Thursday, April 09, 2009 - Posts
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Looks like Meghan McCain's wit and wisdom will soon be available in your local bookstore: the 24-year-old has scored a book deal based on her Daily Beast columns, for a reported six-figure sum. (Close Meghan-watchers know this will actually be her second tome). She's keeping mum on what it's about, but it probably won't stray too far from the major theme of her columns thus far: becoming young and hot and tech savvy is how the Republican party can fix itself. (For Meghan's sake, I hope the book gets a more surgical edit than the Daily Beast has offered her work). Here's my question, though: What's she going to write about when she's no longer young and hot and tech savvy? A handful of columns in, her schtick already has some crows feet. Will we be sick of hearing it by the time her book makes it through production?
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Ann: Thanks for sharing that "misread" headline. Indeed, it would be refreshing to see a headline about someone who "runs down mommy groups." As a non-mother who happens to be at that age when all of your friends suddenly become mothers, I find the mommy-group behavior utterly puzzling and mysterious. I confess I've wondered: When you become a mother, does your DNA mutate and briefly turn you into a 15-year-old again? Why else do otherwise relaxed, normal-seeming women become moralizers on behalf of the whole group? Isn't the whole pleasure of adulthood the fact that, finally, you're able to accept your own idiosyncrasies and faults? Just the other week I was having coffee with someone very close to me who was practically in tears at how mean the other "Brooklyn mommies" have been to her. I find it as puzzling as the dog yoga Jess just wrote about. But you (and, recently, Hanna, in her breastfeeding piece) have written astutely about this, suggesting that it's the fact that we don't have gender scripts now that may paradoxically--or ironically--be at the root of all this group identification and implicit peer pressure and rule-setting about what is acceptable for other parents to offer their children. (Only organic goodies, not too much sugar, etc.) And so I didn't know whether to feel relieved or horrified the other day when, out for a run, heading toward Prospect Park, I spotted a dad hanging out on a deserted block near the Gowanus Canal with his two sons, their skateboards, and....a palpable lack of helmets.
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What do you have to do to make a gritty, boundary pushing cop show these days? You can't top The Wire's complexity, soul crushing realism or commitment to unhappy endings. NYPD Blue fully explored unappealing semi-nudity, as well as racist badge holders—an archetype Crash then overdid to the point of absurdism. Law & Order: SVU has been beaming extremely unsettling sex crimes into living rooms for years. The Shield took on corruption and the CSI franchise has a lock on fancy gadgets and newfangled technology. What does that leave for a freshman cop show, out to prove that it's not just old and borrowed, but also something new?
Southland, an ensemble series about working the beat on the mean streets of Los Angeles that premieres tonight on NBC (it's also streaming on Hulu now), has come up with a fairly effective solution: Kill children. Grit cred established.
Television has become so "edgy," and viewers so familiar with the tropes of that edginess, that it's extremely difficult to subvert audience expectations, or more to the point, to make audiences feel something about all the dark events taking place on screen. (Some people unwind to episodes of Grey's and some to SVU. Just depends whether you prefer relaxing to elevator make-out sessions or sexual predators being brought to justice). Tonight's episode of Southland follows a rookie cop who is having a seriously unsettling first day—the kind of first day that involves gun-wielding, trigger-happy gang bangers, a racist, sexist, unhinged partner, a john picking up a prostitute with his baby in the back seat, an innocent teenager shot down in the street for no reason and a missing little girl. In other words, he's having the kind of day that makes him seriously consider quitting—but he's also having the kind of day cops have on cop shows all the time, the kind of day we've all seen before. Until a kid turns up dead. Southland is an extremely well-made, satisfying genre series that's in some ways a throwback to Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue— but to be as cutting edge now, as those shows were then, it has to be that much more brutal.
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Hanna, I see your insane Martha Stewart interview and raise you this utterly ridiculous New York Times style article about doing yoga with your dog. I don't think I need to unpack the absurdity of paying to gently stretch with a canine (nor do I need to point out this definitely falls in the bogus trend story category), but I did heartily enjoy this comment from a dissatisfied Doga attempter:
"It was lunacy,” Ms. Apro recalled. “Peanuts, my retired racer
greyhound, didn’t participate at all. Instead, I did downward-facing dog while he ate the most treats he’s ever had in a 60-minute period.”
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In the California
legal paper The Recorder, Dan Levine has an insightful profile of Jay Bybee, the author of notorious
torture memos for the Bush administration who is now, for better or worse, a sitting
judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Money quote:
Bybee declined to talk about his work at the Office of Legal Counsel. But
when he gathered former clerks last year at a Las Vegas steak house for a five-year
reunion, he was more revealing.
"He said our work has been well-researched, carefully written, and that
he was very proud of the work that we've done and the opinions his chambers has
issued," said Tuan Samahon,
who was Bybee's first judicial clerk and is now a UNLV professor.
According to Samahon, the judge then added: "I wish I could say that of
the prior job I had."
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Primed by a bunch of reading I've been doing about the vogue in bad-mommy confessionals (here's an interesting piece in the American Prospect on the topic), I misread this tagline—"Broadway Star Now Runs Downtown Mommy Group"—as I skimmed through the XX morning memo highlighting assorted articles. I read "Runs Down Mommy Group." So I hurried to check out the New York Observer piece about a Broadway singer who founded a mothers' group called Bowery Babes: Here, I thought, was the latest bad-mommy thing to do—rain on the parade of communal mommying. And my gut reaction was: A woman after my own heart! When I hear about mommy groups—especially if they have chic names, and (I imagine) members whose cell phones are constantly ringing—I suddenly feel like I'm back in high school, facing a peer group out of my league.
In fact, the article was about an ultra cool mom with just that kind of BlackBerry-buzzing life herself, surrounded by an entourage of other moms lucky enough to land a spot in her "cozy, grass-roots" group (the sort, it seems, who take in stride an activity like a "Halloween soiree" for 100 at a neighborhood bar). Mothering can be a very lonely business, and I'm all for companionship; I'm always glad when I see nannies congregating, because a happy nanny is surely what every parent wants. Still, the hyper-scheduled mingling—"proactively doing, rather than chatting," as a member put it—intimidates me now as it did two decades ago when I ventured with my brand new firstborn into a neighbor's basement with a bunch of mothers I didn't know. I never went back.
Now that it's all behind me, I'll speak up for being a bit of a straggler, rather than plunging into the thick of a "strollercizing" brigade—not least because it's easier to muddle in your own way, and let your baby do the same, if you aren't constantly tempted to make comparisons, as (let's face it) we all are, even in a gathering designed to be soothing. Bowery Babes may well be "unspoiled," but here's hoping the article doesn't lure yet more new moms into the "somewhat of an application process" (oh dear) that the super-popular group has had to institute.
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Men’s mag Esquire has always been one of my legitimate favorites, primarily because it offers at least one
if not two or three pieces of good reported journalism each issue—and
provides arch but accessible fashion tips to guys without descending into
the consumerism and petty quizletry that I encounter in even the
most edgy women’s magazines. Which is why this month’s “How to Be a Man” feature was so disappointing. From the cover story:
A
man carries cash. A man looks out for those around him—woman, friend,
stranger. A man can cook eggs. A man can always find something good
to watch on television. A man makes things—a rock wall, a table, the
tuition money. Or he rebuilds—engines, watches, fortunes. He passes
along expertise, one man to the next. Know-how survives him. This is
immortality. A man can speak to dogs. A man fantasizes that kung fu
lives deep inside him somewhere. A man knows how to sneak a look at
cleavage and doesn't care if he gets busted once in a while. A man is
good at his job. Not his work, not his avocation, not his hobby. Not
his career. His job. It doesn't matter what his job is, because if a
man doesn't like his job, he gets a new one…
A man loves the
human body, the revelation of nakedness. He loves the sight of the pale
breast, the physics of the human skeleton, the alternating current of
the flesh. He is thrilled by the snatch, by the wrist, the sight of a
bare shoulder. He likes the crease of a bent knee. When his woman bends
to pick up her underwear, he feels that thrum that only a man can feel.
A man doesn't point out that he did the dishes.
Oooookay.
I had been keeping a tally of things that I, woman, could also do—cash,
check; eggs, hell yeah; hungover Bravo TV, yup—but pretty much stopped
at “pale breast” (assumed that had gone out of vogue when they finally
started making band-aids for black people). Wait, no! At “snatch.”
I
generally enjoy Tom Chiarella’s work, but this reads like some kind of
grunting parody of male speech and thought patterns—jerky, reductive,
and obsessed with stereotypical tropes of manhood (boobs, booze,
breadwinning). Who talks like that? The emphasis on earning potential
seems especially tone-deaf; in 2009, women are working in record
numbers, and it’s men bearing the brunt of the layoffs in this
recession. As for rebuilding “engines, watches, fortunes”: Just about
every man I know is so divorced from any vestigial handyman tendencies
that, if faced with an engine in need of assembly, he would
simply Google “mechanic” on his iPhone and let the ripoff begin. And
what’s wrong with that? At least it’s honest—and equal opportunity (I
could do that, too!).
Finally, when Esquire insists that a man
doesn't see himself lost in some great maw of humanity, some grand
sweep. That's the liberal thread; it's why men won't line up as
liberals
I just think of all the men who do identify as liberals, and never imagined doing so magically betrays their gender. Why peddle that political point?
And what would a women’s list look like? One longs for Salt ‘N’ Pepa at this point. Cool cover, though.
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Today's Washington Post Home section features a priceless interview with the First Diva of Craft, Martha Stewart, who has just come out with Encyclopedia of Crafts. The interviewer opens on a question about how the recession is affecting domestic life. (Er. Foreclosures? Glue gun out on the sidewalk, along with the rest of my possessions?) Martha falls right for the bait:
People are staying home and enjoying it by crafting and beautifying their home with decorating and cooking. They can't afford to travel, but they can afford a [$23] glitter kit.
Martha then digs in further and further, offering herself, whose net worth is $970 million, as an example of thrift.
I have always been kind of frugal and cautious in terms of extravagance. So I have always turned the lights out when I leave a room...I am a serious gardener, and I grow my own food and have my own chickens and eggs...I am not buying as many trees to plant as I would like, but that can wait until next year.
Yes, Martha, when I'm feeling the pinch, I too space out my tree purchases. And put my horse masseuse on a bi-weekly schedule.
Of course, Martha is only representing the brand here. She understands that we understand that she really does not dig her hands into the chickenshit every morning, but that we need her to pretend she does. And she keeps up a good front, until the interviewer gets to the toxic combination of her own daughter, Alexis, and the true habits of the hoi polloi. Her daughter conducted an online poll asking readers what they would bring if invited to Martha's house: wine, flowers, cake or brownies. (Flowers won)
If you bring flowers, it's like bringing coals to Newcastle. I have more flowers than most people. I certainly don't need a cake; I would be making the cake. Brownies? No.
No, indeed.
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Rosa Brooks, one of our XX Factor contributors, is taking a position at the Pentagon as an adviser to the Undersecretary of Defense for policy. She'll be working for Undersecretary Michele Flournoy, the #3 official in the DOD hierarchy, and the highest ranking civilian woman ever to serve at the Pentagon. Mazal tov, Rosa! We'll miss you on the blog while you're off saving the world.