“ Courtney Love has taken leave from the microblogging service Twitter, without so much as a parting “don’t forget to keep up with your FICO score” to her 45,000-plus followers. Does this mean she’s actually going to drop her mobile device and focus on her long-in-the-making album Nobody’s Daughter? Or is she abandoning the 140-character format to become a Suze Orman for the generation that grew up on The Spin Alternative Record Guide?
I looooooved the Spin Alternative Record Guide. The Pitchfork 500 WISHES it was the Spin Alternative Record Guide.
“ I lost my mind when I found out Kaepa, those weird cheerleader shoes with the plastic triangles all over the upper, still exist)
They DO? Oh man. How about BUF-PUFs? Do they still make BUF-PUFs? I miss early ’90s teen magazine ads. Excuse me, I’m off to rifle through my old Sassys. via the Awl.
“ I have no idea why DJs thought “I Wanna Sex You Up” was appropriate school dance music, but they always played it. I have always, always hated this song. This is the song that would come on the radio while you were in the car with your parents on the way to McDonald’s or something and it would make you want to crawl in a hole and die of embarrassment.
YES. See also: “I Touch Myself” — I’m pretty sure I wasn’t completely clear on what that song was about, but I knew I didn’t want to listen to it with my dad when I was in sixth grade. An Ode To Fairly Inappropriate School Dance Anthems
“ Epitaph One,” the mind-blowing 13th episode of Dollhouse’s first season…didn’t air on FOX, but was included in the DVD. (FOX cannily shuffled the episode off onto the DVD, shrewdly surmising that the show’s passionate fans would be enticed to snap up the set.)
…and yet not-quite-so-shrewdly overlooking that the show’s passionate fans probably also know how Bittorrent works. Dollhouse: “Epitaph One” | TV | The A.V. Club
“ Kristol’s personal political history is famous, and probably over-exaggerated, but goes something likes this: when he was an undergraduate at the “radical” City College of New York, from which he graduated in 1940, his small group of Trotskyite (or at least anti-Stalinist) leftists held ferocious debates from Alcove 1 of the college’s lunch room with the pro-Stalinist leftists in Alcove 2, about politics. Then Kristol decided that the left was insane, and communism could only manifest itself in evil dictators who needed to be overthrown as usurpers of liberty. This was neoconservatism, or something. Kristol would later sell his cadre out to the religious right, which was growing to dominate the Republican party. And at some point, he spawned, which was of course his greatest offense.
Continuing with my theme of being totally behind in posting shit because I never get to use the computer, here is a month old obituary that made me sad because I realize I could have summed up my entire M.A. thesis in pretty much these four sentences. Especially that last one. I should go back and rename my thesis “Neoconservatism, Democratization, and Human Rights: How Irving Kristol’s Sperm Destroyed Civilization (and the New York Times Op-Ed Page)” — that’s got a nice ring to it. via Wonkette
I know, I know, I’m super late with this one (I’m busy with my own gigantic baby), but I wanted to make sure everyone had seen the picture of the 19 pound Indonesian newborn. I love the regular sized baby next to him all, “What the shit??” via Gawker (and everywhere else in the universe ever)
“ Actor Peter Fonda said he thought “celebrating the arrest of Osama bin Laden and not the arrest of Polanski” was far more important.
Yes, you know, OBVIOUSLY the two are mutually exclusive. WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?? via BBC NEWS
“ Look, I dig ROSEMARY’S BABY; but rape’s rape. Do the crime, do the time.
ATTN Hollywood: Kevin Smith is making you look bad. KEVIN. SMITH. is more enlightened about rape than most of you. Hang your head in shame. (I love Kevin Smith, but he’s not exactly the most, uh, sexually respectful filmmaker out there.) KevinSmith (ThatKevinSmith) on Twitter
these people all signed a petition in support of roman polanski, arguing that his arrest and prosecution are immoral and somehow hinder the free expression of art through filmmaking.
None of these really surprise me, though a couple make me sad. (Really, Tilda? Et tu, John Landis?) But, you know, where did we really expect Woody Allen to come down on this issue?
Hollywood, like any industry, has an inclination to close ranks around its members, and defend people’s indefensible actions so as to justify their continued existence within that cohort without feeling icky moral twinges. I’m more interested in who will come out and condemn Polanski. (I’m also curious to see if there’s crossover between those who wouldn’t stand for Elia Kazan at the Oscars and those who defend Polanski.)
One thing I think we can all agree in, though, is that no one gives a shit about what Asia Argento thinks. About anything.
“ Here’s the thing: Mackenzie refers to much of the sexual contact as “consensual.” I understand not wanting to put words in her mouth, and the liability that is involved with that — even though John Phillips was her father, and that should make this issue really clear cut. But the first instance was obviously rape. How do we know? Because one cannot consent to sex during a blackout. Also, because she called it as much on Oprah yesterday. She said that yes, it was rape. Her father raped her. (She also said that when she confronted him about it, his response was “Raped you? Don’t you mean the time we made love?” Extremely typical, if extremely disturbing, minimization and manipulation by an abuser.) And I’m extraordinarily concerned that the media feels the so-called “consensual incest” is more interesting and newsworthy than explicitly defined rape. I’m seriously disturbed by the clear effort to overlook the latter in favor of the former. It shows where our priorities are, what discussions we are and aren’t comfortable with, and which transgressions are worth public shaming.
OK, so I try not to talk about rape a lot, in person or online, because it presses lots of rage buttons in me and I’d just rather not get into it. And yet, here I am, talking about it two posts in a row. But this just totally sums up my main response to the MacKenzie Phillips thing — I follow a link about how she “had sex” with her father to find a description of him giving her drugs and her waking up to find him on top of her. And I just kind of stared at the webpage and screamed silently and my head just said “WHY ARE WE NOT CALLING THIS RAPE? WHY IS THIS NOT THE LEDE?” I find this such a significant aspect of the whole story — it colors the whole following “consensual” relationship and how she has processed it in her own head to make peace with it over the years. And it breaks my heart that the salacious father/daughter “consensual sex” part is what seems to be gathering the headlines, because although the father/daughter rape is more banal, it’s more important to talk about. via the Curvature
