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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 Traister’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?
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.”
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.