The fun never stops, you guys. Levi Johnston's mommy has been charged with six felony counts re: a controlled substance (translation: she likely was making drugs or transporting 'em). Thanks, Anchorage Daily News.. Oh, and Bristol's due Saturday! Whee!
I have apparently missed the boat. It was only today that I heard about Sarah Haskins' video series for Current TV called Target Women. (My friend R sold it to me immediately by calling it Jezebelian.) ANYWAY, it takes down advertising aimed at chicks, and the creator is this v. Comedy Central late-night-style personality who is an alum of both Harvard and the Chicago comedy scene. (*I* wanna be an improv star!) The latest video is about how wonderful it is for men to get their GFs/wives gleaming hunks of fugly jewelry for the halerdaze (that's "holidays" w/ J's Minnesota SLASH Chicago burbs room mom accent). Please watch.
First off: UGH. I've been such a bad blogger. Christmas is so time-consuming, you guys. ANYWAY...
My friend C sent this rad link about could-have-been Obama campaign logos, and it got me thinking that 1) god, I love fonts and 2) god, I love branding. I the last couple years, I've been particularly drawn to logo art and logos-as-art. A few of my faves:
A. The Liquidated Logos from Zevs, this Parisian street artist. He does Coke, Mickey D.'s, etc. too, but I love the fashion ones.
From MocoLoco
B. The Learn the Basics puzzle for babies by Atypyk. Yes, I know that the concept of acquainting tots with the Nike swoosh is foul, but come on. You can't deny the coolness of the design or the statement it makes.
Yesterday may as well have been national Blagojevich day, as far as I'm concerned, because I could focus on nothing else (not even new pictures of Suri wearing a coat!). Today, John Cass of the (flailing) Chicago Tribune writes an op-ed on the matter and basically talks about how, while this debacle and the the associated Clay Davis-style corruption doesn't come as a surprise to Chicagoans/Illinoisans who are used to these sort of local polischticks, the national media and the general public must be stunned—and a little bummed—that Chicago isn't actuuaaaallly the fairy tale-ized place they saw on the teevee on Nov. 4. He says:
"So though Illinois isn't surprised—this is after all the home of the Chicago Way—the national media must be shocked.
They've been clinging to the ridiculous notion that Chicago is Camelot for months now, cleaving to the idea with the willfulness of stubborn children. It must help them see Obama as some pristine creature, perhaps a gentle faun of a magic forest, unstained by our grubby politics, a bedtime story for grown-ups who insist upon fairy tales. But now the national media may finally be forced to confront reality."
But the issue with this idea that exposing Camelot's dark alleys negatively affects Obama is that—from everything we know right now—Mr. President Elect's hands are clean. Sure, Chi-town is looking a hell of a lot less shiny right now, but that almost plays into the fairy tale notion of Obama's perfection: He managed to be the anti-politician in a place that is full of the worst, dirtiest crooks out there. Rather than come out smelling like shit, he's looking like the flower who used the dung as fertilizer.
Clay Davis (of The Wire...I'm sorry) and his infamous "sheeeeeeiiiiiiiit"
YOU GUYS. I cannot even explain. Go to the website Betamaxmas right this minute. Basically, the geniuses over there have curated a collection of YouTube clips of eighties Christmas shows/specials/commercials. Not impressed? Um, there are three channels and a *guide* that will quite possibly keep you from accomplishing anything for the next three weeks.
I love a tennis boy almost as much as a soccer boy (see: my long-lost PBF) and am therefore OBSESSED with these new canvas kicks from A.P.C. x Nike. ("x" is the symbol used for all collaborations these days as the "+" is apparently too mundane?) They are a revival of Nike's 1975 All-Court model. Jean Touitou, I heart you.
After a weekend that largely consisted of 1) shopping online and 2) blowing my nose, I've realized some design/home obsessions that will no doubt still plague me when I've retired the DayQuil. (Ugh. I know.)
Numero uno: Mercury glass Apparently, this effect is achieved by pouring some sort of silvering goo between the walls of a double-walled glass creation.
Numero dos: Wool plaid blankets This is soooo not my usual taste, but the coziness factor is incredibly high. Obviously, I really only like the patterns in black, white, and camel.
Numero tres: Succulents I live in a cave, and this likely accounts for some of my affection for the only plants that could survive the darkness and my lack of watering-and-fertilizing instincts. But then they're also just so pretty and green. Sigh.
From this rad La-la land company Succulent that only delivers its good stuff locally. Booooo.
There's something kind of subversive about this, no? From Viva Terra ($98)
Do you want the good or the bad first? (Unfortunately, there is not enough pressing info for the good-bad-good-bad-bad-good format.) Let's end on a good note anyway!
The bad: Do you recall the 12-year-old restaurant critic SLASH kid who just likes food and eating out? Well, Paramount is turning his story into a movie, and SNL's Lorne Michael will produce. I was under the impression that said story was just that he went for a fancy meal with the $25 bucks mommy gave him, but perhaps I'm wrong.
The good: Get ready for "DIE. D-I-E. DIE." season 2! WHEE! Oh, Rachel Zoe, why do I love you? But mid-2009 really is a long time to wait.
I'm toooootally in a holiday mood, you guys. I'm writing my cards, online buying gifts, making T listen to seasonal classics from Mariah and Madonna...and, next up, I will BAKE, which is ultimately my favorite part because 1) it entails food and 2) you get so much credit for whipping up cookies because, for whatever reason, people think mixing together flour, eggs, butter, and sugar is harder than it is.
I'm going to make one of my mom's Chrismukkah specialties, heavenly hash, which is an ooey gooey combo of chocolate, peanut butter, butterscotch, and marshmallows. It's her one Dec. treat that does not require a candy thermometer (which is really shocking if you know my mother, who hardly has the focus to complete a meal without leaving out a key ingredient). Beyond that, I'm playing domestic goddess with these crazy adorable sugar-crusted lemon sandwich cookies from this month's Gourmet and these brown butter cookies from a 1961 issue of the same inspired food mag (see the pretty pictures). [Please do not think that I resourceful enough to have dug up a sixties recipe on my own. The mag's website has this AMAZING roundup of the best cookie recipe from every year since 1941, and they all look so f-ing classy.]
Sometimes, I get the random urge to watch forgotten romantic comedies like this one, staring the forgotten Freddie Prinze Jr., the forgotten Julia Stiles, and a slutty Selma Blair. Can someone please tell me where I even saw this movie in the first place? Probably on a brown basement couch.
OMFG, someone—namely Adam Sternbergh—over at NY Mag is my soul mate. He has a story in this week's issue about how he just can't watch Mad Men even though every one of the two million people who do tune in try to get him to join their corps, like, every 2.5 seconds. He basically argues that since The Sopranos (a show that I, ahem, have never seen a minute of), we've been bombarded by the quality show—the thing you just HAVE to watch:
"Of course, The Sopranos changed all that. It normalized, then popularized, the idea that a TV show could measure up against the best of any art form. It heralded an age of creative latitude for TV creators, attracting vital talent to the medium. And it coincided with the rise of the Internet, which gave ardent TV fans a new place to gather and whip themselves into a froth—as if the office cooler had been transported into a giant echo chamber. All of which created the perfect conditions for a show to be declared the Best Ever—not just an amusing entertainment but a can’t-miss cultural event."
I'm always suspicious of the shows that win this Best Ever title—stuff like Battlestar Galactica, Lost, and Friday Night Lights—and have only become a card-carrying fan club member of one such program: The Wire (don't get me started). I too refuse to watch Mad Men even though K lent me her Season 1 DVDs. It just feels like I'm selling out or caving to the pressure of the masses, like joining Facebook in 2008 or wearing UGGs (ever). The author of this article goes on to address they why of watching THE show in our world of DVDs, Tivo, and (gasp) teevee on the internets:
"Maybe the furor around shows like Mad Men is not the product of some rampant mass hysteria. Maybe it’s the expression of a yearning for the last remnant of the traditional viewing experience we once shared. Long gone are the days when we would all sit down on Thursday at 10 to watch L.A. Law. So instead, to retain some sense of communal experience, we cling culturally to a single show. We don’t want to admit we’re splitting off in a million directions; we want to believe that all our eyes still occasionally turn in the same direction. (For the past year, the election campaign served this purpose—the one great show we all tuned into.) So it doesn’t even matter that not many people, relatively, are actually watching Mad Men. What matters is that everyone’s talking about it."
The election point is a good one, and this sense of communal experience is exactly why I watch every Monday what maaaaybe might not be one of the best shows ever, Gossip Girl. I know I can rehash the episode with ten people the next day (including my 38-year-old dude office neighbor), read the recaps on Videogum, and feel like I'm part of some big inside joke for a mere 40 min. of DVR time a week. Not to imply that Chuck Bass' fashion choices aren't reason enough to watch.
Well, the rumor mill (apparently Gawker is back to covering publishing news? huh) says that Anna Wintour might be replaced by Carine Roitfeld (of French Vogue) come 2009. Now, last week, the gossipy guys and gals were claiming A Dubs was going to go work for Obama, soo...Ya get my drift. Regardless, I'm OBSESSED with Carine. As in, I want to be her intern/personal slave esp. if that means getting to touch her clothes. An ode:
Tina Fey is on the cover of the new issue of Vanity Fair, but before I address the article, which was written by Maureen Dowd, we've gots to talk about the styling. Why is it that whenever anyone wants to prove T.F. (or, really, anyone for that matter) can be glamorous, they do this forced retro Hollywood L.A. Confidential look with red lipstick, side-swept curls, a bustier, and peep-toes? I'm over it. Way over it. And I'm also way over the biting-the-eyeglasses trick, which is apparently universal moron language for "I'm both smart and sexy!!!"
Moving on: The story itself feels...old. Like it was meant to come out on 11/11—a mere week after the election—but we are just seeing it now. This is clearly a problem that all magazines are facing—how do you deal with a topic that everyone cares about when you can't be at all current about it—but you can really feel it here when a big ol' chunk of page is dedicated to Tina doin' the Palin. The best parts of the piece come straight outta the comedienne's mouth. I guess that's kind of a duh, but still.
On binging before her shoot with Annie Leibovitz:
"Annie’s going to photograph my soul, right?"
On her high school social life:
"I remember bringing people over in high school to play—that’s how cool I am—that game Celebrity. That’s how I successfully remained a virgin well into my 20s, bringing gay boys over to play Celebrity."
On moving to NY
"I’m five four and a half, and I think I was maxing out at just short of 150 pounds, which isn’t so big. But when you move to New York from Chicago, you feel really big. Because everyone is pulled together, small, and Asian. Everyone’s Asian."
PS: Happy belated Thanksgiving!
PPS: Sorry for the long blogging break! I'm back! Not that you were really worried.
Well, who knew that Sunday would be the day when elopement would emerge as a trend, and today would be the day when it would be officially OVER. Thank you, Heidi and Spencer, for masterminding your most recent US Weekly cover. Now, there are all kinds of tidbits of ridiculousness to analyze re: these two, but I for one am most fascinated by the conversation that must have occurred to bring about this momentous day. If it was anything like this, my dreams will be fulfilled.
Spencer: [Flipping through Star] God, it's been a slow week in celebrity news. Lindsay and Samantha relationship counseling? [Jerking off hand motion]
Heidi: I know, baby! More baby pictures! Someone else should have a baby! And name it Queens! [Staring at her Sidekick]
Spencer: Or a wedding. When was the last big celebrity wedding? Jay-Z and Beyonce? And they were so...classy about it. As if they don't understand that photos equal cash. Come on, braw.
Heidi: I want to wear a white dress! And go to the beach!
Spencer: Wait, if we got married this weekend, we could JUST MAKE the Monday deadlines at the celeb weeklies to get a cover—on a week when the whole fucking country travels and sees our face at every airport Hudson News. Why did I not think of this sooner since my brain's sole task is to propel our fame?
Heidi: But how do we plan a wedding in three days? I have to call my mom!
Spencer: NO! Don't call her. Bitch will try to sell her own pictures, and I'll never get the private jet I so deserve.
I got at this point before in a post about Suze Orman, but The Daily Beast has a story today from college sophomore (not sure why that matters, but they hammer that point home) Zac Bissonnette that addresses the fact that, hello, high school kids need to be taught life skills:
"One of my biggest complaints about my high school education—and there were many—was the absence of a home economics class. I don’t mean home ec in the baking-and-ironing sense. I mean a class that teaches young people to responsibly handle their personal and family finances.
I went to a school that prided itself on its commitment to the value of a "classical education," and required every student to take two years of Latin. At the same time, the faculty was all too happy to send kids off to the lion's den of adulthood without any knowledge of credit cards, student loans, the stock market, or how to purchase a car."
An article in Sunday Styles this week hit upon a topic that I'd been pondering lately: Is there blowout wedding backlash? As the story puts it, elopements are are the rise because future misters and missuses 1) feel bad pouring so much money into an eight-hour affair right about now and 2) dread wedding planning has (d)evolved into this insanity-inducing affair heightened by books that tell you that—seven months before the sacred day—you should start picking out favors for your bachelorette party. RIGHT. Because that's what matters. Plus, there's the intimacy factor. Per the article:
"Elopement can be a more intimate and romantic experience than a traditional wedding, according to Lynn Beahan, an author, with Scott Shaw, of 'Let’s Elope' (Bantam, 2001), a compendium of elopement information. 'It’s you declaring your love to somebody else just in front of that one other person,' said Ms. Beahan, who eloped in Vermont in 2001. 'As a married couple you don’t spend the rest of your life making big decisions in front of an audience.'
Now, eloping seems as teeeensy bit extreme as pissing off the parents is a bit, er, undesirable. But I have noticed more City Hall weddings lately, and there's something old-fashiony and charming about that in my opinion. As I see it, the surge was started not just by Carrie and Big in the SATC (where she wore a tooootally retro dress...I digress) but by the short-lived CA gay marriage boom (see: Jonathan Adler and Simon Doonan). A lot of the couples that said vows had been together forevs and likely didn't feel the need to do a whole 300-person affair.
I loooove watching TV on DVD, but I hate the fact that you have to commit to, like, a gazillion episodes if the show was on network telly or a 95 hour-long, fast forward-free ones if the program was on HBO. Right now, I'm stoked on checking out The West Wing—of which I've never seen a single moment—but seven seasons? I do have a JOB (for now), you know. Thankfully, today Y advised me that, really, only the first three are worth watching. Approximately 80 hours of my life are thus saved. (Is using those hours to troll online shopping websites for really good sales better?? Prolly not so much.)
Can someone—anyone? Bueller?—make a website that compiles this information for me? Because the weight of my Netflix queue is too much to withstand, and I feel like I'm already such a terrible cultural consumer considering I didn't watch any teevee live from season 2 of Dawson's Creek to season 5 of SATC.
Anyway, I will offer my suggestions (in hopes that you'll gimme yours in return, duh). Sharing is caring, you guys.
The Wire: Seasons 1-4. You've heard it a milllllion times. The show is DA BOMB. So just watch, otay? BUT, the fourth should have been the last. I don't like when Michael Lee becomes a bad boy. It keeps me up at night.
Weeds: Season 1-2. When Nancy becomes an f-ing full-on drug lord? Count me out
Wonderfalls: All 13 episodes. Yup, it's a brilliant-but-canceled.
I'm Alan Partrige: Season 1. That's enough of Steve Coogan to give you quotes for daaaaays.
Arrested Development: Seasons 2-3. Yes, I know, funniest show, like, EVA, but it doesn't really get going until the 2nd year. The first few episodes can be a tough sell to someone who hasn't seen.
And now! A break for a gratuitous photo of Tristan Wilds (who played Michael Lee and is now on, barf, 90210). He has the best smile in the galaxy. But I can't find a pic where he shows it. HBO! Help!
Next up are The West Wing, Veronica Mars, My So-Called Life (because, let's be honest, I hardly remember), and Battlestar Galactica. And clearly I need advice.
The street style blogs are insanely overwhelming, and, to be honest, I don't need Mr. Sartorialist's commentary on what some chick is wearing or where she's standing. Thus, this aggregator site streetstyl.es is genius, pulling in the posts (photos only, thanks) from all the big real people fash sites and tons you've (or, I've) never heard of. THANK YOU.
We all saw it coming, in this big, expensive movie we call life. Someone's writing a style book about Michelle Obama!!! Says Page Six:
"THE incoming first lady is getting her own fashion book. Avon has signed former Mademoiselle editor Mandi Norwood to pen a 'Michelle Obama Style Guide,' due out next spring. Avon vice president Carrie Feron said: 'Not since Jackie O have we had a first lady become a fashion icon. Michelle Obama will be one of history's most vibrant first ladies; she has a distinctive style that every American woman can aspire to, whether the consumer is a Target shopper or some one more likely to be found on Miracle Mile.'"
You guuuuuuys, doesn't she have to live in the ol' W.H. for two hot seconds first? Please? Why is this frustrating me?
In other fashion book news, I'm sweating the mere idea of the hulking Kate Moss Style book that was released earlier this month. It reeks of promise. And cigarettes.
Yesterday, I read Joan Didion's essay "Where the Kissing Never Stops" in Slouching Towards Bethleham about Joan Baez and her school for non-violence, and today I read this "Peace, Love, and Shopping" business about Simon Doonan's hippy-dippy, peace sign-dripping holiday windows for Barneys that—guess what?—also pay homage to the folk superstar (among others). This is a case of synchronicity...and plenty of reason for a mini ode.
I am a huge fan of Chuck Klosterman. No. That's not true. I'm a huge fan of Chuck Klosterman's work up to 2006: Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, his Esquire column (with installments like this one about trust and Tom Cruise), and Killing Yourself to Live. Right about then, he became famous—like, girls at Borders asking him to sign their boobs famous—and his writing deteriorated into this weird parody of his own style. He tried too hard to be himself. Anywho, he has a review of Chinese Democracy for The Onion's A.V. Club today, and it's kind of amazing. This is likely because it is SUCH a C.K. subject. Guns N' Roses is right up his sonic alley, and, hello, since the album's been in the works since Full House was putting out new episodes, there's plenty of cultural meaning for him to swim in.
My fave chunk:
"On the aforementioned 'Sorry,' Rose suddenly sings an otherwise innocuous line ('But I don't want to do it') in some bizarre, quasi-Transylvanian accent, and I cannot begin to speculate as to why. I mean, one has to assume Axl thought about all of these individual choices a minimum of a thousand times over the past 15 years. Somewhere in Los Angles, there's gotta be 400 hours of DAT tape with nothing on it except multiple versions of the 'Sorry' vocal. So why is this the one we finally hear? What finally made him decide, 'You know, I've weighed all my options and all their potential consequences, and I'm going with the Mexican vampire accent. This is the vision I will embrace. But only on that one line! The rest of it will just be sung like a non-dead human.'"
Note: I chose not to include a picture because every press photo is a little disturbing. There's a weird hands-in-pocket, head-cocked thing happening.
You guys, why do I want this soooo badly? I tried it on with K the other day when we went to our favorite neighborhood stores that we can never afford. And I love, despite the fact that it is decidedly the least versatile piece of clothing in the history of clothing.
Yes, those are pleats. And if you wore it with even a trace of glitter it'd be majorly Studio 54. It's from Black Halo. (Who? Yah.) Please make Revolve take it off sale.
Not that we've had a real break from Palin news since the election or anything, but for the first time in a couple weeks I've read something smart about the woman (and Hillary) that has nothing to do with Africa (the continent!) or NAFTA (US, Canada, Mexico!). This, from Amanda Fortini's NY Mag story about the female stereotypes that were reinforced this year:
"In the grand Passion play that was this election, both Clinton and Palin came to represent—and, at times, reinforce—two of the most pernicious stereotypes that are applied to women: the bitch and the ditz. Clinton took the first label, even though she tried valiantly, some would say misguidedly, to run a campaign that ignored gender until the very end. 'Now, I’m not running because I’m a woman,' she would say. 'I’m running because I think I’m the best-qualified and experienced person to hit the ground running.' She was highly competent, serious, diligent, prepared (sometimes overly so)—a woman who cloaked her femininity in hawkishness and pantsuits. But she had, to use an unfortunate term, likability issues, and she inspired in her detractors an upwelling of sexist animus: She was likened to Tracy Flick for her irritating entitlement, to Lady Macbeth for her boundless ambition. She was a grind, scold, harpy, shrew, priss, teacher’s pet, killjoy—you get the idea. She was repeatedly called a bitch (as in: 'How do we beat the … ') and a buster of balls. Tucker Carlson deemed her 'castrating, overbearing, and scary' and said, memorably, 'Every time I hear Hillary Clinton speak, I involuntarily cross my legs.'"
For me, if Hillary is Tracy Flick of Election, then Palin is Elle Woods (of Legally Blonde or, better yet, of Legally Blonde 2: Red, White, & Blonde where our main character was working in Washington). She's a well-heeled charmer who doesn't get wrapped up in silly things like policies. Who cares about words and ideas as long as you have enthusiasm and great shoes?
In both of these roles, Reese Witherspoon is playing charicatures. Of course all public figures become cartoonish to some extent, and so it's not shocking that we align them with similarly two-dimensional characters. But both Tracy Flick and Elle Woods were meant to be laughable. They weren't just exaggerated—they were there for comic relief.
It's beyond obvious who I relate to/side with. Never mind the millllllions of Palin-bashing posts: I call one of them by her first name and the other by her last. But, anti-girl politics aside, some of this S.P. hate stems from the fact that she represents everything girls of our generation were told wouldn't matter for us. We could wear cute dresses to the office and not worry about it helping our hurting our career climb. We could just be women without playing the woman card. (Some of these feelings are highlighted in this Jezebel post by Jessica Grose that I was OBSESSED with. It's also mentioned in the article.)
At the end of her story, the writer gets at that space between bitch and ditz that all ambitious, opinionated women have to navigate, nevermind those 18 million cracks.
"But among the darker revelations of this election is the fact that the vice-grip of female stereotypes remains suffocatingly tight. On the national political stage and in office buildings across the country, women regularly find themselves divided into dualities that are the modern equivalent of the Madonna-whore complex: the hard-ass or the lightweight, the battle-ax or the bubblehead, the serious, pursed-lipped shrew or the silly, ineffectual girl. It is exceedingly difficult to sidestep this trap. Michelle Obama began the campaign as a bold, outspoken woman with a career of her own, and she was called a hard-ass. Now, as she prepares to move into the White House, she appears poised to recede into a fifties-era role of “mom-in-chief.” It will be heartbreaking if, in an effort to avoid the kind of criticism that followed Hillary Clinton, the First Lady is reduced to a lightweight."
Yesterday, the New York Times published a story about a 12-year-old wannabe food critic—and, if you can believe, it wasn't even in the trend-happy Sunday Styles. It ran in N.Y./Region. Anyway, as the story goes, pre-teen David Fishman went alone to a just-opened Upper West Side restaurant Salumeria Rosi last week. He did this because he's interested in food, has a mother who'd give him $25 bucks for dinner, and wants to be a food critic. That's basically it. Now, considering the fact that I have a six-year-old cousin who just loooooves Top Chef, Bobby Flay, and the Spotted Pig, I'm not so impressed that David prefers a fancy dinner (where everyone fawned over him, I might add) to Pizza Hut delivery. But what's more, the whole point of the article is to make light of David's pursuit. But he wants to be a food critic, and so he's pursuing his interest just as other kids his age play guitar, start websites, and volunteer at animal shelters (not to imply that he doesn't do any of these things). By writing about this in a "how adorable!" way when he clearly just wants to be treated like a grown up, the NYT makes it seem like there's something special, different, and maybe wrong about David's food fascination. The coverage will make him either embarrassed or pretentious. This being NYC, I go with option B: He'll have a blog by week's end and will be consulting for Danny Meyer by 2009.
David Fishman at Salumeria Rosi, eating food. From NYT.
C sent me this article penned by Michael Lewis a.k.a Mr. Liar's Poker and, depending on your interests, Mr. Moneyball from Portfolio. There is a lot of nitty-gritty here about Wall Street's current Wicked Witch of the West-style meltdown, but I found these chunks about his perception of the high-rollin' eighties and Liar's Poker really fascinating:
"I thought I was writing a period piece about the 1980s in America. Not for a moment did I suspect that the financial 1980s would last two full decades longer or that the difference in degree between Wall Street and ordinary life would swell into a difference in kind. I expected readers of the future to be outraged that back in 1986, the C.E.O. of Salomon Brothers, John Gutfreund, was paid $3.1 million; I expected them to gape in horror when I reported that one of our traders, Howie Rubin, had moved to Merrill Lynch, where he lost $250 million; I assumed they’d be shocked to learn that a Wall Street C.E.O. had only the vaguest idea of the risks his traders were running. What I didn’t expect was that any future reader would look on my experience and say, "How quaint.'
I had no great agenda, apart from telling what I took to be a remarkable tale, but if you got a few drinks in me and then asked what effect I thought my book would have on the world, I might have said something like, “I hope that college students trying to figure out what to do with their lives will read it and decide that it’s silly to phony it up and abandon their passions to become financiers.” I hoped that some bright kid at, say, Ohio State University who really wanted to be an oceanographer would read my book, spurn the offer from Morgan Stanley, and set out to sea.
Somehow that message failed to come across. Six months after Liar’s Poker was published, I was knee-deep in letters from students at Ohio State who wanted to know if I had any other secrets to share about Wall Street. They’d read my book as a how-to manual.
In the two decades since then, I had been waiting for the end of Wall Street. The outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to shareholders, the never-ending scandals, the bursting of the internet bubble, the crisis following the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management: Over and over again, the big Wall Street investment banks would be, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet they just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to 26-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents’ world when you can buy it, slice it up into tranches, and sell off the pieces?"
It's way, way too early to see what is going to become of those kids from Ohio State who (claim to) just want to do the ol' finance thing for a few years, you know to save money for B-school or a startup. What do those 21-year-olds who thought they were shoe-ins for Morgan Stanley analyst gigs do now? What do those 25-year-olds who were slowly settling into i-banking as a career do? I know kids who got into entered the then-flush finance world because they truly love it, and I suspect they'll stick it out and just settle for less nights of bottle service and fewer weekends at the Hamptons summer share. But I also know kids who fell for the money—guys (mostly) who dream of leaving it all to open a bar in Key West. (Note: I realize this is douchey, but that's someone's real-life dream so shut it.) And while it's clearly a terribly shitty time for everyone (hi, I work at a magazine—not the most recession-friendly biz), I can't imagine stepping into an industry that's getting a Nip/Tuck-worthy facelift. Clearly, a lot of these people that took Liar's Poker as inspiration are going to shrink away from an industry that's more hard work and long hours than a huge paycheck, but where do they go?
Go sink into another cozy seat with a big box of Sour Patch Kids and see Slumdog Millionaire. It's the story of a kid who grew up in the slums (get it? slumdog?) of Mumbai who—with like zero education—wins the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (get it? millionaire?). It sounds cheesy, I know, but it's actually smart and touching. Basically, the film (from Trainspotting director Danny Boyle) uses flashbacks to explain how our hero attained his unlikely knowledge, and those flashbacks include kids that are sooooo f-ing adorable that you'll want to go home and watch Jerry Maguire again just so you don't have to come down off your adorableness high.
David Chang, the man behind the Momofuku restaurant empire (we can call it that now, right?) has, from what I've read on the internets, done it again. His Momofuku Bakery and Milk Bar opened today (on 2nd Ave. at 13th...if you don't gots to work, go RIGHT. NOW.). Serious Eats—specifically Ed Levine—already has pics. I'm dying. My crappy midtown lunch is going to taste so much worse than it normally would.
From top, pork & egg bun, salty pistachio caramel soft serve, and blue cheese foccacia. Many more pics at Serious Eats. And White Lightning has the menu.
In addition to these things, I'll have a brown-butter cinnamon bun (with cheesecake filling!), chorizo challah, cereal milk, a hoisin bun, kimchi butter...
I'm endlessly jealous of people younger than me who have impeccable fashion sense. I mean, you can't tie your own shoes, but you can throw it down in Balenciaga? I'M SORRY. Emma Watson (of Harry Pawta fame) is one such person. She's 18 now, which makes her technically a grown-up, and she's fully evolved beyond the too-fashiony phase of her life (which, in her case, included lots of feathers, some red lipstick, and a flapper dress here and there). At that age, most girls are just discovering the full glory of a slutty halter top and "going-out" pants. Ugh. ANYWAY, a look at E.W.'s prowess over the past two months:
In an article for The Daily Beast (new fave site...noticed?), Curtis Sittenfeld, a writer crush of mine who penned Prep and most recently American Wife (which is a fictionalized story of Laura Bush...kind like W. in a sense), writes about the problem with the whole wide world being ga-ga for Michelle Obama:
"Now, after almost eight years of Laura-loving, Michelle Obama is about to become our first lady. I’m totally captivated by her, too—and so, it turns out, is everyone else. And though I’d have expected this affirmation of my taste to feel good, frankly, I’m not sure if I like sharing my first-lady-to-be with so many other people.
For a brief moment, I thought that I’d get to have Michelle to myself. Back in June, the media informed us that she was controversial and divisive and could cost her husband votes. The only problem with this argument was that, as far as I can tell, it was a total myth. For an article about Michelle I wrote for Time Magazine in September, I trailed her at the National Democratic Convention, and in advance of my trip to Denver, I began asking everyone I encountered for impressions of her. I got a wide range of reactions—you know, everything from 'I love her!' to 'I fucking love her!' Admittedly, the people I encounter skew toward my own demographic—white twenty- and thirty-something NPR listeners—but at the same time, I live in Missouri, which isn’t exactly a bastion of liberalism.
Of course, Michelle Obama is so charming, so smart and gracious and funny and beautiful, that I have no doubt she’ll soon win over her few detractors. The only question is, do I really want Michelle to accumulate even more fans? I thought that loving Laura Bush was lonely, but in retrospect I’m realizing that maybe I enjoyed my loneliness. I could feel protective of her for being underestimated and I could enjoy the righteous self-satisfaction of being able to see what others couldn’t—it was like being obsessed with an obscure indie band, knowing I was a member of a very exclusive club, whereas loving Michelle Obama is like being a member of Netflix."
This indie band reference is so on point. The thing is, we are part of a generation that came of age in an era of cynicism and niche. We are used to operating as part of the minority even if we're upper middle-class white kids who've had every opportunity. We only have mainstream tastes—Britney, Real Housewives of Atlanta, dodgeball—when we can embrace them ironically. But now, we have a president we believe in—one we like, respect, and ostensibly want to be or do. But in the end everyone else likes him too! It's like we've all bought tickets to some Miley Cyrus arena show thinking she would somehow never make it big. Now it's hard to be cynical, which is, for better or worse, the only world view we know. It's impossible to feel fringe or even especially unique. While it's not fair to call this a problem, I suppose, it's most certainly an identity crisis, and I'm fascinated to see how it & we shake out.
The other day, Y made the huge, over-sized, Big & Tall store-worthy mistake of dissing Love Actually. As far as I'm concerned, L.A. IS Christmas, and, furthermore, I'd have a mural of Hugh Grant painted on my bedroom wall if that was a socially acceptable thing to do. But, really, what's not to like about this movie? There's a Monica Lewinsky-style hookup, Emma Thompson, a naked old dude, and a little boy who looks like a hamster. 'Tis the season, you guys.
The It bag obsession is not something that I can get behind. (Maybe if I had a spare two grand? Yah, probably not.) But this concept from Slow and Steady Wins the Race is brilliant—well, more like plotting with nefarious cat genius. The company is all about taking high design and boiling it down to the cleanest, most unadulterated forms, and one of their projects (and the one I heart) replicates the forms of iconic handbags in ultra-simple, super-clean canvas or muslin. All the styles are $100, which is a tiiiiny bit more reasonable than a reg. Birkin, no? And by tiny, I mean Birkin is to S&S bag as foie gras is to bacon. Moving on...some of my faves:
Now, I didn't post this last week because of election overload '08, but now the nostalgia is really settling in. Like, the puppy guessing game has been dominating the news cycle for days, dudes. I long for the times when people "on the trail" would say stupid shit to a group of 43 people outside of the Omaha airport, and we'd hear about it seven minutes later and see video within the hour. This mashup from the folks at Best Week Ever sums up the unforgettable moments of the two-year-long campaign—and it's set to a collection of truly tear-jerking tunes.
I don't know why I remember this, but the class ahead of me in high school chose Greenday's "Time of Your Life" as their graduation song. The well-tanned girls in that class called themselves the senior bitches. That is all.
When sweet, un-Hollywoodized Evan Rachel Wood started dating Marilyn Manson (who CLEARLY needs no adjectives), I thought—once I got past the fact that she's a toddler who may or may not use training wheels—"Huh. This is so weird because he so obviously has a type and she is not it."
The type? Rose McGowan and Dita Von Teese. Picture it in your mind: black hair, pale skin, blood red lips, burlesque attire, etc., etc. Well, prepare yourself for the post-Marilyn E.R.W.
Before!
Yes, I'm trying to be toootally fair here by using a photo (from Bitten and Bound) when she was actually dating mister mister.
It took me until 2008 to realize that writing things on the internet doesn't (necessarily) make you the most annoying person in the universe. Then my friend had a dream that I had a blog where I posted a photo of myself in an orange sequined dress. Hot.
I'm toooootally in a holiday mood, you guys. I'm writing my cards, online buying gifts, making T listen to seasonal classics from Mariah and Madonna...and, next up, I will BAKE, which is ultimately my favorite part because 1) it entails food and 2) you get so much credit for whipping up cookies because, for whatever reason, people think mixing together flour, eggs, butter, and sugar is harder than it is.
I'm going to make one of my mom's Chrismukkah specialties, heavenly hash, which is an ooey gooey combo of chocolate, peanut butter, butterscotch, and marshmallows. It's her one Dec. treat that does not require a candy thermometer (which is really shocking if you know my mother, who hardly has the focus to complete a meal without leaving out a key ingredient). Beyond that, I'm playing domestic goddess with these crazy adorable sugar-crusted lemon sandwich cookies from this month's Gourmet and these brown butter cookies from a 1961 issue of the same inspired food mag (see the pretty pictures). [Please do not think that I resourceful enough to have dug up a sixties recipe on my own. The mag's website has this AMAZING roundup of the best cookie recipe from every year since 1941, and they all look so f-ing classy.]
Tina Fey is on the cover of the new issue of Vanity Fair, but before I address the article, which was written by Maureen Dowd, we've gots to talk about the styling. Why is it that whenever anyone wants to prove T.F. (or, really, anyone for that matter) can be glamorous, they do this forced retro Hollywood L.A. Confidential look with red lipstick, side-swept curls, a bustier, and peep-toes? I'm over it. Way over it. And I'm also way over the biting-the-eyeglasses trick, which is apparently universal moron language for "I'm both smart and sexy!!!"
Moving on: The story itself feels...old. Like it was meant to come out on 11/11—a mere week after the election—but we are just seeing it now. This is clearly a problem that all magazines are facing—how do you deal with a topic that everyone cares about when you can't be at all current about it—but you can really feel it here when a big ol' chunk of page is dedicated to Tina doin' the Palin. The best parts of the piece come straight outta the comedienne's mouth. I guess that's kind of a duh, but still.
I got at this point before in a post about Suze Orman, but The Daily Beast has a story today from college sophomore (not sure why that matters, but they hammer that point home) Zac Bissonnette that addresses the fact that, hello, high school kids need to be taught life skills:
An article in Sunday Styles this week hit upon a topic that I'd been pondering lately: Is there blowout wedding backlash? As the story puts it, elopements are are the rise because future misters and missuses 1) feel bad pouring so much money into an eight-hour affair right about now and 2) dread wedding planning has (d)evolved into this insanity-inducing affair heightened by books that tell you that—seven months before the sacred day—you should start picking out favors for your bachelorette party. RIGHT. Because that's what matters. Plus, there's the intimacy factor. Per the article:
