victory lap

shame

2006-12-19T21:49:00.000-05:00

why am i so fond of Jessica Cutler, a/k/a the Washingtonienne? shouldn't i hate her? i'm so confused about this. every time i see her name somewhere, i google the old, superior blog (the one about all the sex she had on capitol hill). and smile.

i have to counteract this with the news that i have picked up Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, reading it in prep for Ulysses.

a double-gawker week—uncork the champagne!

2006-12-15T17:51:00.000-05:00

Natasha Lyonne is in trouble again, and so Gawker has linked to the post that quotes from this very blog. see, my roommate at the time, J., had a jailhouse missed connection with NL after he got caught on the street with an open container and had to spend the night in central booking. i wrote about it. Gawker linked. i panicked, fearing legal action, and—far worse—my boss seeing what i wrote on my blog, so i asked them to take down the link. but now it's ok, i left that job, and NL is a confirmed mess; she really did break into someone's apartment and steal a dog or whatever is it indie-darlings-turned-junkie-disasters do for kicks.

i'm on gawker, what does it all mean?

2006-12-14T17:58:00.000-05:00

i turn up at very end of this Gawker video (me: hair up; eating cheese; making face and giggling like an anxiety-ridden schoolgirl when i notice the camera) from the Good magazine party last night, at the William Beaver House. i'm sorry, i can't get on board with this beaver name, it's too much. (though there was an incredible projection of beavers building a dam, plus it made for a good Talk of the Town in this week's New Yorker.)

most astute Gawker comment: "looks like a Heeb magazine party." so true. but rest assured, all of you out there who fear the jewish conspiracy, WASPs were also very well represented. and a Heeb party would never serve cheese. or have an open bar where the drinks actually have alcohol in them.

if you were peter pan, you'd be able to fly

2006-12-11T19:07:00.000-05:00

today was 35-year-old-men-on-skateboards day in williamsburg. (i saw four, and i was only passing through.)

akin to wearing a neighborhoodie that says, "i'm having a crisis."

"workin' on our night movesss"

2006-12-09T17:31:00.000-05:00

i just found out that years ago, one of my friends worked for an escort service in tallahassee called Night Moves Entertainment. the ultimate Bob Seger tribute.

she had a client who wanted her to read a specific book aloud to him. i don't want to sell out her story, so i will leave the matter of which book to your imagination.

kinda embarrassed to have been employed by you (a.k.a. ditto, jen snow)

2006-12-06T21:05:00.000-05:00

Jen Snow posted a letter to the Village Voice (that i hope she sent them) on her blog, regarding the fact that Jonas Mekas, Andrew Sarris, Jim Hoberman, and Dennis Lim appeared at BAM on monday in celebration of the new Voice film guide, and the paper didn't even list the event. hmm.

still, the Voice is the best place i've worked, at least in terms of my happiness, hours, and boss relationship, not overall fucked-up-edness—best place, that is, if you don't count the cheese shop where i toiled in high school. but please, feel free to go ahead and count the cheese shop.

adley's blog,

2006-12-06T16:37:00.000-05:00

now linked to my blog.
Process Production

table for baldwin

2006-12-05T11:58:00.000-05:00

here is the proof that i was in the same room as Alec Baldwin on monday night: the name card swiped from his table. i realize that better proof would be a picture of him, or me and him together, but i couldn't bring myself to ask for that, even when you factor in the open bar.

this brush with Baldwinism came about because a friend of a friendinvited me to come along to a fundraising cocktail party for Tisch. there was a sushi buffet, and William H. Macy (short, shaggy). Tony Kushner and George Wolfe received an award; Tony Kushner is great, very neurotic, entirely brilliant. Marcia Gay Harden came onstage and talked about what it was like to work with them on the first big stage production of Angels in America (off-bway?). what i would give to travel back in time and see that. after the cocktail party thing, we decided to go to bungalow 8 (i know). i'd never been there, and i spent quite a few minutes considering the fact that at any moment Paris Hilton could blow in and strip naked or something. this thought alone was more far more surreal that being near Alec Baldwin.

all in all, an excellent night. i love Alec Baldwin, weird speech pattern—faux-pedigreed, frequent-pause-for-dramatic-effect—and all. the man is magic. long island magic.

terror threat level = orange (high)

2006-12-03T15:24:00.000-05:00

Bush twin spotted. Barbara (the cuter one), Daddy's (in semi-dingy williamsburg, not condo williamsburg), saturday night. slumming it at a bar that sells hot dogs. her boyfriend lied to me and my roommate N. and said it wasn't her, but we have it from good sources that the secret service was standing watch outside.

this is almost as good as a Gyllenhaal, but nowhere near the grail that is an Olsen twin. (saw one of those too! M-K, third avenue, last summer, simian yet adorable.)

SFJ//joanna newsom magic

2006-12-02T16:34:00.000-05:00

Sasha Frere-Jones has a great review (great as in positive, but also great as in insightful and thoughtful and well written) of Joanna Newsom's new album in the New Yorker. (i think the album is amazing, btw, and i wasn't into her first one.)

this is just an awesome line for a critic, of anything, to write:
"she brought to mind a college student i knew who wore suspenders to show that she would not countenance this debased modern world." extremely effective description.

and funny that JN is related to Gavin Newsom. incidentally, i am into him too.

meth, the ultimate study drug

2006-12-01T13:37:00.000-05:00

a columbia grad student was arrested for setting up METH LABS all over manhattan. i love it when nerds go bad.

NY Daily News story (with requisite heinous headline pun): "Meth Lab in 'High' Rise." a little preview—"From the cornfields of the Midwest to the penthouses of New York City, this drug is a poisonous danger."

crushed ice, cilantro, gondoliers—all overrated

2006-12-01T12:54:00.000-05:00

potentially raucous/brilliant game, courtesy of The Believer: Overrated. read the rules; print out the gamecards (worked best with adobe acrobat. preview messed it up for some reason).

suggested additional cards: jamba juice, jack nicholson, horseback riding, the george forman grill, westerns, fax machines, roberta flack, the new york times

devolution

2006-11-29T00:02:00.000-05:00

at dinner tonight, friends said that if i'm going to read Ulysses, i need to brush up on Hamlet and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. i was going to shortcut all of that. apparently there are no shortcuts. this is not off to the best possible start if i'm already trying to cheat. (i have a bad feeling that two weeks from now all this blog is going to be about is how i'm reading Ulysses, because it's all i'll be doing. wild.)

update: add The Odyssey to the pre-game list. chance this will all get done just diminished by about five percent.

proof positive: calypso IS like so

2006-11-27T21:32:00.000-05:00

was out the other night, drunk, when conversation turned to Robert Mitchum (per usual); i flashed back to this album pictured here, Calypso Is Like So. yes. it's true. user review, from one J. in sunny Los Angeles, California: "calypso is so totally like so." (J., it should be noted, originally turned me on to Robert Mitchum's calypso ouevre.) i listened to it today at the library, because that's how i do. and i think the only word to describe the look RM's shooting the camera is "smoldering."

other happenings today: i noted an abundance of totally fucked up hair on the L train, including a guy with cornrows in his goatee. and beads. colored beads. ack. ugh. and i overheard a girl in the same car explaining the oil spill in greenpoint to some guy she didn't seem to know very well. she said they've cleaned it up (not entirely true), it was in the water pipes (not true at all; that means we'd be drinking it), and that somewhere nearby there's an enormous warehouse—200,000 sq ft—full of discarded mattresses (tangent?). maybe she was picking him up. maybe oil spill chitchat is her A game.

then they started talking about different local thai restaurants, the great conversation leveler. in these parts, everyone has something to say about thai restaurants.

file under Hot Disaffected Youth Studies

2006-11-27T15:49:00.000-05:00

gay book party (is there any other kind?), wednesday night.

in other news: my good friend K. told me the way i write here doesn't actually sound like me, but not in a bad way. i'm mulling that one over. she is always right about these things.

stop making sense

2006-11-26T13:35:00.001-05:00

david byrne has a blog

"lexical-gustatory synaesthete"

2006-11-25T17:37:00.000-05:00

=the condition in which your senses comingle and you can taste words. [NYT story]

this to me is as strange as the furry lobster.

pale horse, pale rider

2006-11-25T17:09:00.000-05:00

my new copy of Pale Horse, Pale Rider arrived in the mail today. i've been looking forward to this all week. (last week it was my new moccasins. easy come, easy go.) anyway, i've been rabid lately, recommending this book. it is fairly devastating and beautiful—Katherine Anne Porter actually describes what it's like to die of influenza. and how incredible is this title? name a better book title. ok, comparable: The Sound and the Fury, Tender is the Night, The World According to Garp.

this is a good game.

hangover panda merch (!)

2006-11-24T17:01:00.000-05:00

aww: hangoverpanda.com.

update:

2006-11-24T16:08:00.000-05:00

still at the coffeehouse. we're knee-deep in a Billy Joel album over here. a real one, not the greatest hits. i'm not complaining; i'm just saying. anyway, "just the way you are" is on, and when he sings (croons?), "you always have my...unspoken passion" (he really pounds that last syllable—the -SION), it takes me right back to the Stella short with Sam Rockwell. not the pick of the litter, but worth watching.

the Stella Shorts are another holiday tradition. naturally.

everyone who pretended to like me is gone for the weekend

2006-11-24T14:13:00.000-05:00

thanksgiving weekend in greenpoint is excellent because there are never crowds at any of the places i like to go and loiter; you get a break from new york without actually leaving. (i'm loitering at the coffeehouse right now—the loitering here is better than ever since they expanded their menu and got wireless internet. way back when, they only served croissants and muffins, and there was no wireless, and so if you hated baked goods and loved the internet, you were totally fucked.) anyway, almost everyone i know here is from someplace else, except one of my roommates, with whom i've been watching the OC season one on DVD. this seems to be a new holiday season tradition, three years running. naturally.

items:
reread Mark Danner's excellent New York Review essay from two summers ago, "Humanism and Terror (What are you going to do with that?)," pretty much about how difficult it is to confront dread. he quotes the Czeslaw Milosz poem "A Song on the End of the World." the poem is beautiful.

for some reason, the other day i pulled out David Ives's collection of one-acts, All in the Timing. i loved these when i was 15, which says something. it's all very clever-clever winksy lit-snob new yorker "isn't this delightful?" crap. ok, i shouldn't call it crap, it's extremely well executed, but what used to be clever is now sort of grating. like Seinfeld.
the best play in the collection: "the philadelphia," about the metaphysical state of never being able to get what you want, supposedly like the experience of actually being in philadelphia. i think what i really meant to read was John Guare. that's next up.

also think i'm going to read Ulysses over xmas break. so far, i've only read about Ulysses, and been subjected to some insufferable conversations about it. i think it's going to take all five weeks.

and i worked on my Amazon wish list. still in progress.

triomphe

2006-11-24T01:47:00.001-05:00

victory lap returns. i know, i know, it's always, "i'm done, it's over, everything we shared has turned to dust, thanx for reading!!" and then i come back a few months later, "baby, i'm sorry, i didn't mean it, etc etc." but that's not what's like this time. this time it's real.

anyway, all the dated material is going into the archives, even the embarrassing stuff. it seems dishonest to delete it, like i'd be torching my high school yearbook just because i'm doing something moderately retarded in all of the pictures in which appear. i may in fact have been guilty of that (i.e., doing something moderately retarded), but i still own my yearbook. and so, too, i still own all this old crap, even though i don't endorse most of it.

ciao for now.

a fond farewell

2006-06-02T18:37:00.000-04:00

reader, i think victory lap is dead.

i'll start another site soon, but the content will likely be different. i'll do another post when that all happens. for now, thanks for caring enough to look at my little blog.

long live victory lap!

proof i do things

2006-05-23T11:41:00.000-04:00

i have been sort of a busy bee, if you discount the fact that i sleep until 11 every morning now and just got back from a weeklong vacation. here is some of the fruit of my labor:

Village Voice//Al Gore

Village Voice//Greenpoint oil spill

joan didion//sasha frere-jones//i do too like to blog, sometimes

2006-05-05T15:26:00.000-04:00

i know you think i'm bad at this blogging thing, what with the infrequent posting and lack of original material when i do, and i'm not denying it. but perhaps this link can make up for that, just a little bit:

sasha frere-jones's blog: joan didion appears at the paris review dinner (held in her honor, natch)

flickrs of the rich and famous

2006-04-09T18:49:00.000-04:00

it's not every day you get to see a former mtv news anchor's flickr page:

gideon yago's pics (a mix of iraq, new orleans, and his friends, one of whom i think i met at a bar, hanging out on a couch)

snakes on a plane

2006-04-08T22:20:00.000-04:00

the thing about writing about the upcoming cinematic joyride snakes on a plane is that you can't title whatever you're writing anything other than "snakes on a plane." i mean, it is so brilliant and succinct.

i will do anything to avoid writing when something is due, which is why it is a saturday night and i stayed in to finish a story, yet i am googling the trailer for snakes on a plane; and here's a bonus link to a snakes on a plane blog.

very impressive

2006-04-08T22:13:00.000-04:00

pitchfork is already posting the lineup for their festival in chicago, and it's not until the last weekend of july. perhaps this is what happens when a bunch of compulsive indie nerds plan a festival. or maybe i'm just used to the voice's siren festival, where they book a headliner and then they find a few bands on the f-train on the way out to coney island and throw them on stage next to the cyclone to fill out the schedule.

not that i'm complaining.

my new, sad addiction:

2006-04-07T18:01:00.000-04:00

go fug yourself

i give you the direct link to my favorite page; scroll down to the march 6 entry, lindsay lohan meets sharon stone. terror ensues.

andrew lloyd webber got it all wrong

2006-04-07T10:04:00.000-04:00

how amazing that they found the original gospel of judas, and that it suggests jesus asked judas to betray him. i should say here, though, that most of my knowledge of this period comes from jesus christ superstar; specifically, the production at my jewish summer camp (a group of girls from westchester screeching "take him to pilate!").

this comes as dan brown is found innocent of lifting ideas and information from a nonfiction book, holy blood, holy grail, for the da vinci code. (the alleged stolen info was the notion that jesus and mary magdalene were married, had children, and their descendants live in france, which is not only a key plot point in the da vinci code, but the only really good thing about it.) and related to that—read this great joan acocella new yorker story on mary magdalene and how she shape-shifted through history.

to summarize, judas: neat, dan brown: meh, joan acocella: hoorah.

NYT: "Gospel of Judas Surfaces After 1,700 Years"
NYT: "Judge Rules in Favor of 'Da Vinci Code' Writer"
New Yorker: "The Saintly Sinner"

caitlin flanagan, scary conservative intelligento-bot

2006-04-06T10:56:00.000-04:00

the elle profile (in the issue with shakira on the cover) of new yorker writer/housewifey conservative caitlin flanagan was fascinating, so a good followup is alexandra jacobs's review of flanagan's new book. this woman is way more offensive than maureen dowd, who is irritating but really pretty harmless.

NY Observer: "Caitlin Flanagan to Housewives: Please Eat the Damn Daisies"

the raw food 'subway perv'

2006-04-06T10:39:00.000-04:00

hilarious new york mag story on the downfall of popular raw foods chef who exposed himself on the subway. ("I don’t think he was eating totally raw," says one of his disillusioned followers.)

actually not unlike celebration, florida

2006-03-15T01:46:00.000-05:00

domino's pizza founder tom monaghan is developing a town in florida that will pretty much be a roman catholic theocracy, which is very medieval times (the era in history, not the stadium-seating dinner theater). more here.

learning to love you more

2006-03-14T17:05:00.000-05:00

i woke up in the middle of the night last night wondering if miranda july's group-art-project website Learning to Love You More still exists. it does. neat.

and in the DIY vein: sarah mccoll's lovely website/vlog, pink of perfection. i am possibly the most avid endorser of DIY projects i know who is not a DIY person. meaning, i applaud you for tapering your own jeans or building your own amp from two baking pans and some paper mache or dicing and canning your own homegrown peaches and then using the scraps to make cocktails, but i am in no way able to slog through that myself.

more hating on sandra bullock

2006-03-14T16:14:00.000-05:00

annie proulx trashes Crash in this essay about going to the oscars. (i thought larry mcmurtry said she was there, though the show's producers must not have bothered to figure out who she was, since she didn't appear onscreen.) i agree with her, Crash was crap, even though i only saw the first 20 minutes, but since the dialogue from those first few scenes is what's quoted in all the reviews, i'm thinking i got a handle on the heavy-hitting moments. the premise was so in-yo-face mid '90s, and the LA shots and color palate reminded me of Speed, a likeness that isn't helped by sandra bullock's presence alongside some "hunky" LAPD officers.

anyways, proulx also articulated what i've been thinking all along, about how it's sort of bullshit that actors win awards for biopics of famous 20th century people (i.e., of whom there's film or video footage) when heath ledger had to figure it out from scratch. this ties into my general belief that biopics are creepy because they're like breathing wax museums.

breaking: powerHouse books can't/won't cease/desist

2006-03-05T16:51:00.000-05:00

the tribeca space that currently houses powerHouse books' photo gallery and office has been sold to a group of marauding restaurateurs who're kicking them out april 1. stay apprised via their blog, for which they got served cease and desist papers. as if.

the world's shittiest mix tape?

2006-02-28T23:58:00.000-05:00

here's a video of comic aziz ansari and friends' world's shittiest mix tape contest. the video isn't as funny as the song selections. regardless, the dawson's creek theme song is an inspired choice, as is that crazy town song "butterfly" (lyrics: "come my lady, come come my lady, you're my butterfly"). little known fact: back in the day, DJ AM was on the turntables for crazy town. wow.

anyways, their video Shutterbugs is way more hilarious. recommended.

the lachey brothers

2006-02-28T23:33:00.000-05:00

the thing i love most about nick and drew lachey is that they're so unabashed about being entertainers, as opposed to musicians or even "artists." they're just balls-out in show business.

BBC.com: drew lachey wins "dancing with the stars"

the world wide web

2006-02-06T10:38:00.000-05:00

remember when people used to use the phrase "the Net"? remember the Sandra Bullock movie The Net? (circa back when the Internet was strange and scary.)

i'm freelance copyediting at a magazine today and seeing "the Net" in a style guide was a real blast from the past.

my brain is a focus group

2006-02-03T14:54:00.000-05:00

titles of stories I'll automatically read:

"'Full House' Cutie: I was a Meth Addict" [New York Post]

"Love and the Ambisexual, Heteroflexible Teen" [the coverline on NY magazine]

sidebar: above meth addict is the actress who played irritating middle sister stephanie tanner, who had a catchphrase that was so unmemorable that i now can't remember it. something about the fact that she lives in L.A. and is a meth addict upends my general meth stereotype. see, in my head, meth is a chief crop of the rural midwest that's exported directly to Chelsea, just like how i think of Appalachia whenever i hear the word "oxycontin." then again, the chick from Diff'rent Strokes robbed a video store in Vegas, so the lesson here is that the wreckage of post-child-stardom has no particular geography.

cat power/the new adult contemporary

2006-01-30T10:22:00.000-05:00

i like cat power, maybe not as much as the next sensistive girl, but a whole lot. that's why i'm sad to report that her new album, The Greatest, sounds just like a norah jones song about moods, the kind you might hear in a candle store—not Yankee Candle but Illuminations, the fancier one found at more chic malls. not that there's anything wrong with norah j., it's just not what you want to hear from cat power, who's still awesome regardless. (incidentally, Pitchfork agrees; here's the review.)

while we listened to The Greatest my roommate smartly wondered whether there will be easy listening station when we're older that'll be all cat power, iron & wine, and will oldham, and we'll drink cabernet or herbal tea and turn it on to feel "soothed."

a million little fact-checkers

2006-01-28T13:41:00.000-05:00

there is actually next to nothing left to say about the james frey/Million Little Pieces ordeal, since every op-ed writer, celebrated memoirist, and general-interest internet essayist already weighed in with their two cents, beginning approximately five to seven minutes after the story broke. as a onetime pro fact-checker, i'm amused by the calls for fact-checking that follow this kind of jayson blairish debacle, since a lot of the time fact-checking goes like this—me: is the couch really blue? writer: well, i guess it's more of a periwinkle. me: should we make that change in the piece? or—me: how much is your chicken burrito? whoever picks up the phone at the restaurant: $5.99. me: not $4.99? restaurant: no, you're mistaken. i.e., fact-checking is fairly banal and not necessarily geared toward proving that the author of the piece you're checking is lying about his jail sentence, root canals, or his girlfriend's suicide. not that fact-checking couldn't do that, and there are times you do get immersed in the subject of the story, but normally it doesn't and you don't; it's more about confirming information than getting at the "essential truth" of things.

that said, the manuscript should've been looked into far more than it was, and nan talese was sort of heinous on Oprah (see the transcript here), so much so that it could affect her career. frey's a liar who made and continues to make a gajillion dollars off his lie; he was so pathetic it was uncomfortable to watch him. and who let him dress like the sloppy intern? frank rich was wearing a suit, for chrissakes, and oprah was very business casual, like an HR lady with soul.

bottom line: i love oprah, even when she's a hardass.

fur cups for teeth

2006-01-03T16:36:00.001-05:00

i saw this all-girl band at a party on new year's eve and they were really hot: dancey/rock, sort of le tigre, vaguely karen o. it was fantastic. they wear coordinated outfits, too.

returning to my interweb roots

2005-12-31T00:17:00.000-05:00

i just read jen snow's blog and it made me want to restart up my blog.

i also like jen snow's website, and not just because her cousin, mr. jonathan zacks, set it up and also helped set up my own site.

dot com

2005-12-28T13:13:00.000-05:00

i am now virtually housed at Emily Weinstein dot com. i'd say "check it out now" but there's really nothing there yet, so..."check it out later."

notes from...

2005-08-18T17:42:00.000-04:00

Jude Law's penis, courtesy of fittedsweats

and jotham, of the jotham report, who gave me his new copy of Radar magazine, the one with the heavily photoshopped Tom Cruise–as–Mohammed Ali on the cover. at first i thought the issue was not so good and already dated, especially given it was dealing with pop culture blahblahs and gossip from june, when they were putting it together, but the articles are pretty good, clever, well-written, and all that crap. he also brings me the NY Observer, because he's neat.

Victory Lap returns with a pro-Philly/anti–Sunday Styles rant

2005-08-17T18:45:00.000-04:00

only some straight-up Sunday Styles crap could rouse my from heatstroke-induced slumber—specifically, the bizarre "Philly is the sixth borough" story that ran in that sad excuse for a styles section. it's almost as bad as a trend-forward Jennifer 8. Lee production. here's the clever rebuttal, which includes what i think is an accurate accusation: that for years New York City has been "masturbating furiously at the sight of itself." it's funny because it's true, and because it uses the word "masturbate."

also, just to bring you up to speed:
good Editor & Publisher story about media corporations who only care about the bottom line, not the quality of the content. i also heart Brendan Koerner, always and forever, even in the NYT sunday business section. read all about "america's love affair with ranch dressing."

i'm taking a break from NYC, stifling heat, and pricey heirloom tomatoes to go to Maine this weekend, where i will hopefully eat lobster rolls in peace, all day long, on a rocky beach. then i'm going to school in less than three weeks. pack up your pencil cases!

and i had a story on the Voice website this week about the FDA, fake boobs, and the morning-after pill. all things to know about, if you are committed to being in the know about those things. or other things, like the president generally being an ass and making a lot of people miserable.

finally, check out Harper's Weekly Review. it's highly likeable. choice excerpt from this week's edition:

"President Mahmoud Abbas announced that the Palestinian general election will be delayed until January 2006, and Palestinian authorities forced hundreds of volunteers to stop making a 2,460-foot sandwich. The U.S. Army fired four-star General Kevin Byrnes, head of the Army Training and Doctrine Command, for adultery. Cream puffs with 560 calories and 47 grams of fat were selling briskly at the Wisconsin State Fair. Pfizer patented a drug that cures premature female orgasm . . . Approximately 2,000 dolphins gathered off the coast of Wales, but no one knew why. A study found that 1 in 25 fathers was unknowingly raising another man's child, a situation referred to as “paternal discrepancy,” . . . Women in Sudan were committing adultery so that they could be arrested and thus obtain a divorce; Sudanese men are often resistant to divorce because it requires them to return a bride’s dowry. 'He wasn't caring for me,' said Ding Maker, an imprisoned woman whose dowry was 90 cows. 'I don't mind staying here.' A South Korean man played video games for 50 straight hours, then died, a man in Australia was charged with bestiality with a rabbit, and a man wearing an AC/DC T-shirt was criticized for dancing on Ronald Reagan's grave." ack.

sarah vowell's op-ed: the speech Bush should give

2005-07-13T12:28:00.000-04:00

sarah vowell's piece—"The Speech the President Should Give"—is a good read, though i have enough thoughts on my own about the apocalypse, thanks, especially after reading a depressing, semi-crackpot review of geographer/architectural critic James Kunstler's new book, The Long Emergency, in Arthur magazine.

in other news, just got back from a long weekend in Omaha and South Dakota, where there were lots of fat people and fried chicken. it was unclear to me whether they were concerned about apocalypse. on the one hand, everyone drives, and everything is huge and air conditioned, which was depressing yet vaguely comforting in a "hey, they're not worried, why are you?" kind of way. but on the other hand, we repeatedly passed places with signs that would say things like "go-kart fun track open today. jesus lives!" which makes me think that they're a little worried too. still, it seems that consciousness about this stuff is rising, even if it's outpaced by general disregard for human health and the environment. let's all hope the tides turn; the fact that soon more than half the world's population will live in cities may help (at least with gasoline consumption, right?). sorry to harsh your mellow, victory lap reader!

bonfire of the Vanity: Graydon 'n Paris 4eva

2005-06-27T15:45:00.000-04:00

from Radar mag online:
Vanity Fair staffers under the impression that they work for a high-minded publication are steamed over editor Graydon Carter’s reported choice of Paris Hilton for the September issue’s cover, we hear. “Graydon is obsessed—obsessed—with her and has been dying to put her on the cover for a long time,” says one Hollywood insider.

But top editors at the glossy—many of whom wanted Beyoncé for the coveted slot—feel Hilton isn’t VF cover material, and certainly not worthy of a fawning 5,000-word profile....“You can only print ‘That’s Hot’ so many times,” complains the source. Carter, who’s besotted with the porn-star-turned-fast-food-pitchwoman, couldn’t care less. “He invites her to the Oscar party every year and just nuzzles up to her,” the source notes. “He doesn’t care about Julia Roberts or Cameron Diaz—he thinks Paris is the fluffy epitome of what VF is all about. Graydon also loves the fact that she’s a skank and isn’t embarrassed about it.” Write what you know!

republicans program their tie-clad babies

2005-06-15T12:28:00.000-04:00

like kangaroos stuffing their babies into their pouches, the right finds ever more ways to mobilize their young, such as well-paid internships with swanky dorms at the super-conservative heritage foundation. the NYT describes this summer's interns as tacking up Reagan posters in their cubicles and feeling relieved that the $600k program is "an escape from the liberal orthodoxies they said they experienced at Harvard and Yale." like all the hate propagated by the amoral, slutty publishing interns hanging around the NYU dorms all summer.

mr. & mrs. smith: "the prospect of a hot hate fuck looms tantalizingly"

2005-06-10T17:52:00.000-04:00

"Most viewers will be studying this film for clues to, as a recent Us Weekly headline put it, 'how Angelina stole Brad.' (The movie supports some of the magazine's extensively researched theories, in particular 'She's Flirtatious!' and 'She's Fun!' but is inconclusive on others, like 'She Lives in the Now!')"

i liked this Voice review of Mr. and Mrs. Smith. also secretly a little bit looking forward to browsing W mag's 60-page bonanza of hottt-Brad-and-Angie-as-married-'60s-couple pix.

could the RIAA be any more heinous than they currently are?

2005-06-10T17:25:00.000-04:00

probably, as those wrinkly Sith lords of the recording industry did applaud and aid (and i think even tipped off/spurred on) the NYPD on a raid at Kim's on st. marks, where cops actually arrested the store's clerks and held them overnight. maybe if the major music labels worked a little harder at not severing umbilical cords promptly after an artist/band maxes out on their two minutes of novelty, people would care about screwing them out of their heinous $17.99. it's bullyish—arresting the employees, handcuffing them like they're violent criminals.

sidebar: the reason you almost never hear the song "happy birthday" sung in movies is 'cause some douche owns the rights and demands royalties (says The Corporation, a movie i wish everyone could see).

chris klein's rebuttal

2005-06-08T17:31:00.000-04:00

courtesy of fittedsweats. mini-prevue:

Chris Klein: [pacing] Tom Cruise is weird? I'm weird! I am. I love women. I do. I love Katie. Still! I love a lot of stuff. Gazpacho. I'm pregnant with my lust for gazpacho.

Agent: Back up.

Chris Klein: I do wild stuff. Crazy. Like Charles Manson. Loco. Look at this foot work. Should I stagger like this? I'm waffle batter. Pour me into the crazy machine.

ps. yesterday i decided to spare you all a post about how Katie Holmes requested a small private dressing room at the MTV movie awards, which she subsequently stuffed like a phone booth circa 1959 with her hair/makeup people and no less than six scientologists. that poor girl.

hilarious pps. addendum: The Minor Fall, The Major Lift posted this Yankee Pot Roast magic, clarifying that Tom Cruise loves women. true love really is fodder for magnificent prose.

Siren lineup: hot or not?

2005-06-08T15:48:00.000-04:00

the Voice announced the Siren Festival lineup last week, with rumored additions Ambulance LTD and Morningwood. here's what i am feeling at the moment; the weather underground could change:

hurrah: Spoon, Mates of State, the Dears, Q and not U

meh/who?: Brendan Benson, Dungen, Morningwood, VHS or Beta

boo: Ambulance Ltd.

wish list: Arcade Fire, the Decemberists, Dinosaur Jr., the New Pornographers, Broken Social Scene, Fannypack, Steven Malkmus, some permutation of Magnolia Electric Co., Au Revoir Simone, the Flaming Lips, Of Montreal, the Unicorns, the Wrens

funny (or, not remotely funny) that almost half of said wish list (including my beloved Decemberists) will be playing Pitchfork's Intonation Music Festival in Chicago the very same weekend.

au revoir, freedom of the press!

2005-06-08T14:12:00.000-04:00

ward sutton demonstrates how a hypothetical deep throat '05 could never happen 'cause the Bush white house controls information with an iron fist, and journalists just play along. (apparently, things don't happen anymore unless a publicist says they do.) don't click on the comic itself to see it larger; click here instead.

speaking of, here's a great transcript of Bill Moyers speaking at a media reform conference. this part is especially rockin': "Never has there been an administration so disciplined in secrecy, so precisely in lockstep in keeping information from the people at large and–in defiance of the Constitution–from their representatives in Congress. Never has the so powerful a media oligopoly–the word is Barry Diller’s, not mine–been so unabashed in reaching like Caesar for still more wealth and power. Never have hand and glove fitted together so comfortably to manipulate free political debate, sow contempt for the idea of government itself, and trivialize the people’s need to know."

oh yeah, and coldplay is "the most insufferable band of the decade"

2005-06-06T19:41:00.000-04:00

"the lyrics can make me wish I didn't understand English." (NYT)

manhattan lit map delite

2005-06-06T16:14:00.000-04:00

i've opted not to go for a scientology-post hat trick because i think this NYT interactive map of literary settings in manhattan, annotated with quotes from the novels, is so neat. that, and there's not much more to say about scientology except how totally creepo it is.

on the map: Woody Allen's revelation in The Whore of Mensa that the Hunter College bookstore is a front for a prostitution ring; Tom, Gatsby, and Daisy's Plaza-suite encounter; Holden Caulfield's duck pond in the park; some Bright Lights Big City in the village.

more "evidence" in the case against scientology

2005-06-06T15:33:00.000-04:00

Beck. supposedly his father staged an "intervention" where he locked Beck in his house for a weekend. tiny Beck emerged a fully formed scientologist. i'm very concerned.

here's a link to the Church of Scientology's official website. did you know that kelly preston feels more alive, thanks to something called a purification rundown? (doesn't that sound like a colonoscopy?) and, because i'm fair and balanced, take a look at Scientology Kills, which looks a little shoddy but has some ok articles posted.

she blinded me with scientology

2005-06-06T12:07:00.000-04:00

consider this explanation for the tom cruise–katie holmes peculiarity: scientology. he's got her brainwashed like a Stepford wife! looky here for a brief description of Tom scarily proselytizing to a Details writer—he also pitched a scientology tent on the War of the Worlds set where "volunteer ministers" in suits offered massages. hmmm. meanwhile, page six works the Katie angle, claiming that Tom's sister/publicist has been in control of Katie's interviews, especially when Tomtom is around, and that they showed up for a Batman press junket with "an entourage of Scientologists in tow." an entourage of scientologists? aaaaaahhhhhhhh! save yourself! this is so twilight zone, i can't even stand it. or maybe scientology mandates the sacrifice of a virgin? either way dude, i'm freaked.

all this scientology coverage is randomly coinciding with my getting around to reading an article on kabbalah in the march Vanity Fair, which says that the kabbalah centre is turning huge profits for the rabbi and his wife, who now drive benzes whilst hustling money from flake celebs eager to become "vessels of light." used to be that kabbalah was an intensely religious practice requiring old-fashioned devotion (only hebrew scholars over the age of 40 could study), so i find all this new agey crap—especially the intentional p.r. divorce from judaism, designed to attract more people—to be kind of weird and insulting.

roll bounce = mindblowing excitement

2005-06-02T12:31:00.000-04:00

watch the Roll Bounce trailer, even though it's not coming out til september. it will rock you like a soulful kneesock-clad hurricane on roller skates in 1978. ps. that's bow wow (he dropped the "lil")

deep throat mania

2005-06-01T18:30:00.000-04:00

romenesko has up a wide range of links to stories and commentary related to the deep throat revelation: the fact that Woodward and the Washington Post didn't get to unveil it, how the story was handled in the Vanity Fair offices, how astonishing it is that Felt, along with two journalists, actually brought down Nixon. (remember how Abu Ghraib didn't bring down Bush?) the actual Vanity Fair story about Felt is available online. thanks, graydon! we owe you a lime rickey.

pottymouth

2005-06-01T16:49:00.000-04:00

looking over this may's posts, i realize now i am one. i vow to change! no more cussing, no more drama.

please let this craigslist posting be real

2005-06-01T16:16:00.000-04:00

thank you, Defamer, for calling attention to this eerily Tom-and-Katie-like scenario (and for photoblogging Tom on Oprah), in the form of a highly plausible job posting on L.A.'s craigslist:

Needed: Actress (23-30) as a Cover-up Date for a Homosexual Celebrity

I am the personal assistant to a major celebrity. He is gay and needs an attractive woman to pose as his girlfriend and accompany him to movie premieres, Hollywood parties, etc. Must be an actress, well spoken, educated and extremely gorgeous. Someone who is multi-lingual is a bonus as there will be considerable travel, especially to Europe. We will require a confidentiality agreement to be signed and notarized, as you can imagine the media would love to pounce on this story.

Think of this as an acting job where your goal is to make everyone belive that the two of you are in love. The compensation will be generous, I assure you and the connections you will make will most likely make your career, if you truly are a “great” actress. We require a resume and at least one current photo, preferably a full-body photo (as we are looking for someone with a great figure to make him look good) and a headshot. This is an amazing opportunity for a struggling actress!!

you know, at first i didn't care that Tom Cruise thought his new pal of 2.5 weeks was "magnificient." but now i really want to get to the bottom of this Tom Cruise–Katie Holmes thing. i am on the Tom and Katie beat. i watched the Oprah rerun that night. i wondered why. i think about it at night. is he gay? is it for their movies? is this a big Rock Hudson–style cover-up? what? what is happening? is it true that he had a list of potential beards? was Nicole Kidman really under a 10-year contract to stay married to him? i need to know.

camp wanatakee deep-throat scoop! circa 1989

2005-06-01T14:31:00.000-04:00

i'm cutting and pasting Gawker here out of utter laziness: "In 1999, a high-schooler named Chase Culeman-Beckman wrote a paper for his history class, the title of which was (roughly) Deep Throat is Mark Felt.

I was in the “Herons” group along with about fifteen other 8, 9, and 10 year olds. One Friday in July we went on a trip to Sag Harbor, and Jacob [Bernstein], Max and I ended up sitting in the sand precociously talking about politics...During the conversation Jacob told me: “Deep Throat was Mark Felt, he’s someone in the FBI. I’m 100% sure.”

That’s Jacob Bernstein, as in the son of Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein, one of only three people who actually knew Deep Throat’s identity (until today)." you can read a Slate article about it published in 1999 here. ps. the camp was in the hamptons. clearly.

disturbing New York Mag story

2005-05-26T13:35:00.000-04:00

the choirboy molestation story. this is deeply fucked up.

more on lady columnists

2005-05-25T14:33:00.000-04:00

or lack thereof, courtesy of the Observer. i like her writing, but i'm starting to think Maureen Dowd is really annoying as a person. she whines about her sweet job and agency to write whatever she wants to whoever will listen just like a drunk chick clinging to the end of a cocktail party, cornering people polite enough to ask "how are you?" while she sloshes her cosmo all over herself. oh, no.

fittedsweats on new releases:

2005-05-23T19:10:00.000-04:00

"If someone tells you an Australian band called the Cat Empire is good, please walk away from them, then call their parents and say, 'You raised a real asshole.' They sound like Gogol Bordello–Right Said Fred—Ru Paul on a Tequiza bender. If you have a friend who won't shut up about how much ethnic food they eat, give them a Cat Empire CD and call it even."

this blog is awesome.

lee the girl wonder/crippled detectives

2005-05-23T13:15:00.000-04:00

meant to post this last week—the Voice's Ed Park writes about a 7-year-old girl, lee, who in 1976 wrote and illustrated a 25-chapter novella with a wild, careening plotline and brilliant absurd dialogue (characters speak in shapes!) called the Crippled Detectives. she's later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and never writes again, but her mother is a published poet who chronicles their relationship. really bizarre and fascinating; worth reading.

VV: Ed's Village Voice literary supplement piece
Stone Soup: Crippled Detectives

xgau seal of approval

2005-05-23T13:14:00.000-04:00

Robert Christgau writes about brooklyn band Wide Right, comparing the lead singer to Loretta Lynn.

the russian word pizd'uk means "a rare asshole"

2005-05-20T13:57:00.000-04:00

it also translates to "dirty smelly cunt." (no joke. a guy from the state dept told me that.) some Latvian pranksters made these signs to protest bush's visit last week. it's sort of an inter-lingual pun, 'cause when you say "peace duke" out loud in English, you're actually calling someone a total vagina in Russian. you know, like George W. Bush.

photos featuring the "peace duke" signs were run by news agencies and major papers around the world as proof of support for Bush in eastern europe (not so, the majority of those people oppose the war in iraq). anyways, Vanna blogs about this and has lots of links, including one to a letter his friend wrote to WaPo. here's more about the Latvian dudes who did this; they run an ad agency and wrote about their entire anti-bush protest on their website (click on "news").

i watched a lot of tv this week

2005-05-20T12:26:00.000-04:00

the OC season finale was so good last night i almost puked when it was over. that's how good it was. ok, the puking is a metaphor; for what, i don't know. also found myself committing, emotionally, to the final episodes of America's Next Top Model on both tues and weds nights.

"indie-yuppie" definition mayhem, a.k.a. hipsters point fingers

2005-05-19T12:42:00.000-04:00

the NY Post keeps upping the ante on their "trend coverage." the latest stoke of genius: "Rebel with a 401(k)," a treatise on hipsters with jobs and money. impressive, but you'll never defeat Jennifer 8. Lee, conqueror of the man date, and those harbingers of awesome over at the Times. now you have to register to read the Post online, but it's free. they just collect your really personal data for some sort of murdochian evildoing. (ps. Jotham, of the Jotham Report, pointed out the other day how redneck the word "evildoing" is; i.e., "i'm doin' evil today before the possum hunt.")

here's the Columbia Spectator interview with Vice's Adam Shore that sparked this. for evidence of standard carnivorous hipster-on-hipster hate, there's always someone on CL missed connections with nothing better to do than type up a college app essay about how much they hate the L train.

and, seriously, look inside yourself. like, really deep inside. are you an indie-yuppie? now live in fear of being uncool.

xx-chromosome baseball machine!

2005-05-19T11:59:00.000-04:00

the only girl (11 years old) in an upstate-NY little league threw a perfect game! and she's batting .714! that is fucking awesome.

britney and kevin's Chaotic: the victory lap review

2005-05-18T10:52:00.000-04:00

is britney really so over that her reality-TV debut has gone largely ignored? (does no one watch UPN?) then again, this time last year, pre-KFeds, it seemed like brit might hack it as an olsen-style downtownish icon. well, i still root for britney, even though, as this sad yearbook-video of her Hotel Onyx tour (a stage show emceed by The Penguin) suggests, she pretty much begs kevin to love her and mistakes his complete lack of personality for his being "really super cool." meanwhile, her bodyguards think he's a sleazy, freeloading retard. which is true. but even though it seems like he can barely tolerate her, kev is a total fuckpuppy; they have sex constantly, which is why i guess she ultimately proposed to him. (at first he said no. so sad.) anywho, what it all boils down to is that i will be watching next week.

here's a WaPo article about the show, just in case you like to read.

stop the presses

2005-05-17T16:33:00.000-04:00

Revenge of the Sith, better than Star Wars? so say the drama queens over at the NYT. god, please let it be true. (i tried hard to find the NY tabloid pics of dweebs waiting in line dressed in their storm trooper costumes, but those websites are a fucking mess. please settle instead for a pic of hayden christensen, looking like a stone-cold, jedi-gone-bad fox.)

in other shocking NYT stories, science returns to issue of the female orgasm, and a Sulzberger defends their recent decision to charge for online access to Op-Eds. Maureen Dowd is crying a little, somewhere.

girls gone skeletal

2005-05-16T13:43:00.000-04:00

the NYT says that 70 percent of the passengers who are treated by subway EMTs are young women who passed out from not eating. christ. in related news, the LA Times reports on the business/pleasure exploits of Lindsay Lohan, who for serious wants to be treated like an adult. well, you know, she is only 18. such a babe 20 lbs ago, too.

the corporation: frightening yet entertaining

2005-05-16T12:00:00.000-04:00

watched a really good/depressing/fascinating documentary last night called The Corporation, which basically asks "if the corporation is a person—which it is legally—what kind of person would it be?" (a: a psychopath, if you go by the FBI's definition.)

along with all the usual horrifying stuff (children born with horrible birth defects; economics of third world exploitation and slave wages; an American company who bought the rights to all the drinking water in Bolivia, including puddles), there was a good corporate media bit: two Fox News investigative reporters who did a story about the drug company who makes rBGH (hormone that's fed to cows to make the produce more milk; harmful for humans to consume, fed to american children every day at school) once that company threatened to sue. a Fox exec tried to force them to rewrite the story to make it more flattering to the drug company, telling them "the news is what I say it is." then he tried to bribe them and finally strung them along through 83 rewrites until they could be fired for insubordination. the reporters sued as whistle-blowers and ultimately lost because it's not illegal (at least not in Florida, where they sued) for a news organization to knowingly lie to the public.

anyways, the website is almost bizarrely uninformative about the movie is actually like, so here's a Village Voice review that i googled just for you. everyone should have to see this. once a company gets a copyright on human life—the only form of life currently unpatentable— we're all fucked. but you know i'm just afraid of the war against the machines.

children, rejoice

2005-05-12T12:40:00.000-04:00

stellaaa! stelllaaaaaa! (ha! i slay myself.)
NYT: New 'Guest' at H&M

i just saw liev schrieber on the street...

2005-05-09T21:48:00.000-04:00

and his little mustache (for Glengarry Glen Ross?) makes him look like a douchebag.

update/query: how gross, on a scale of 1 to 10, is the phrase "douchestache"?

monday morning delights: bob saget's pottymouth, a gawker media exposé, and the huffington post

2005-05-09T11:43:00.000-04:00

at first it seemed strange and random, but once i started reading the NY Observer's article on Bob Saget and how he tells the filthiest version of the world's dirtiest joke, i recognized its editorial brilliance. one for the Nexis abstract: "Saget is the dirtiest motherfucking cocksucker that ever walked the face of the earth!" turns out that in addition to making jokes about fucking his daughters up the ass, he has also recently been honored by his synagogue.

also worth a look-see: a NYT business section story on gawker media, "A Blog Revolution? Get a Grip"; i wondered if it would be on Gawker this morning, and it wasn't. guess that's not surprising. i kind of liked Arianna Huffington's new-today Huffington Post, a collection of blog posts from famous people like Ellen Degeneres, David Mamet, and Mike Nichols. don't bother looking at crappity sunday styles; beyond a so-so story about a dude who lives in a retirement village and writes about it, it's just another week of disappointment and heartache. trust me.

why i haven't blogged lately

2005-04-28T11:51:00.000-04:00

friends, i've been doing some other stuff. i know that sounds like an excuse. but i've been wandering around town, fact-checking, doing some bar reviews, working on an essay, and getting accepted to dork college for writers. and i just finished a great book about rats; check out this interview with the author (and New Yorker contributor), Robert Sullivan. see, it's like i've already graduated from dork college. cum laude!

the republican "culture of life." ick.

2005-03-22T15:10:00.001-05:00

i feel badly for terri schiavo. pundits are airing her personal history (which includes an anorexic stint), her parents are circulating footage of her meant to elicit some right-wing Christian sympathy (mission accomplished), and here she is, a vegetable for the past 14 years, looped up on national TV. her own husband wants to let her die with dignity. i am tired of hearing about this (21,600 Google News hits in 30 days, and that's just a sampling of news sources), so i'll just link up to the great Slate analysis of the "culture of life" and mention that the Iraq civilian death toll is at 17,000 and counting...

comedy central picks up Stella, much to my joy/dismay

2005-03-22T14:35:00.000-05:00

am i happy? am i sad? either way, i am terribly late on this "news." back in january, comedy central ordered 10 episodes of brilliant Stella comedy, which are set to air this summer. (Stella is State alums Michael Showalter, Michael Ian Black, and David Wain. see this freakish fan blog comprised of Stella links for further info and borderline–Single White Female obsessiveness.) while i'm pleased they're doing well, this almost guarantees that i will never see them live at a small venue, a luxury i squandered by never going, not even once, to their regular fez show. so, i suppose you could call my dismay "selfishness," or perhaps "my own fault." but put my troubles aside and watch their hilarious, obtuse videos online.

'99 problems but a bitch ain't one':TV cuss words, tween mags, and the lack of ladies on op-ed pages

2005-03-22T10:44:00.000-05:00

inspired perhaps by those righteous, nitpicky bitches over at the FCC, the NYT explores the evolution of "bitch" on TV and its "new" application to men in exhausting detail.

the excellent Brendan I. Koerner takes a look at the tween "gossip" bible J-14, the cheap cut-and-paste little sister of In Touch (a.k.a. the poor man's Star magazine. Ouch!). J-14 outsells Teen People (not surprising, these days), ElleGirl (plus: helmed by Christina Kelly, minus: nowhere near as good as Sassy), and the brilliant Teen Vogue (beloved by fashion editors and twentysomething girls), which all look like the New Yorker next to this Tiger Beat crap.

hot on the heels of harvard president Lawrence Summers making an ass out of himself, a "why there aren't more women on the op-ed page" debate has started to rage. Maureen Dowd threw in her two cents last week, with a much criticized op-ed about being a female columnist in which she correctly points out, "There's been a dearth of women writing serious opinion pieces for top news organizations, even as there's been growth in female sex columnists for college newspapers. Going from Tess Harding to Carrie Bradshaw, Dorothy Thompson to Candace Bushnell, is not progress." true. Editor and Publisher offers a more distanced, "scientific" roundup of female columnists' opinions.

today: martians 'n' sex talks, williamsburg real estate, and r.i.p. mr. delorean

2005-03-21T19:30:00.000-05:00

not to delve too deeply into my neuroses, but i have been submerged in a blog identity crisis for much of the afternoon. i read a bunch of relatively high-quality blogs, and it made me wish i had more time and woke up early enough in the morning (literally and figuratively) to post the articles i would've read anyway had they already not been posted on gawker an hour earlier. scooped! so i have devised this time-saving solution: since i only have one regular reader (thanks, kate, you're my girl), i bet no one will be too upset if i group a lot of stuff i think is worth reading into one post, with only one pithy sentence of description for each link, as opposed to an entire paragraph's worth of nothing. how 'bout that? ok.

in the midst of the FCC/decency debate (this week's Time magazine cover "package" [gasp] asks "Has TV Gone Too Far?"and includes these useful charticles) McSweeney's offers a guide on
how to talk to your kids about almost anything, like aliens and sex.

it's probably just my loathing of the Gap "pretty khaki" onslaught that has moved me to appreciate this decent parody-blog, Other Guys Like Me So Marry Me Already(.blogspot.com).

and here i thought williamsburg was dead! the NYT trendspotters wipe off their crystal balls and declare williamsburg a buyer's market (if you're in the market for million-dollar condos in fairly impoverished neighborhoods).

looking for love with a like-minded conservative? then you are so in luck: check out conservative pundit Sean Hannity's miracle-working solution, Hannidate (scroll down and look on the right side of the page). watch out, JDate! you're going down!

and finally, RIP John Z. DeLorean, whose dream of manufacturing futuristic cars was sadly deferred. as my colleague dan always says, "there's nothing like keeping your company afloat by selling drugs!" own your own collectible '81 delorean for as little as $6,000.

ASME hearts The New Yorker. and Details.

2005-03-17T16:39:00.000-05:00

so many interesting stories in the news this week, yet i break my silence to bring you word of the National Magazine Award nominations, a.k.a. the New Yorker dry-hump (entirely deserved, of course). strange surprise: Details made the "general excellence" list. must be their whole "gay or _____?" bit that wowed 'em. (or perhaps the softcore fashion spreads. who's on that awards committee, anyways?) on another, sweeter note, so heartening to see the excellent Believer magazine on the ballot.

'cause uglies don't sell magazines

2005-03-10T18:21:00.000-05:00

mag journalism 101: the unattractive don't move issues. neither do men, says Vanity Fair editor graydon carter, who put three miscellaneous eastern european "supermodels" (we're using that term lightly these days) on the april cover.

the jotham report, no. 1

2005-03-10T17:39:00.000-05:00

my nice bf, jotham, who usually spends his time reporting and writing brooklyn news stories, called and let me know that:
(a) martha's stock has plummeted since she left prison (and i don't think he means "her stock has plummeted!" in the Clueless sense)
(b) when you google "google" you get 127 million hits. that's so meta. will keep you readers posted if he gets any other scoops!

martha is more popular than ever!

2005-03-10T12:26:00.000-05:00

all the glowing martha s. coverage in the past couple of days (including a NY Post story that goes so far as to suggest that minimum-security prison is the new ashram) reminds me of the scene in Heathers in which JD (Christian Slater) watches local news coverage about the heinously bitchy "popular" girl (front and center in the pic above, in plaid) he and gf Veronica (Winona Ryder) murdered, and then made it look like a suicide. while fellow students who openly hated her remember her fondly on the news, he exclaims, in disbelief, "Heather Chandler is more popular than ever!" it's totally applicable.

liberal-arts-college kids: drunken, repressed, and sensitive about it

2005-03-09T16:49:00.000-05:00

my seven sisters soulmates over at Wellesley filled up 11 emergency room beds during their annual Dyke Ball. they even made page six (scroll all the way down). what? when i was at Vassar back in the day, more than 30 beds were filled by midnight of Homo Hop, which the school has since banned. where was our shout out? and Bard's storied Menage party? they used to have cages, a foam pit, and a "look the other way" drug policy; the less you wore, the less admission you paid. kids went to the hospital. where are you, Lloyd Grove? report from the frontlines!

update: NY Press' editor resigns

2005-03-07T13:00:00.000-05:00

according to Fishbowl NY, NY Press' editor-in-chief, Jeff Koyen, has just resigned following this whole Pope article debacle (see below). wow. that's a dramatic response. and in vaguely related news, Jane Pratt is pregnant with twins. could these two incidents be linked somehow? preposterous theories accepted via comments.

politicans agree that the NY Press is awful

2005-03-04T18:17:00.000-05:00

full disclosure: i concur that the NY Press is heinous. i didn't bother picking up their new issue, the cover story of which is titled "The 52 Funniest Things About The Upcoming Death of The Pope," because i never pick up the NY Press. but put my feelings aside for a second and consider that mighty NY Daily News gossip columnist lloyd grove has condemned the story AND got chuck schumer, hillary clinton, bloomberg, and fernando ferrer to shit-talk it too.

travolta can't stop, won't stop

2005-03-04T11:34:00.000-05:00

john travolta (a.k.a. oprah's favorite white man) and pals really set themselves up by naming their Get Shorty follow-up "Be Cool." (and by bringing steven tyler in for a cameo—nothing says "cool" like aerosmith and chiffon scarves.) anyways, witness today's clever, clever headlines:

NY Post: "Don't Be Cool"
Boston Globe: "Dated 'Be Cool' comes up short-y"
Detroit Free Press: "'Be Cool': Not Cool"

sidebar: one of my coworkers (mr. darren reidy) thought that the barrage of "cool" posters wallpapering NYC streets were gap ads. uh, i can think of nothing scarier that john travolta grooving, in close-up, against a white screen, while wearing a pair of tight khakis.

"literary Jezebels"/attention-craving college chicks try to live down their campus sex columns

2005-03-03T17:18:00.000-05:00

someone please tell me why the world needs college-girl sex columns about what it was like to pursue and nail some dweeby boy-in-the-dorm-room-next-door. it's so unnecessary. and, it turns out, perhaps too "spicy" for the resume, as this Baltimore Sun article, cutely titled Risque Business, claims. especially irritating: natalie krinsky's new "novel," Chloe Does Yale (scroll down on its amazon.com page to check out the amusing user reviews).

bloomy, oprah, and bill and melinda g. show us some cash

2005-03-03T13:11:00.000-05:00

Slate just published their annual list of the 60 more generous philanthropists of 2004; leading with an astounding $3.4 billion dollars pledged to their own foundation are bill and melinda gates. that's more than the gross domestic product of several caribbean islands combined. oprah, bless her heart, is up there, and is filthy rich NYC mayor michael bloomberg (who serves as our fair city's mayor practically pro-bono). the late susan t. buffett, wife of warren, is no. 2 on the list, donating $2.6 billion to lots of charities based in some mysterious, faraway land named omaha.

fun oscar memories

2005-02-28T00:28:00.000-05:00

highlights from tonight's oscar ceremony: (1) chris rock's man-on-the-street interviews with black moviegoers, who loved White Chicks and just didn't happen to catch Sideways or The Aviator. lesson learned: white people are sappy, boring dorks. (2) prince, onstage, in the flesh, looking disturbed about having to even utter the names of the nominees in the always-horrific "best song" category. and (3), camera cuts to leonardo d., seated in the front row next to a portly, middle-aged seatfiller in an unfortunate gown who was most definitely not his date, gisele the supermodel. bro, where's your hot lady friend? for other musings, go read Defamer's liveblog commentary.

babe flashback: the 1980 gold-medal-winning u.s. hockey team

2005-02-24T18:03:00.000-05:00

i wish i could find a better picture of the medal ceremony at the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics, where the U.S. hockey team beat the unbeatable Soviets 25 years ago this week in a feat known as the "miracle on ice" (glorified in the excellent disney movie Miracle, starring none other than Kurt Russell). clearly the real miracle is this bunch of hot shaggy-haired college boys in fitted velour jumpsuits, all jumping on each other to get up to the podium. swoon.

Missed Connections = the hot new thing!

2005-02-23T17:33:00.000-05:00

the trendspotters at the New York Times do it again! this time, they pick up on a new craze sweeping our city: Craigslist's Missed Connections. usually, they're so late on these things that a mention in the paper is usually a harbinger of the trend's decline (i.e. that big Friendster article in 2004, at least a year after it started to peak); that, or the editors are so eager to get the first word that they misidentify as a "new trend" something that is actually an "isolated incident." they're the ultimate outside source, your high school friend who's always the last to know. next week's exclusive: those frappuccino things we've heard so much about!

james cameron totally called it: the robot revolution is coming

2005-02-22T13:34:00.000-05:00

haven't we learned anything from the Terminator movies? the pentagon just approved a plan to spend $127 billion on building a robot army. first schwarzenegger's election, and now this...the rise of the machines is almost here. aaahhh!

this NYT article reports that some of the robot soldiers, which i have already mentally started calling g.i. mr. robotos, will even look like humans. apparently lawyers said there are no prohibitions against robots making life-or-death decisions. but rest assured: an army official said, "I have been asked what happens if the robot destroys a school bus rather than a tank parked nearby. We will not entrust a robot with that decision until we are confident they can make it." whew. well, jeez, that's not fucking terrifying or anything.

this makes me yearn for the friendly robots of my childhood: alice from the Jetsons, the irritating girl from Small Wonder, those adorable little guys from Short Circuit...

hunter s. thompson's editor breaks his silence

2005-02-22T02:45:00.000-05:00

there's been a flood of (well-deserved) "remembering hunter s./goodbye gonzo" essays written in the past day, appearing on the world wide web at a rate of exactly one every 2.378 minutes. but here's a special one, or so i think: a brief, loving piece written by hunter s. thompson's editor from his SF Examiner days, david mccumber. next up: paris hilton remembers hunter s. thompson.