you have to shape your own identity and political destiny. And ever since the 2000 race, the Democrats have let Republicans caricature them as effeminate. The Democrats have let the G.O.P. give them their shape, and it's an hourglass.

2006-01-17T16:32:00.000-12:00

Is anyone else disturbed by the photos that go along with this review of the latest anti-feminist polemic Women Who Make the World Worse: And How Their Radical Feminist Assault Is Ruining Our Families, Military, Schools, and Sports? Betty Friedan looks like she has a headache, Jane Fonda's smile looks plastic and painful, and Gloria Steinem is falling asleep. Are these the faces of feminism? I think not. At this point, anyone who writes a book attacking these women is just lazy. And check out this side-by-side comparison of Ms. magazine's latest cover alongside an issue of Ladies Home Journal. The design similarity isn't the end of the world - it's just really really lame - but why the fuck is Jane Fonda on the cover of this magazine instead of about a million other more interesting and relevant women and men? It's not that there aren't other great zines and magazines out there, but to see Ms. still hanging out on the newsstand, looking so clueless, really makes me cringe.

Anyway, Ana Marie Cox (late of Wonkette, now a Times It Girl with the publication of her first novel) makes short work of debunking Kate O'Beirne's oh-so-inspired book:

[O'Beirne's] salvos against such dusty icons as Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda and Catharine MacKinnon do all these women the enormous favor of making them relevant again. And, surely, anytime anyone recalls the deeds of Bella Abzug, an angel gets its wings.

It's always fun to call conservatives on their shit, but it also seems like a waste of energy and column inches. Patrica Cohen also tackles "choice feminism" in the Week in Review.

If you'd like to see the literary scandals of last week turned into a rather snotty, completely serious, yet still pretty interesting intellectual type essay that manages to compare James Frey's fictions to Holocaust deniers and the Bush administration (and who doesn't?), go see what everyone's favorite literary critic Michiko Kakutani has to say. And click here if you want to read Mary Karr's more insightful Op-Ed about the same situation. It's possible that I'm officially sick of this topic. Sick, yes, but still totally fascinated.

2006-01-16T16:27:00.000-12:00

One of the questions I had to answer in my grad school admissions essay was what publications I read. My list was insanely, stupidly long, and it's only getting longer. The New Yorker is what really pushes me over the limit. I knew as soon as I got a subscription that it would bury me. I even probably knew it would happen so soon (I'm only on my forth issue). It's one of those things I feel like I should keep on top of, but every time I open my mailbox there's a new issue when I haven't even started the last one.

If you haven't picked up Kitchen Sink yet, you should. It's a quarterly magazine based out of San Francisco - with the tagline "for people who think too much" - and every issue is full of short-ish essays about art and music and politics, along with fiction and comix. What makes KS different is that the editors really make it a point to contextualize the things they're talking about: to never just review a book or movie or album, but to write more personally and in-depth about their own takes on those things. It makes for much more honest and interesting reading, and the result is a whole lot less masturbatory than a lot of the usual arts writing. KS is also blessedly short on interviews.

My weekend was pretty laid back, which is how I wanted it. Katie and I braved the sleet on Saturday night and had dinner at Pukk, this trendy (green flourescent lights, every surface including tables covered with round white tiles) but surprisingly cheap and delicious vegetarian Thai place. I did some laundry. I ate some cake. I did a bunch of reading. I read Manstealing for Fat Girls, by Michelle Embree, which looked promising because it was published by Soft Skull and had an awesome title. It was also blurbed by some writers I really like, including Michelle Tea and Poppy Z. Brite. But it was only (and barely, really) okay. The teenage narrator was pretty true to life, but there were enough over the top moments and characters to kind of kill things. Everything in the book was pretty bleak - as high school is - but eventually, I just couldn't care about the characters because I didn't believe in them. If you're going to have characters do a lot of drugs and beat up on themselves and form unrealistic friendships, it should at least feel like there's a reason behind it. There were points where I actually rolled my eyes. The best high school period piece I've read in a long time is still Joe Meno's Hairstyles of the Damned. That was such a solid, great book. I was hoping Manstealing might be a kind of girl driven version. Oh well. I also read Self-Made Man, by Norah Vincent (non-fiction). It was pretty much another disappointment, with Vincent (a lesbian) going undercover as a man in various social situations to try and get some insight into what men's motivations and actions. It didn't really reveal much that most of us don't already know or suspect, I think.

I did watch the FOUR! HOUR! PREMIER! EVENT! of 24 last night and tonight, though tonight I couldn't handle giving it my full attention. Man, that show is just so bad. I'm not sure I can stick around to see how terrible and cliched its going to get, but its also kind of amazing to see what new ridiculousness they manage to offer up with a straight face week after week.

And now, off to figure out what I can wear to work tomorrow that will make me feel capable and smart, but not too much like a grown up. This is a nearly impossible balance. A cup of coffee, always too full and dripping onto my hand as I rush into the office anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes late, is the one consistent thing about my appearance 5 days a week. There's something comforting about this though. If I think about it, I'm glad I haven't managed to really get it right.

2006-01-12T09:52:00.000-12:00

Everyone is talking about this recipe for mac & cheese that was the #1 emailed article from the Times online for like a week. Everyone I talk to has read it, and salivated over it, and some people have actually made it. Anyone want to have a mac & cheese party? I am dying to make this. It's basically just pasta, butter, milk and about a million pounds of cheese, baked. The problem is that I honestly don't know if my oven works. Yes, I've lived in my apartment for a year and a half, and made so little use of the oven that it's not just that my oven doesn't work and I haven't gotten it fixed, but that I don't even know if it works. This is probably something I should figure out. I would actually like to know if baking is even a possibility in my kitchen, should I ever decide to shock everyone I know by giving it a try. I even have cookie sheets, which were a housewarming gift after I whined loudly enough about wanting to have some "just in case." Sometime last year I optimistically bought some Pillsbury sugar cookies, but the stick of dough is still in my fridge. Do those things expire?

It is something like 57 degrees out, and I didn't even wear my coat today. I just got back from picking up some prints at this amazing photo lab across the street from my office. You have to walk up this weirdly industrial flight of stairs to get to it, and then the whole floor smells like photo chemicals. Mmmmm. It is such a trigger for my brain. Yesterday when I went to drop off contact sheets and put in our order I got back to work in a really bad mood. At first I couldn't figure it out, but then realized that for awhile now I've gotten this displaced feeling when I'm in a photo gallery or a lab. Less so with the galleries, since I love looking at that kind of art on a lot of different levels, and my experience of it isn't always related to my own work (or lack thereof). But being in a lab is a lot more emotional. And being in a lab like this one, where people are crouched over lightboxes and waiting for their stuff to process, and thumbing through binders of negatives and marking up contact sheets makes me feel disconnected. And duh, I am. It's easy not to think about the fact that I don't do photography anymore when I'm not in the middle of it, but when I'm there, and I can't answer the guy's question about whether we were getting our prints done by machine or by hand I get defensive and really, I feel homesick. Homesick for the darkroom, whichever one, any one. For that kind of process. But I don't feel this way all the time.

So now I have these gorgeous 5x7 work prints that cost a lot of (not my) money because a machine didn't just spit them out, and the edges of the paper are a little rough from where it was cut, and the idea that someone else made them is digging at me. I mean, these are just basic head shots of my organization's executive director for using in this year's annual report, but it's this weird look at what I could be doing, or what I almost decided to do, and then didn't, not quite on purpose. I'm not sorry (and yes, I know it's never too late). But it still kinda sucks.

And then there's this news:

Nikon said it would halt production of all but two of its seven film cameras and would also stop making most lenses for those cameras. The company will halt production of the film camera models "one by one," though it refused to specify when.

Ouch.

ain't it the (sad) truth...

2006-01-11T10:13:00.000-12:00

The NY Observer notices that 2005 may not have been a great year for women's movie roles:

"We should be writing more great roles for women, period,” said Ms. Witherspoon’s Walk the Line director, James Mangold, also on that red carpet on Sunday. “Another problem is that movies are generally made for 14-year-old boys—and 14-year-old boys want to watch 25-year-old action heroes. So the truth is, any movie, like all the ones being honored here tonight”—he gestured vaguely in the direction of Ang Lee and Philip Seymour Hoffman—“that makes it into reality, is a movie that made it despite the system that’s really built almost predominately and universally to make movies about comic-book heroes.”

2006-01-11T07:35:00.000-12:00

Here's what JT Leroy confidante Mary Gaitskill said back in 2001 about the then-distant possibility of a hoax:

"It's occurred to me that the whole thing with Jeremy [J.T.] is a hoax, but I felt that even if it turned out to be a hoax, it's a very enjoyable one. And a hoax that exposes things about people, the confusion between love and art and publicity. A hoax that would be delightful and if people are made fools of, it would be OK—in fact, it would be useful."

Bookslut also pointed to another article this morning about the Leroy "revelations" (if you want to call them that), this time on Salon. The article was by Ayelet Waldman, and I read it, and it was okay. But then I clicked on "read all letters on this article," you know, to see what the word on the street is about Leroy and partner-in-literary-scandal James Frey today. Here is what I mostly found:

Why does Salon insist on publishing drivel from a half-baked, modestly talented mystery writer? Simple: a)she's a woman and b) if Salon didn't publish Ayelet Waldman, we'd be stuck with another overwrought, self-absorbed female writer like Anne Lamott.

AND

Congratulations, Waldman. You successfully saved face by proving you knew he/she was a phony before everyone else. Your former support of Leroy won't be embarrassing to you now because you knew it was a hoax....Oh, and also, congratulations for having a famous author for a husband. Because lord knows you wouldn't be able to publish mastabatory crap like this without his name attached to yours, and stories of trips with him to Rome within the content to remind your readers of your viewpoint's validity.

AND

You should listen to your husband more often. He is the sane one in your family.

AND

Congratulations on leading with an article so solipsistic, content-free, and unframed that it would do any teenager's first blog proud. Kindly give Mrs. Chabon* a LiveJournal account and spend my Premium member money on someone who can write. *

Normally I detest the Mrs. appellation, but in this case I suspect it's only because she is Mrs. Chabon that she's so often welcomed to contribute her maunderings. Which makes it all the more painful that Salon published a lead piece about one hoaxer with celebrity connections conning another.

Hmmmmm.

And now I'll stop posting about this shit. Maybe.

2006-01-10T09:35:00.000-12:00

It's funny how movies you don't like sometimes leave much more of an imprint in your psyche than movies you love.

Noel Murray and Nathan Rabin talk about Woody Allen's Match Point over at The Onion's AV Club.

2006-01-10T08:29:00.000-12:00

Andrew Bujalski (writer/director of Funny Ha Ha), has a new movie coming out, called Mutual Appreciation. He's profiled in the Times:

[Bujalski's protagonists] are the most unassuming of existentialist heroes, slouching toward not epiphanies but the tiniest shifts in perspective. Both [Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation] are slow-burning comedies about the fear of adulthood made by someone who isn't yet inclined to sentimentalize or belittle these threshold years.

...[T]he start-stop chatter in Mr. Bujalski's films is less arbitrary than it seems. A master of the mixed message and a veritable sculptor of dead air, he's deft at showing how inarticulateness can serve as defense tactic and passive-aggressive weapon.

2006-01-09T10:45:00.000-12:00

So here's what I think of the insanity that Gawker is calling "Fake Writer Day."

[ if you're not up to speed and/or really want a headache, read these:
"Who is the Real JT Leroy?" New York Magazine, 10/17/05
"Who's that boy/girl?" The Guardian, 1/4/06
"The Unmasking of JT Leroy: In Public, He's a She," The New York Times, 1/9/06 ]

In these latest stories in the Guardian and the Times , Laura Albert sounds pretty unhinged, and also really sloppy about covering up or being consistent with what she says. I think she wanted to be caught.

That said, I don't really understand this obsession with finding out the truth about JT Leroy. I do think it reveals more about why we like the things we like, and the prejudices we bring to our readings, than any of us would like to admit. I don't want to think that people were interested in Leroy just because of his fucked up past, or that they let themselves be blown away by his writing because of who they thought he was, but I also think it's impossible for our knowledge of writers and artists' lives not to influence how we interpret their work. And I can't say I think this is necessarily a bad thing, even if it's not totally great.

I do think it's fucked up and manipulative that Leroy got people's sympathy (and their acclaim) by using a story that was not his (though this makes me wonder what stories we can actually claim as our own...). Plenty of people do have horrible stories and experiences, and do have AIDS, but do not have a network of celebrities supporting and promoting them. It worries me that people who do manage to have some degree of success or redemption despite the odds may be understood not as the exceptions to the rule that they are, but as examples of what can happen if people are motivated enough to pull themselves together (the consequence being that people in genuinely shitty situations get neither sympathy nor help).

This whole drama touches on some of the more fucked up issues of identity at stake in publishing. There's no question that it matters who you are (and what gender you are) when it comes to trying to sell a book. And this JT Leroy thing shows that there's clearly some privileging of the "authentic experience" in the same vein. This isn't to take any blame off of sketchy Laura Albert (it sure seems like this whole crazy multiple identity thing must be a hell of a way to live, and to have relationships) but it touches on a lot of interesting issues (and sore spots) about what matters to us when we decide to read a book, and then when we decide that we like it.

2006-01-09T08:12:00.000-12:00

The other day I watched Funny Ha Ha, this tiny little indie movie about some people wandering around their early twenties. It was pretty good. There were moments that were excruciating, conversations that went nowhere but continued for waaaaay toooo loooong, but it did manage to capture a certain kind of ridiculousness while also pointing out the ridiculousness of the ridiculousness itself. You know? And it was so homemade, it felt like the film was spliced together at the kitchen table. It never felt like anyone was acting, but it also never felt like a documentary... it just kind of felt right, and so the infuriating pieces wouldn't have made sense if they had been less irritating.

Sometimes when I watch things like this I wonder why it's even fun to watch stupid scenarios that are really close to your own life acted out on screen. It's not like I really want to relive awkward conversations or drunken nights or bad dates or crappy jobs, or like I need to sit around watching the eerily similar tedium of someone else's life on a Friday night. Maybe it is just like watching a train wreck, and you can't look away. But it's not, because it's not actually that horrible. Is it kind of oddly comforting to know that your life can be approximated or portrayed with such accuracy? I don't know. It's not that I think we're always looking for mirrors of ourselves in art, but there's something satisfying about it when it's done right.

I felt this way about Jason Schwartzman's character in Shop Girl... he was so perfect(ly horrific) that it almost hurt, but it made me love the movie. Though that was different from Funny Ha Ha because the people in that movie were glamorous professional actors, so there was a level of detachment where you could just appreciate the artistry of the movie or the accuracy of the imitation. Where it could just be entertainment. In Funny Ha Ha, it just seemed like this is who these people were, that even if they were playing characters, their real lives were really similar to what they were acting out. Though there's obviously an artistry in that, too. Really, I think it must be hard to do that kind of acting, to know that you're essentially playing yourself, to carefully pause and scratch your nose and shift your weight and say "I don't know" a lot, in conscious imitation of yourself and all your dumb tics that your acting job means owning up to.

2006-01-06T06:28:00.000-12:00

Check out Jen Miller's "Sex and the City Endurance Test" at Nerve, where she tries to watch all 96 episodes of the show in one sitting:

Lopi keeps threatening to leave, but because I fast-forward through the theme song, she stays. It gives her no time in between episodes to make a run for it before the next one sucks her in. She says that it's like crack, never having done crack.

Bruce agrees, having done crack.

2006-01-05T11:04:00.000-12:00

I'm a little behind in my reading of this weekend's Times, so I just noticed this piece in "Week in Review." Using the recent death of actor Vincent Schiavelli (who played Mr. Vargas in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and that really scary subway ghost in Ghost) as a jumping point, Peter Edidin writes sweetly about the memorable faces of Hollywood actors who are not conventionally attractive, and how they enhance our experience of a film: Mostly, of course, movies offer beautiful faces and construct fantasies around them. But other, more idiosyncratic images of humanity have always been present as well, and with them a more expansive vision of what it is to be human. He quotes Nancy Etcoff, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School and the author of "Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty": "Because we can't fit [these actors] into a mold," she added, "we have freer range to imagine who they are, so they can embody more complexity. Their features draw us in because we want to make sense of them."

How lovely. But what Edidin neglects to say (or does he not notice?) is that the actors whose "idiosyncratic" faces have enabled their successful careers in film are almost invariably men. Can you think of the female equivalent of Adam Sandler? Paul Giamatti? Billy Crystal? Michael Showalter? Jimmy Kimmel? Steve Buscemi? Even Nicholas Cage? What about Jack Nicholson, these days (and don't say Diane Keaton)? Many of these men are attractive, but they are allowed to be attractive by way of their distinctiveness, not after they meet certain standards.

Times film critic Manohla Dargis wrote an essay that ran in that paper about a year ago, called "One Word for What's Happening to Actors' Faces Today: Plastics." She argues that plastic surgery is altering one of the greatest landscapes in cinema: the human face without pretending that this isn't a gendered problem: Clearly, part of the blame for the spectacle of the post-human lies with the movie industry and its pernicious sexism; after all, Sean Penn wins awards with a face crosshatched with lines. But while it's easy to blame the industry, the entertainment media, the satellite industries and the stars themselves, let's face it: the other culprit, the faithful keeper of the cults of beauty and youth, is staring out at us in the mirror.

Plastic surgery preserves women's faces so that they look younger (and less complex, and therefore less human) sitting pretty across from their male counterparts. So maybe that explains it. Maybe film audiences (or more likely, the people who make and bankroll movies) don't want their female characters (or their movie-going experience) burdened by things like complexity. Laughing and frowning will both give a girl wrinkles. Better to remain neutral.

Regardless, I'm just sick of pieces like Edidin's, where the writer is oblivious to the things that influence the phenomenon he gets to lovingly relate. It suggests that his set of observations and experiences are the end of the story.

i love me some savage

2006-01-05T06:50:00.000-12:00

From this week's "Savage Love":

Joking about Christianity isn't evidence that I'm intolerant—hell, I'm perfectly willing to tolerate Christians. I have never, for instance, attempted to prevent Christians from marrying each other, or tried to stop them from adopting children, or worked to make it illegal for them to hold certain jobs. I don't threaten to boycott companies that market their products to Christians, and I don't organize letter-writing campaigns to complain about Christian characters on television. It would indeed be hypocritical for me to complain about fundamentalist Christians who've done all of the above to gay people if I turned around and did the same thing to them, but I've done no such thing. Intolerant? Hell, I'm a model of tolerance! Oh sure, I joked about the Virgin Birth because I think it's silly and sexphobic. And I'm free to say as much, however unpleasant it is for some Christians to hear. Fundamentalist Christians, for their part, are free to think homosexuality is sinful and unnatural, and they're free to say so, however unpleasant it is for me to hear. But fundamentalists aren't willing to just speak their piece, Rob. Nope, they seek to persecute people for being gay, and that's where their low opinion of homosexuality—which, again, they have an absolute right to hold—transubstantiates into intolerance.

...and with this, my devotion to Dan Savage predictably carries on into 2006.

buttercream frosting!

2006-01-04T17:28:00.000-12:00

Birthdays are funny. Today I spent mine in an office all day, but because It Was My Birthday I gave myself permission to slack off and poke around the interweb for interesting things. Since I slack off at work pretty much every day, this didn't do much to help me feel like this day was different from all other days. But that's because it's not.

I'm really into all the reflection that comes along with The New Year, but only if it's the spontaneous kind. the mandated looking back and resolutions and shit are just gross. I was watching NY1 for a couple of minutes on new years eve, and the anchors were talking about some poll that asked people for their new year's resolutions, and the top 3 were: 1) make more money, 2) lose weight, and 3) spend more time with their families (that final one coming in a distant third, if I'm remembering right). Not that any of this is surprising. But it was sort of weird to hear it reported like that, against the background of the countdown to 2006. Sometimes that countdown feels like a promise, like a "new leaf" or whatever will be turned over and at least the first few minutes after midnight will be a breath of fresh air. Other times it almost feels threatening, letting you know exactly how long you have to get shit right in the year that's wrapping up before that book is closed forever, the history of 2005 written and done.

Anyway, I was thinking about this because this year at dinner on new year's eve the conversation turned at some point to what we were all doing on december 31st in years past. I'm the kind of person who thinks (too much) about that kind of thing anyway, and not just on new year's. But I like seeing other people do it, having some kind of occassion that makes people remember where they used to be. For a minute there I thought I'd lost 2001, but when I got home later and went through old notebooks trying to piece that time back together, I remembered that I spent that year at alice's, drinking too many margaritas and regretting it pretty quickly. Still, I just like to know. Even if my love of new year's is really just out of habit at this point.

So it was my birthday, and I was told offhand, in the annual kind of way, that I must be "older and wiser." I guess so. Last year on january 3rd I went out with jhon for the second time, and we sat at a little cafe sharing a piece of cake and staring at each other across the table. He bought me a copy of Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar, which was so sweet and smart, especially since we didn't know each other at all yet. I still haven't read that book, but notice it on my shelf occassionally and then let it nag at me for a little while.

Dorky as it sounds, this blog is kind of my birthday present to myself. I mean, it's about time. And I really truly will update it often. Promise.

Here's the monthly(ish) self-promotion segment... I have 3 new reviews online which I somehow managed to pull together while procrastinating about my grad school application. My column at Bookslut is about A Piece of Cake: Recipes for Female Sexual Pleasure and I also reviewed - more favorably - the surprisingly excellent Letters from Young Activists. Over at Grace is my review of Yiyun Li's A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. Since it was supposed to be a recommendation rather than a real review, I get through the whole thing without mentioning that I didn't like the book at all. I seem to be the only one on the planet not to. Ah, well.

And go read this: Anne Ishii's great essay in the Village Voice that pinpoints most of the problems I have with the movie Memoirs of a Geisha, but haven't really been able to explain. Oh, except for when I yelled at my family: "I just want to see a movie about women's lives that wasn't written by a man, and isn't about women fighting with each other and selling each other out for a man!" Yeah, there was that. So we went to see King Kong instead. And it kicked ass. At least the "man" in that movie was a giant gorilla.