Pretty Standard

whatchuckwore: “Yes, I am wearing the leather gloves. Yes, I...

Fri, 08 May 2009 12:55:57 -0400

“Yes, I am wearing the leather gloves. Yes, I am aware that they add a Patrick Bateman edge to the whole look. I’m okay with that. Do we have to go over who I am again?”

imchuckbass:

(via meesters)

Oh hello, favorite new blog.

“Sara Watson took three weeks to transform the car.”

Mon, 04 May 2009 23:31:17 -0400

“Sara Watson took three weeks to transform the car.”

This is definitely what you wear to take your students on a tour...

Mon, 04 May 2009 23:30:00 -0400

This is definitely what you wear to take your students on a tour of urban architecture in the Magic School Bus.

Infinite

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 17:08:17 -0400

dearoldlove:

You were the first and only person I wanted to talk to when I heard about David Foster Wallace.

Dear Future America's Next Top Model Contestants

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 10:52:12 -0400

If Tyra asks you about your favorite heroine in English literature, like she did to that Harvard girl on Wednesday, there’s really only one acceptable answer: Rosalind, the heroine of “As You Like It.” First of all: Shakespeare. Tyra will love that — shows you’re sophisticated. Second, Rosalind is a strong woman. We all know how ANTM feels about strong women. And third, Rosalind spends most of the play disguised as a young boy while hanging out with the man of her dreams. She needs to really sell the outfit, even as she’s trying to let her inner self shine through. This involves a lot of smiling with her eyes and, of course, being fierce — just like America’s Next Top Model! (You’re welcome.)

In other news, I’m pretty sure Gossip Girl is actually Serena’s grandmother CeCe.

Joyce Carol Totes

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 13:11:00 -0400

Granted, I have a massive girl-crush on Curtis Sittenfeld, a crush so powerful it withstood the experience of reading The Man of My Dreams in hardback as soon as it came out (in terms of letdowns, roughly the same as being the first person in line at the midnight showing of Harold and Kumar II). And granted also, I think Joyce Carol Oates is kind of a hack, what with her sixty different literary novels about serial killers in love with their sisters. Her latest, btw, is about JonBenet Ramsey, making her both suspiciously prolific and about ten years too late.

What I’m saying is that I might be biased, but I still think Oates’s review of Sittenfeld’s amazing-sounding new novelization of the life of Laura Bush, American Wife, is kind of bogus. Look, for example, at this put-down of Prep:

Much acclaimed at the time of its publication in 2005, the tersely titled “Prep” is not a brilliantly corrosive adolescent cri de coeur like J. D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye,” still less a powerful indictment of conformist American racist society like Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” but an unassuming coming-of-age memoirist fiction tracing the adventures and misadventures of a Midwestern girl…If Lee Fiora is a 21st-century American-girl pilgrim of sorts, her quest isn’t for a searing and illuminating truth but a girl’s wish to be “popular” with her peers and to be noticed.

One of the crazy things about fiction is that there’s often a difference between the intentions of the protagonist and the intentions of the novel itself. Yes, Lee really just wants to kiss Cross Sugarman (for the record, so do I) but that doesn’t make the book somehow untrue, or uninterested in the truth. In fact, what makes Prep so good is its relentless devotion to accuracy, to making Lee utterly unlikeable in a very realistic way.

Or take this awesomely condescending little paragraph:

Curtis Sittenfeld surely did not intend to create, in this mostly amiable, entertaining novel, anything so ambitious — or so presumptuous — as a political/cultural allegory in the 19th-century mode, yet “American Wife” might be deconstructed as a parable of America in the years of the second Bush presidency: the “American wife” is in fact the American people, or at least those millions of Americans who voted for a less-than-qualified president in two elections — the all-forgiving enabler for whom the bromide “love” excuses all.

Yeah, I’m sure that while thinking about Laura Bush for like two years, it never crossed Sittenfeld’s mind that her relationship with W might be an allegory for the country’s.

Obviously, I really, really want to like American Wife. And Oates ultimately seems pretty positive about it, despite all her Prep-bashing. Actually, the only thing in the review that makes the book seem disappointing are the excerpts: “Was I mutable, without a fixed identity?” the Laura Bush character muses. (I’m going to guess the answer is “yes.”) Still, Laura Bush’s life story is pretty fascinating, and there’s no one else I’d trust to do it justice; even Tony Kushner’s play about her, from around 2003, was totally unsastisfying in its look at Laura-Bush-as-person, as opposed to Laura-Bush-as-wife-of-monster. Maybe Curtis could do Sarah Palin next!

The Best Idea I Had All Summer

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 22:50:41 -0400

Referring to the cat as “Ball-of-fur Eliasson.”

Didn't the Onion Call This?

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 10:44:00 -0400

New York Magazine, yesterday:
Will McCain’s Surrogates Bring Up Barack Obama’s Destitute Kenyan Brother?

The Onion, August 13:
Obama’s Hillbilly Half-Brother Threatening To Derail Campaign

Capsule Review: Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 10:21:17 -0400

It’s sweet that Woody Allen thinks a post-collegiate free spirit ScarJo type would never have had a threesome before.

A Gross Sound

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 14:41:15 -0400

coffeeflavored:

Air kisses in the next room.

Kids in America

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 23:41:00 -0400

I’m a little surprised this article on the British teen show Skins didn’t once mention the words “gossip” or “girl.” The show was born when a TV producer’s son pointed out the problem with most dramas about teenagers:

“He said that being a teenager, by definition, means behaving badly, having sex, flirting with drink and drugs,” Mr. Elsley said, and all teenage dramas either pretend such things don’t happen or make sure that if they do, “people die as a consequence.”

So Skins, wisely, goes in the opposite direction — it plays the Carla Bruni, if you’ll forgive a geographically faulty metaphor, to Gossip Girl’s Laura Bush.

In the pilot, for example, Tony, the show’s main instigator of drinking and underage sex, takes a break from party planning to try out for the high school chorus. On Gossip Girl, the audition would have been presented as evidence of Tony’s deep-seated hypocricy. You’d hear his voice piping angelically over a montage of flashbacks in which he, say, molested someone in the Campbell Apartment and then drugged Serena to make her miss the SATs.

“Skins,” on the other hand, plays the scene completely straight. As Tony sings “On the Street Where You Live,” all the girls around him start to giggle because they think he’s cute, the point being that they’re right, he IS cute, and he has a nice voice, and generally the world is a better place when we can all just appreciate British guys with dramatic eyebrows singing songs from old musicals without tossing on a ton of subtext about how if you have premarital sex you’ll probably wind up dead.

(This is all particularly refreshing, by the way, if you find the new Gossip Girl ads incredibly irritating. Like, the Parents Television Council thinks you’re bad? Wow, you must be truly wicked — they haven’t been this upset since the third season of Friends.)

Forest, Trees, Etc

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 16:25:49 -0400

I’m back from self-imposed exile, if only for a moment, just because I cannot wrap my mind around Jezebel’s response to the concept of the Quirky Aggressive Female archetype, as invented by Lauren Bans (who is also a founding member of my book club!) Lauren writes:

Signs You Are A Quirky Aggressive Female:

#1.) You do drugs or you like talking about how you do drugs.

#2.) You use unique, half-witty, half-annoying sayings like “Dudesies!”, “For YAYs” and make jokes about “Rim Jobs” because you are so cool with your sexuality.

#3.) On dates, rather than awkwardness, you manifest your wants/needs/insecurities through aggressive lines like “So when are you going to kiss/fuck/lick my C???

To which Jezebel’s Sadie Stein replies:

I’m guessing you’re probably not going to discover, upon taking this quiz, that you are a QAF. Because the thing is, I’ve never actually seen any character besides Olivia Thirlby’s character in this movie who pulled all this nonsense.

I know it can be kind of hard to make a distinction between yourself as a writer and your publication as an entity, but, like, really? Sadie Stein might not do any of these things, but if Jezebel the blog were a person, she would do all of them! And while not all of the blog’s editors have cultivated a QAF pose, the site as a whole totally encourages this sort of behavior. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course, but a little self-awareness might be nice.

The Good Old Days

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 23:12:00 -0400

From a Talk of the Town about the history of New York’s poop scoop law:

Then you had your community activists—Max Schnapp, of POPA (Pet Owners Protective Association), a labor organizer and the owner of two Great Danes (Tiger and Sampson), a pet crow (Mitzvah), three rabbits (Pinkie, Dutchie, unnamed), a white mouse (Piggy), a baby squirrel (Elmer Wiggley), a gerbil, and half a dozen alley cats (Mau Mau, Nebisch, Sister, Freddy the Freeloader, Monty Wooley), vs. Fran Lee, the founder of Children Before Dogs—grinding out their small-bore issues on the grand stage.

Max Schnapp seems like the consummate Old New Yorker, given his (1) dedication to a completely deranged cause, (2) command of the Yiddish language, and (3) willingness to tell it like it is (I mean, presumably Elmer Wiggley was really fucking wiggly, you know?)

I can’t seem to find it anyway, but one of the best Talk of the Towns ever was about Berhard Goetz, the “subway vigilante” of the ’80s, and what Wikipedia terms his involvement in “the squirrel community of New York.” Goetz befriended the squirrels by feeding them tomato sauce. No word on whether or not they were wiggly.

“If I were a saxophonist who played on the street” is an amazing phrase with which to...

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 13:13:21 -0400

“If I were a saxophonist who played on the street” is an amazing phrase with which to tag blog entries.

rach: From an old issue of Sassy. Sigh. Not only did I have this...

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 15:12:29 -0400

rach:

From an old issue of Sassy. Sigh.

Not only did I have this issue, but I needed to look up “Mr. DeMille,” and I think of this whenever someone mentions his name. Which is pretty much daily, right?

They Say the Lights Are Bright

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 15:06:12 -0400

Every time I think about this, my brain gets a little bit seared by the awesomeness. From Gothamist:

It’s time to start getting really, really excited about Spider-Man the Musical, which will feature a score by U2’s Bono and the Edge and direction from Julie Taymor of Lion King fame. In May, Marvel Executive Peter Cuneo announced that the show could open as soon as next year, with Jim Sturgess and Evan Rachel Wood – Taymor’s stars in Across the Universe – playing Peter Parker and Mary Jane.

The post goes on to say that a casting call recently went out for both lead roles, meaning the world might not get to see Jim Sturgess sing U2 songs in mid-air, which does reduces the magic a bit. Mostly, though, I’m just excited to hear that Julie Taymor has finally been united with the genre she was born to direct: Superhero movies. Can you imagine a Taymor Batman? A Taymor X-Men? Hugh Jackman’s first love is musical theater; please God, let us all someday be blessed with a singing Wolverine.

Does an image lose something every time it’s reblogged? ...

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 12:46:00 -0400

Does an image lose something every time it’s reblogged? Or does it gain something? Either way, this is so awesome that I am proud to be number 46.

5G37

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 12:45:20 -0400

cabdriverstellmeimpretty:

His name was Wade Tango.

I was caught up in thinking about this, and the short story character his name could become, when he proclaimed, “You will have a great evening.”

He repeated it and added, beaming, “I just came from praying. You are the first to enter my cab since my prayers.”

It was only noon, so it seemed a bit early to be making predictions about my evening.

She’s back! And, I suppose, so am I.

Pretty Standard’s readership has demanded another picture...

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 13:22:00 -0400

Pretty Standard’s readership has demanded another picture of a rat on a cat on a dog, and we always give the readership what it wants.

California: Where Animals Perch on Other Animals

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 17:23:00 -0400

One day on our honeymoon we saw a little turtle standing on a bigger turtle:

We were extremely impressed. Until half an hour later, when we saw this: