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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.

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.

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.

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.