previously

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.