Friday, June 26, 2009 - Posts
-
sponsorship
Lizzie Skurnik's new book on classic teen novels from our past, Shelf Discovery comes out next month. What better woman to weigh in on the intersection of twin adolescent rites of passage: the bat mitzvah and the Farrah 'do. ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
-
sponsorship
I'm truly heartbroken. MJ was my very first love. I wrote him letters
through his fan club when I was a girl, of course never imagining that
his cute baby-face would eventually morph into something that looked
like a laboratory creation. I loved him through my teen years and even
stuck with him through high school and into my first years of college.
By then I was long over wanting to marry him and was doubtful that he
even liked girls. Still, watching his physical transformation ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
-
sponsorship
Now that Michael Jackson has gotten what always seemed to be his
wish for eternal youth, I expect participants in his secretive life
will emerge for a last reminder of the extremely gifted pop star’s
lifetime of sad dysfunction. The Jackson Family will surely have a
stake in resolving who will attain custody of Jackson’s offspring. Any
dispute will no doubt also involve Debby Rowe,
the dermatologist’s nurse who bore Jackson his oldest two, 11-year-old
son Prince and 10-year-old daughter Paris. Rowe seems to have upheld
her end of their strange bargain, but their businesslike marriage ended
in businesslike divorce. (He found a less personally taxing way to reproduce by using a surrogate to create his third child, also named Prince II, but nicknamed Blanket).
Speaking of mothers, I doubt we’ll hear again from the housekeeper at Jackson’s amusement park ranch, whose son testified he was molested by her ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
-
sponsorship
"Everything's falling apart." So begins the first episode of HBO's Hung,
a new dramatic comedy that premieres this Sunday, June 28, at 10 p.m.
The opening shots highlight downtown Detroit's urban blight, and the
economic downturn serves as backdrop for the tale of a man who takes
desperate measures to survive financial hardship. Because it's HBO,
this particular red-blooded American man doesn't score a part-time
position at Starbucks. He becomes a male prostitute.
Thomas Jane stars as Ray Drecker, a once-great athlete who's fallen
from his lofty pedestal. His homecoming queen ex-wife (Anne Heche) has
left him for a wealthy dermatologist who's kind enough to give her
Botox injections in the kitchen while ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
-
sponsorship
I was particularly touched by Emily Yoffe's remembrance of Michael Jackson
as the young, innocent, and extraordinarily talented boy he once was,
before his life went terribly wrong. Despite such cautionary tales,
parents continue to push their kids in front of the cameras long before
the age of consent. Just look at the children of Jon & Kate.
It's already too easy picturing the Gosselin brood all
grown up: the plastic surgeries to come, the TV specials of their
family "reunions" (complete with vicious sibling rivalries), the
"comebacks" for child stars who are famous merely for having always
been famous. Maybe they'll be lucky. Their fame,
after all, is diluted by ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
-
sponsorship
A friend told me last night the sort of thing that you only admit
when you’re standing in a bar where the entire room is grooving on the
18th song in a marathon of Michael: that recently, for no real reason,
he had read through a bunch of the coverage of Michael right after Thriller
was released. The general sentiment at the time, he told us, was awe at
what Michael’s music did to existing standards of “black” and “white”
music. Back then, Billboard had its top-10 mainstream chart, and a
separate “Black LPs” chart, and there was little overlap between the
two. Michael changed that.
I was less than born when Thriller came out in 1983, so for
me, it was strange last night to think of Michael as he once was:
someone who raised issues of race not by being some ever-changing
hybrid of black and white, but by being black. I remember ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?