I think we can understand the attraction of “Girls Gone Wild” to men. Men, after all, are pigs. But what’s the attraction for the women (or, rather, “girls”)? Is this sort of soft-core porn exhibitionism empowering for these women? Or is it just more of the same?
Listen to the author of Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, Ariel Levy, on “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross from Tuesday, November 28th.
So, I avoided joining Facebook for some time. In the first place, I thought it was lame for a grown-ass man to be on there. It’s for kids, not a twenty-eighteen year old like myself. In the second place, I already have a web presence for posting ideas and pictures and the like. And I have an email address if people want to communicate with me.
Well, I broke down this past week and registered and I have to say, it is quite a site. It is an awesome way to keep track of alot of people all at once and just let them know you’re thinking about them. Especially for someone like me who has moved from California to Wisconsin to Indiana to Virginia back to Indiana and now to North Carolina. It will make it so much easier to keep track of people I thought I would probably lose track of.
So, let the haters hate on us old timers crashing Facebook. It’s fine by me.
“A personal library is an X-ray of the owner’s soul. It offers keys to a particular temperament, an intellectual disposition, a way of being in the world. Even how the books are arranged on the shelves deserves notice, even reflection. There is probably no such thing as complete chaos in such arrangements.”
-Jay Parini, “Other People’s Books”
The Chronicle of Higher Education
22 September 2006
October 2006 Esquire magazine Style Rule No. 363: Before you wash your jean shorts, pretreat them by throwing them away.
“In Calif., a stranger is a friend until he proves otherwise; in NY, a stranger is an enemy until he proves otherwise. One uses up a lot of energy in NY by that hypothesis.”
–Susan Sontag, April 6, 1967
Notebooks and journals excerpted in the
New York Times Magazine
10 September 2006
”I wasn’t afraid to be sensual and romantic. But I wanted to still hit you hard and make your body move. I just think that being honest is the most gangsta thing you could ever do.”
–Sean “Puffy”/”P-Diddy”/”Diddy” Combs
A New Sound For Old What’s-His-Name
By SIA MICHEL
New York Times
September 10, 2006
I guess I took the summer off. I didn’t mean to, but teaching summer school wiped out 8 weeks, then I had 4 weeks to do 12 weeks worth of other work. A couple of brief points by way of getting back into things:
1. I (heart) Montreal. Spent a week up there with my boy, Shattuck Slim, at a conference and LOVED it. I also developed a fondness for The Netherlands while there. What I learned: in French, a bow tie is called “noeud papillon” — knotted butterfly. Beautiful. Thanks to Nadia at Harry Rosen for that.
2. I (heart) Ana Ivanovic, who won the Coupe Rogers in Montreal the week after I was there.
3. Now that classes have started again this fall, I have to ask: why do so many students refer to any book as a “novel”?
On the occasion of graduation, an excerpt from Alan Lightman’s novel, Reunion (in which the narrator attends his 30th college graduation reunion):
“Young people explode with their discovery of the world and the newness of life. They sleep and sleep in their tiny cocoons, and suddenly one day, perhaps in one moment, as in the moment Juliana first kissed me, suddenly a young person wakes up and finds the universe tilting and gasping in front of him. Infinity. So many things are happening for the first time. What young people don’t realize is that so much is happening for the last time as well. The world is both opening and closing at once.
The first kiss, the first ecstasy of love, the play of light in the trees on a particular fall day, the endless flood of strength in our biceps and thighs. We have the illusion that all of this will happen again and again. In a way this falseness of youth is even more painful than the branching channels ahead. For the young are very much aware of the moment of the first kiss, the first ecstasy of love, and so on. They are keenly aware. Their terrible miscalculation is thinking that these moments will repeat in the infinity of time, that their bodies and minds will hold.”
Enjoy the rest of your lives, Graduates of the Class of 2006!
(In honor of D-Nice on his graduation)
By “Laguna Beach,” I mean the MTV “reality” series, not the town itself.
1. The show is very easy to watch! There is only about 10 minutes of content per half hour show, none of which is at all significant.
2. The show is not only heavily edited, it is obviously staged as well. For example, when Stephen picks up LC at the airport and then drives her to San Francisco, they show them on the Golden Gate Bridge. You do not take the GGB into The City from the airport! Or when Kristin is getting out of the hot tub talking on the phone, she has sunglasses on, but then they cut to a different camera angle and she has her sunglasses off (OK, you have to watch this scene in slow motion to notice this gaff, but I’m willing to do this as an aspiring TV critic).
3. It shows that spoiled rich kids are insecure just like everyone else. Of course, their insecurity doesn’t have anything to do with having enough food, shelter, or clothing, but can you really hold that against them?
4. Kids call their friends parents by their first names because, after all, the parents are their kids’ friends, not authority figures for God’s sake!
5. LC can, without any hint of irony, call someone else “dumb as dirt” despite the fact that she is “in jail” for not getting C’s in her high school classes. Her best friend, Lo, is rejected from USC, Morgan is rejected from BYU, and Trey is rejected from NYU. Of course, Stephen and Dieter succeed at getting into the California state university system (practically an open admission policy), and Christina is going to SMU. So, Stephen, Dieter, and Christina are the intellectual pacesetters of this crew!? That’s a dreamworld for the intellectually challenged.
Bonus: Like the students at my university, the “cast” of Laguna Beach complain about not liking “the bubble,” but they don’t do anything about it – because they actually like living in a bubble! (Witness LC, Season 2)
I spent half of the spring break in the Chi and have two “shout outs” to those I observed on the bar scene there:
(1) To the men of Chicago: here’s to you, with your untucked striped shirts (open two buttons down) and jeans, your spiked hair and gold chains, and your Bud Lights. That’s a great look . . . for you.
(2) To the women of Chicago: your ability to put back Red Bull-vodkas and Jager shots is impressive and I enjoyed our many conversations at the bar, if only your slurred speech had not gotten in the way of my understanding what the hell you were saying. Delightful. To woman #39, did you honestly tell me that you were on “Bay Watch,” were a runway model, and had your own modeling agency? Perhaps in Van Nuys.
And one for the road: To the two 20-somethings at the airport, very cool the way you were both wearing the same pair of Deisel driving loafers. . . . Very BFF.
It’s good to be home.
