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

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.

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

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.”

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.

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

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."

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.

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).

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.

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."

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

-- 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!

Kitchen Sink has a new blog.

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.

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

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").

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.

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.