And Now I Want To Read The Blog

I've had zero interest in Look at This Fucking Hipster until now. I mean, I get the joy of it, but I can see people wearing gold lamé shirts, neon orange sunglasses, and ironic top-siders without going on the internet. But! The lovely Max Silvestri did a Q&A with the guy behind the meme for Gawker of all places. The best part's below, but the whole thing's genius—in a way that makes me suspect I know who mystery blogger is, too. ANYWAYS:

The only hipsters I hate are the motherfuckers who write quasi-intellectual hate email to me. I get so many messages that are like, "Fuck you, man. You're the hipster...You're using a false term to describe something that's just a social construct." Okay, I get it, you went to college. What do you want from me? A grade? You want me to grade your email? 'F' There. You get an F. Go away. Everyone went to college.

Basshole

From, oh, just the best site eva.

Obsession: Rachel Kauder Nalebuff

I follow some news stories and pop cultural products with such an intensity that I may as well set up a Google Alert, and 18-year-old author/editor Rachel Kauder Nalebuff and her book My Little Red Book represent one such case. Chick wrote a book about first periods (as in, menstruation) that, of course, isn't really about periods as much as it's about our cultural history and femininity. She started compiling stories when she had her first "arts and crafts week at panty camp" at 13 and eventually drew in such names as Erica Jong. (Judy Bloom would TOTES have contributed—'cept she was busy campaigning for Obama.)

The New Yorker posted an online-only Q&A with R.K.N. I have yet to read the book (I know, I know—I'm far too busy reading about it), but K, J, and I got it for B for her big 2-6, and I'm anxiously awaiting feedback.

The Geese And The Gays

There's a really fantastic post over at the GOOD blog about how ridiculous it is that we as people focus any attention on such secondary socio-political concerns as banning gay marriage or halting foie gras production. It's written by Zach Frechette (the editor-in-chief) and addresses the fact that our obsession with such alterna-issues works to distract us from the real problems as hand (i.e., in regards to foie gras, can we not instead focus on the totally f-ed up commercial chicken, cow, and pig industries that affect millions, thankyouverymuch?). Anyway, go read.

It's A Joke, You Guys!

The fashion industry publication WWD got The Onion treatment yesterday: Somebody put together a high-production spoof called Worldwide Women's Wear Daily, or WWWWD.

Ok, haha:

You can download the whole PDF here, but the real highlight (for me, obvs) is a story about how Little Miss Suri Cruise is America's fashion ICON.

Sorry to go totally overboard on the S.C. front this week, but this is important stuff—and by this I mean my opinion being validated.

"The First Geekgasm Of 2009"

...Or so says this blog Film School Rejects. This artist Mitch Ansara has given the middle finger to those stinkin' Hollywood types who keep swiping their movie ideas from classic books ("The Curious Case of an F. Scott Fitzgerald Story Only KIND OF About What That Brad Movie Is About," anyone?). Instead, he's turning the most important movies of our time into sixties-style books—well, sixties-styles book covers, at least, that look pulled straight from bins at Strand, worn edges and all. My favorites are below, and the rest are on M.A.'s Flickr.





Note: All of the designs aren't in black 'n white 'n shocking pink—just the ones for my choice films. This clearly says something (and something not that highbrow) about my movie taste.

The Beautiful, Beautiful Breakup

I absolutely, totally, 100% buy into gimmicky books, especially those that employ pretty art (see: Bitter With Baggage Seeks Same, featuring those shoot-me-now adorable chicks). My latest Barnes and Nobel crush, then, is Important Artifacts and Personal Property From the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry. As if the ridiculiously long name wasn't winning enough, the book is about a hypothetical auction that takes place on 2/14/2009—THE FUTURE!—to sell off a now-dunzo couple's shared personal belongings. I mean, genius. For some reason, I think this would be an ideal v-day book, and then I question my sanity.

ANYWAY, it's written/compiled by this art director slash illustrator chica Leanne Shapton, and there was an article in the NYT about her and her project today. Her take on consumption and the thing-filled nature of our lives (which she's not necessarily criticizing here) just make me want to read and own and hold this thing more:

“It’s sort of about how reliant we are on our things to define us,” Ms. Shapton said, acknowledging that there is a strain of what she described as somewhat “suffocating discernment” running through the protagonists’ lives.

“But I wanted to balance that with a pretty genuine love of very private meaning,” she said, adding that most of the things put up for sale are “those kinds of things that mean everything to the person who owned them and nothing to anyone else.”

Some such things that mean nothing to nobody from Important Artifacts...gotta love the Nuvaring.

Unfortunately, the internet is being a total fucking slacker and is serving up like no pictures of said publication. GAWD. Thankfully, there is this video that gives a better sense of the layouts and content without spoiling all the fun:

Just Wait 'Til You Hear Him Do Voices

I was feeling like an a-hole—and legitimately so—for not yet having read Dreams from My Father, but now I'm quite proud of myself for holding out. A of all, the story is even more dynamic now that Barry's officially our main man than it was even six months ago—to think that he was talking about change the same way in f-ing 1995 (if you recall, that year's hit singles included Coolio's "Gangsta's Paradise," Oasis's "Wonderwall," and Deep Blue Something's "Breakfast at Tiffany's") is, in a word, BANANAS. B of all, I'm not so much reading as I am listening. Almost a full year ago for sure, my friend P told me about Audible, which is basically the Netflix of books-on-tape—well, excuse me, since I've identified that it's NOT the mid-nineties anymore: audio books.

I mean, seven hours of Barack Obama talking for a mere $7 (introductory rates...gotta love 'em until they F you)??? Amazing, especially on Monday mornings when you don't want to relinquish the down comforter that is shielding you from the world, let alone walk to work in peep-toe shoes (dumb). It's hard to be lazy with all that YES, WE CAN-ness triumph plugged into your ears.

And, I'm pretty sure that I'm going to become an Audible addict. One of the best parts is that, unlike my Netflix queue that eats away at my SOUL, the audio book selection is somewhat limited. Yes, there's lots of stuff, but you can't get, like, every single book at a bookstore. And that's a good thing.

Next up: Sarah Vowell's The Partly Cloudy Patriot as narrated by Stephen Colbert, Conan O'Brien, David Cross, etc. and Richard Price's Lush Life in the voice of Bobby Cannavale.

Oh, Internet, You Crack Me Up

I want to hate this, I really do. But I have a soft spot for Mr. Darcy. Shocking, I know.

Full version here.

The Collective Effervescence Of The Must-See TV Show

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.

Thanks, Miss Isadora

The Perfect Chuck Klosterman Assignment

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.

"If Somebody Runs Out Of The Bank And Yells, 'Help! The Bank Is Being Robbed!,' He Must Be A Neighborhood Crazy Person Who People Just Laugh At."

Why did this thing—Jack Handy's "The Plan" from The New Yorker—crack me up so much? WHY? It's so...McSweeney's.

On Eighties Wall Street: How Quaint

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?

The Problem With The Obamas

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.

A Piece Of That "Our"

At some point, I'll stop posting this kind of stuff. But not now. From Judith Warner's most recent op-ed for the NYT "Tears to Remember":

"The glory of Barack Obama is that there are so many different kinds of us who can claim a piece of that 'our.' African-Americans, Democrats, post-boomers, progressives, people who rose from essentially nowhere and through hard work and determination succeeded beyond their parents’ wildest dreams are the most obvious.

But there are also people who respect intelligence and good grammar. People who see their spouse as their 'best friend,' as Barack called Michelle on Tuesday night. People whose children have the same knowing look as Sasha and Malia, who are probably more excited about their puppy than about their father’s presidency."

"You Want To Be With A Winner."

The most Hunter S. Thompson thing I've read this election season is a story in the Nov. issue of GQ (the one with the kinda annoying Jimmy Kimmel cover) called "Hack: Confessions of a Presidential Campaign Reporter" by Michael Hastings.

On the campaign trail:

"The reality is: I quickly realized Rudy was a maniac. I had a recurring fantasy in which I took him out during a press conference (it was nonlethal, just something that put him out of commission for a year or so), saving America from the horror of a President Giuliani. If that sounds like I had some trouble being 'objective,' I did. Objectivity is a fallacy. In campaign reporting more than any other kind of press coverage, reporters aren’t just covering a story, they’re a part of it—influencing outcomes, setting expectations, framing candidates—and despite what they tell themselves, it’s impossible to both be a part of the action and report on it objectively. In some cases, you genuinely like the candidate you’re covering and you root for him, because over the long haul you come to see him as a human being. For a long time, this was John McCain’s ace in the hole with the press, whom he referred to as “my base.” Reporters rode along with him, and he joked with them, and that went a long way toward shaping the tone of their coverage. (Last January a group of reporters asked McCain’s staff to make McCain campaign press T-shirts for them.) And because your success is linked to the candidate’s, you want to be with a winner, because that’s the story that makes the paper or the magazine or gets you on TV."

Hunter S. Thompson in 1971, by way of guardian.co.uk. Chic.
And on time with the Clinton crew:

"I thought it might be better jumping over to the Democrats; at least I wasn’t appalled by their basic ideas. But Hillary Clinton’s campaign was killing me. I could feel my soul die a little more with each cigarette break I took, each prepackaged meal I stuffed into my face. I couldn’t stop eating when I was with her, and there was always food available. On most days, we took three to five flights, and each flight, no matter how short, had a catered meal. The campaigns charge reporters for all travel (the cost runs from $1,000 to $3,000 per day, per reporter), and catering is included in that price. Then there is food served at each event—pizza, sandwiches, celery, carrots, broccoli, bowl upon bowl of ranch dip, baskets of candy and chips. In part I felt obligated to eat every fucking thing in front of me, since it costs enough. But there was also a feeling that you were in a Gulag on wheels. Everyone traveling with the campaigns is completely dependent on them for food and transportation and shelter—not to mention any little interview crumb they toss our way, any remotely intriguing piece of information. Political reporting is founded on very dysfunctional relationships. You need them and they need you, but on some level they hate and distrust you (and on some level you, too, hate and distrust them), and in my experience a lot of that gets sublimated into food. Eat, hoard, scrounge, because you never know if they’ll give you anything more."

Barry Fashionable (Pun!)

Tina Brown wrote a really fascinating article about the style and sex appeal of Barack Obama and Sarah Palin. (Cause, let's be honest, they're both pretty—even if SOMEBODY is way less attractive when she opens her mouth.) The piece gets at why Palin will cling to her new look after Tues., why Bill Clinton & John McCain despise Obama's put-together-ness, and why Obama's look plays in Peoria...and the Lower East Side:

"I can’t say if those hand-pressed looking shirts are made of the finest Egyptian cotton or not—maybe they're from Costco—but the point is they suggest it. The simplicity of Obama’s lean, monochrome suits and solid blue ties makes every other pol appear porky and plebeian, old school glad-handers in oversize watches. It’s not just the clothes, of course. It’s the wearer—his carriage, the loping grace of his walk to the stage.

It’s also that the way he’s put together works simultaneously south of the Mason-Dixon line and south of 14th Street. When Obama works a rope line to most people he just looks neatly dressed. But to others he looks as stylishly minimalist as one of those Meatpacking District boutiques where a few shirts are piled artfully on otherwise empty shelves. It’s a little like the Republicans’ dog-whistle rhetoric, in which routine-sounding words like 'worldview' and 'wonder-working' convey a special, coded meaning to Christian conservatives. Obama's look conveys the message of a new world order to the young."

While Palin's look is new to the pol arena, much has been made of Obama fashion in the last year. Last spring (March, me thinks?), Paper magazine did a fashion story inspired by ol' Barry.



More where this came from at Rod 2.0.Then, earlier this month, he popped up on Paris (that's right: not NYC) runways. Like, literally: Jean-Charles de Castelbajac did an in-your-FACE sequins dress (in yellow, not orange...wah) w/ Obama's mug on it. Granted, this was as much about him as his look, but Bill Clinton sure never got fashion designer attentions.

L: Sonia Rykiel, R: Jean-Charles de Castelbajac by way of NYMag.com, which has more on the Parisian appreciation for B.O. Wow, that takes a double meaning in this case.

On That Whole Nazi Plot Thing

I read Gawker daily, but not because I like it—more because I feel like I have to take it into my system despite the yucky taste. Kinda like multi-vitamins. I generally hate (yah, yah, strong word) most of the bloggers because 1) they don't do their research and 2) they're super self-important (hi, NO ONE CARES that the crappy restaurant around the corner from your place of business got shut down, Sheila).

The one writer I appreciate in those parts? Alex Pareene, who used to be the editor of Wonkette. Because he gets it and has something to say. Por ejemplo, in a post about that whole "let's kill Obama!" plot this week:

"There was a tendency in New York, among liberals used to assuming that the elections are all stolen anyway, to assume the Obama campaign was doomed before it began because of his blackness, plain and simple. There was, similarly, a dark speculation, sometimes in the form of macabre joking, sometimes serious paranoia, that Obama would not survive the campaign if he got too close to the prize. What that didn't take into consideration was that as he looked more and more electable, more people liked him. Honestly, some thought Iowans were more likely to shoot him than vote for him. Then he proved them wrong, and the paranoia lifted, slightly."

This is right-on. Obama's biggest early supporters probably had the least faith in his ability to actually, you know, WIN. Thing is, though, I don't think this was just a liberal New York sentiment. If I recall correctly, I had a convo with K and C when they were visiting about the scary, scary, wtf issues of assassination, and they had the fear coming from Pittsburgh by way of Baton Rouge. Going into this election season, the idea of blue states and red states was stronger than ever, and I, for one, totally bought into those bullshit classifications. When Bush was reelected—and won all of the states he'd won in 2000—it reinforced a sense of divide: These are the people who get it (go, blue!) and these are the ones who don't (sigh, red). It's not that leanings don't exist, of course—it's just that they're not as unbending as they've seemed in the last four years. And that's really refreshing, especially for people who want to vote for Hope but didn't think there was any.

Read the rest of Pareene's post here, and be grateful for what scraps of Gawker smartness remain.

Because I Really Need More Books By My Bed, More Shows On My DVR, More Bookmarks On My Browser...

I'm pretty all-around in lust with Tina Brown's new political site The Daily Beast, but I especially love this feature called the Buzz Board. It is, as T would say, SICK. Power players from Bill Clinton to Padma Lakshmi to T. Boone Pickens to Kate White (Cosmo editor)—yup, there's a real spread here—post about what they're into right this minute.

A Makeover Story!

Pres. Barbie from AM NY. Not wearing Valentino. DUUUUUH.From Maureen Dowd on the "sexism" of talking about Sarah Palin's wardrobe:

"It doesn’t wash to cry sexism now any more than it did at the beginning, when the campaign tried to use that dodge to divert attention from Palin’s lacunae in the sort of knowledge you need to run the world. The press has written plenty about the vanities and extravagances of male candidates. (See: Haircuts, John Edwards and Bill Clinton.) Sexism would be to treat Palin differently, or more delicately, than one of the guys."

Now, I was never a huge M.D. fan, but she's done good by this election. Some of her best business of late:

"Sarah's Pompom Palaver": On speakin' homespun

"Vice in Go-Go Boots": On why the Palin nomination should have been on Lifetime

"Keeping It Rielle": On John Edwards' narcissism

"Mr. Darcy Comes Courting": On why Barack Obama is a modern Mr. Darcy (if you haven't read Pride and Prejudice—or seen a Bridget Jones movie—don't bother)

"All About Eve": On Hillary's leetle RFK gaffe