You know how sometimes you'll see a commercial or TV show or something like that that utterly fascinates and infuriates you, but you can't explain why? No? Just me then? OK.
That's exactly how I feel whenever those commercials for McGriddles, McDonald's new breakfast sandwich-type objects, come on. The ad shows some cool kids out on the town. A DJ's scratchin' it up, everyone's dressed like an Urban Outfitters catalog shoot and there are even some cute girls at the periphery.
But who wants to chase girlies when there's an animated boom box pulsing to some phat beats? (Though what it's supposedly playing sounds more like Cake's dreadful "Never There.") Anyway, the kids seem content to just kick it and keep drinking until McDonald's opens and they can get some McGriddles to cap off the night.
This commercial makes me want to break shit in my apartment, but I totally want it to come on again.
Thursday, May 05, 2005
Concert Review: The Decemberists
Before tonight's show, I went through three distinct phases with The Decemberists. On the first go-round, I thought that they tried too hard by half, with their lyrics about Victorian England and their string-heavy, accordion-heavy sounds. In stage two, I gained appreciation for Colin Meloy's lyrics and the quirkiness of his stories, but I liked them tentatively, kind of the way I feel about Beck. Stage three came after I heard their new album Picaresque, and their whole ouevre and style made sense.
Tonight, they were fantastic. Meloy is great with a crowd and at ease with himself. Unlike The Shins, they were dynamic on stage -- a joy to watch. Their big-sounding songs like "16 Military Wives" and "The Chimbley Sweep" were great. Songs that weren't quite my speed, like "Eli the Barrowboy," sounded better than before. A really well-done live show leaves me liking songs that didn't quite click on the album. Their final performance of "The Mariner" worked wonders. They're showmen and legitimate talents who will outlive the flavor-of-the-month nonsense.
The Decemberists' performance came after a long, painful buildup. Willy Mason was scheduled to open. Mason is a prolific and talented nineteen-year-old whose work found its way into my iPod a few weeks ago. He's hit and miss, and his lesser songs have lyrics that sound cribbed from a cigarette-fueled Dawson's Creek episode. Still, I was pretty excited to hear him play songs like "So Long" and "Oxygen." But instead of Mason, we were treated to a listless character who called herself Rebecca. She didn't explain who she was or why she was there instead of Willy. It was a performance better left to an audition night at the Ark.
Tonight, they were fantastic. Meloy is great with a crowd and at ease with himself. Unlike The Shins, they were dynamic on stage -- a joy to watch. Their big-sounding songs like "16 Military Wives" and "The Chimbley Sweep" were great. Songs that weren't quite my speed, like "Eli the Barrowboy," sounded better than before. A really well-done live show leaves me liking songs that didn't quite click on the album. Their final performance of "The Mariner" worked wonders. They're showmen and legitimate talents who will outlive the flavor-of-the-month nonsense.
The Decemberists' performance came after a long, painful buildup. Willy Mason was scheduled to open. Mason is a prolific and talented nineteen-year-old whose work found its way into my iPod a few weeks ago. He's hit and miss, and his lesser songs have lyrics that sound cribbed from a cigarette-fueled Dawson's Creek episode. Still, I was pretty excited to hear him play songs like "So Long" and "Oxygen." But instead of Mason, we were treated to a listless character who called herself Rebecca. She didn't explain who she was or why she was there instead of Willy. It was a performance better left to an audition night at the Ark.
Wednesday, May 04, 2005
Wankers at Princeton
I like all of my nice Princeton friends in the City, so this isn't directed at you. But sitting at work, I'm listening to Al Franken interview one Princeton student who organized the anti-Frist filibuster, and a Republican undergrad who opposes them. Both are pleasant and articulate -- but they're also pompous, and seem to have very shallow knowledge of the issue. Nice to see a little leftist activism at a place like Princeton, but the Democrats put a big target on themselves when they celebrate a piddling campus protest like this. Listening to these two (who learned their rhetorical techniques from Crossfire and seem to have little idea of what they're actually talking about) is bringing back bad memories of the Diag. It also conforms with the worst media stereotypes of an effete liberal elite. Sucks that public outrage over the Republican parliamentary putsch has taken this form.
Just asking ...
Given that the New York Times puts its bigfoot White House and campaign reporters out to pasture in the food section (Frank Bruni pens a charming Critic's Notebook on those crazy bathrooms these days. Consarn it!), what's going to happen when Elisabeth Bumiller starts filing her usual puff pastry from every joint in town?
Eat your leafy greens
Cole Slaw Blog adds spinachdip nyc to its list of links at right. Like Cole Slaw Blog, the content of spinachdip bears no recognizable nexus to a widely enjoyed appetizer. Plus, the dude updates the site constantly and has prolific interests.
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
Book Review: Generation Kill
Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War, by Evan Wright (Putnam 2004). Reporter Evan Wright was placed as an embed with the First Recon Battalion at the start of the Iraq War. He is nothing like the bloated, jingoistic embeds from cable news. Wright is a talented, balls-to-the-wall reporter whose articles on the war won him a National Magazine Award. His book eclipses everything else written about the war.
Wright spends most of his time with the recon battalion's Second Platoon, a group of 22 Marines who journey through Nasiriyah and Baqubah and ultimately end up camped out in a Baghdad cigarette factory. By the time the time these men departed Iraq, Wright had all the narrative material for a character study, a treatise on Marine leadership, and the nature of modern war.
This book covers everything -- what happens to human bowel movements during battle, the crises that arise when incompetent leadership fails to supply proper weapons lubricant, castes that arise from musical preferences, the smell of burning bodies (it's like barbecue chicken).
In one passage, the Second Platoon is ambushed on three sides, managing an exit with only one man felled by a bullet to the foot.
A trigger-happy nineteen-year-old sniper has a penchant for shooting unarmed children, earning him a nickname derived from "Baby Killer."
A 1,000-pound bomb vaporizes a friendly village. Leadership explains that the pyrotechnics are a morale booster.
Wright does not identify by name the real villains of the book -- the Marine middle-management whose often-manic pronouncements mostly shriek through the radio. Instead, Wright uses the nicknames adopted by the Platoon. Captain America is a trigger-happy hysteric who terrorizes civilians and wilts under pressure. He compensates for his uncertainty with bursts of violence. The Platoon members fantasize of his death. Captain America doesn't die, but is ultimately relieved of his position when a random group of reservists formally report his mistreatment of a battlefield POW.
Another target of their ire is Kasey Casem (so named because his voice reminds the men of the disc jockey) who fixates on videotaping the war and dreams of assembling his footage into a feature documentary.
The members of the Platoon themselves are profane, eclectic, ultimately noble guys, who grow to resent the incompetence of their commanders and the overall arc of the war. They're wild individualists -- including born-again Christians, a vocal Communist, a metrosexual Taoist, and a marine as left as Howard Zinn. They don't conform with the image of soldiers coming from a narrow, conservative cross-section of the country.
Two of the guys stand out in particular. Nathaniel Fick is a thoughtful, well-spoken Dartmouth grad who abandoned his pre-med studies after taking a class taught by a former special forces soldier and Vietnam veteran. Wright describes Fick as "something of a closet idealist," a classics major who spent time in East Timor where he was assigned to distributing donated ThighMasters to starving people. Despite his elite pedigree, Fick is at the middle of the group, universally respected, eager to stand up against orders he considers counterproductive and dangerous.
Rudy Reyes is the aforementioned Taoist, a yoga practitioner who waxes his legs, reads Oprah's magazine, and identifies with the The Color Purple. But Reyes comes from a miserable background. A close relative was a drug-addicted cop who brought home busted prostitutes to babysit for Rudy and his brother. "I was always the new guy in a shitty neighborhood in a shitty school," Reyes says. "I was inspired by Spider-Man, Speed Racer and Bruce Lee. I decided to become a warrior." Despite the quirks, Reyes is a great soldier, physically courageous and purpose-driven. (At the end of the book, Fick enrolls at Harvard Business School and Reyes is promoted to a team leader.)
Fick and Reyes are most memorable, but if Wright had wanted, he could have expanded this book to an 800-page character study without an excessive line. A cynical, embittered doctor battles alongside them, but then his temper explodes when he attempts to treat mortally wounded civilians; their commander is nicknamed "Iceman" for his inscrutability, and longs to come home to long solitary bike rides; a Missouri native shrieks Avril Lavigne songs and once opened for Limp Bizkit.
Many of them want to be idealists. They're challenged by the war, but embittered by their leadership. As stated by Sgt. Eric Kocher,
In one of the funniest, strangest passages of the book, the Marines survey a wealthy Baghdad neighborhood, where the women work like mules, everyone hates Saddam, and the local men make sexual advances on the Marines, who are told by men and boys that they have "pretty eyes." ("Girls. Blah!" says one local. "You go with my friend, you like." Apparently, Iraq will either become the next Afghanistan, or the next Chelsea.)
Generation Kill is a book so good that I have to discipline myself to avoid superlatives. It does not belong in the proximity of coleslaw, but then again, it stands too tall to be compared to anything. Not the reporting the TV war correspondents, or even Seymour Hersh's New Yorker dispatches.
This is graphic and profane -- more than Black Hawk Down, Saving Private Ryan, or Anthony Swofford's excellent Gulf War memoir Jarhead. It contains an episode more violent than anything I've read or seen. And man, this book is a hell of a thing. It taught me more about war and current events than anything in my 20-book library on the Bush Administration's post-9/11 foreign policy. Wright's narrative is detached and evenhanded. He makes you love the soldiers and hate the war, in a way that isn't some stupid slogan or an armchair polemic. In comparison, Farenheit 9/11 has the gravity of Family Circus cartoon.
*In an attempt to streamline our often-lengthy posts, I'm writing this review in two parts. Part II will discuss the book's lessons about the Iraq War, the U.S. military, and war reporting.
Wright spends most of his time with the recon battalion's Second Platoon, a group of 22 Marines who journey through Nasiriyah and Baqubah and ultimately end up camped out in a Baghdad cigarette factory. By the time the time these men departed Iraq, Wright had all the narrative material for a character study, a treatise on Marine leadership, and the nature of modern war.
This book covers everything -- what happens to human bowel movements during battle, the crises that arise when incompetent leadership fails to supply proper weapons lubricant, castes that arise from musical preferences, the smell of burning bodies (it's like barbecue chicken).
In one passage, the Second Platoon is ambushed on three sides, managing an exit with only one man felled by a bullet to the foot.
A trigger-happy nineteen-year-old sniper has a penchant for shooting unarmed children, earning him a nickname derived from "Baby Killer."
A 1,000-pound bomb vaporizes a friendly village. Leadership explains that the pyrotechnics are a morale booster.
Wright does not identify by name the real villains of the book -- the Marine middle-management whose often-manic pronouncements mostly shriek through the radio. Instead, Wright uses the nicknames adopted by the Platoon. Captain America is a trigger-happy hysteric who terrorizes civilians and wilts under pressure. He compensates for his uncertainty with bursts of violence. The Platoon members fantasize of his death. Captain America doesn't die, but is ultimately relieved of his position when a random group of reservists formally report his mistreatment of a battlefield POW.
Another target of their ire is Kasey Casem (so named because his voice reminds the men of the disc jockey) who fixates on videotaping the war and dreams of assembling his footage into a feature documentary.
The members of the Platoon themselves are profane, eclectic, ultimately noble guys, who grow to resent the incompetence of their commanders and the overall arc of the war. They're wild individualists -- including born-again Christians, a vocal Communist, a metrosexual Taoist, and a marine as left as Howard Zinn. They don't conform with the image of soldiers coming from a narrow, conservative cross-section of the country.
Two of the guys stand out in particular. Nathaniel Fick is a thoughtful, well-spoken Dartmouth grad who abandoned his pre-med studies after taking a class taught by a former special forces soldier and Vietnam veteran. Wright describes Fick as "something of a closet idealist," a classics major who spent time in East Timor where he was assigned to distributing donated ThighMasters to starving people. Despite his elite pedigree, Fick is at the middle of the group, universally respected, eager to stand up against orders he considers counterproductive and dangerous.
Rudy Reyes is the aforementioned Taoist, a yoga practitioner who waxes his legs, reads Oprah's magazine, and identifies with the The Color Purple. But Reyes comes from a miserable background. A close relative was a drug-addicted cop who brought home busted prostitutes to babysit for Rudy and his brother. "I was always the new guy in a shitty neighborhood in a shitty school," Reyes says. "I was inspired by Spider-Man, Speed Racer and Bruce Lee. I decided to become a warrior." Despite the quirks, Reyes is a great soldier, physically courageous and purpose-driven. (At the end of the book, Fick enrolls at Harvard Business School and Reyes is promoted to a team leader.)
Fick and Reyes are most memorable, but if Wright had wanted, he could have expanded this book to an 800-page character study without an excessive line. A cynical, embittered doctor battles alongside them, but then his temper explodes when he attempts to treat mortally wounded civilians; their commander is nicknamed "Iceman" for his inscrutability, and longs to come home to long solitary bike rides; a Missouri native shrieks Avril Lavigne songs and once opened for Limp Bizkit.
Many of them want to be idealists. They're challenged by the war, but embittered by their leadership. As stated by Sgt. Eric Kocher,
"If something happens to me, I want my wife to know the truth," he says. "If they say we fought valiantly here, I want her to know we fought retarded. They haven't used us right -- sending us into these towns, onto the airfield, with no observations."Their arrival to and occupation of Baghdad is both powerful and anticlimactic. Fick's vision of the war comes undone when he quickly realizes that there is no plan for the occupation. He meets with locals, expecting that he'll serve as a liaison to doctors and engineers. Then, chaos ensues. With the Americans' blessing, Baghdad turns to anarchy, with Shiites enacting revenge killings and the mass slaughter of Baathists. The Marines do not patrol at night because the Shiites have been given a green light to enact a bloodbath.
In one of the funniest, strangest passages of the book, the Marines survey a wealthy Baghdad neighborhood, where the women work like mules, everyone hates Saddam, and the local men make sexual advances on the Marines, who are told by men and boys that they have "pretty eyes." ("Girls. Blah!" says one local. "You go with my friend, you like." Apparently, Iraq will either become the next Afghanistan, or the next Chelsea.)
Generation Kill is a book so good that I have to discipline myself to avoid superlatives. It does not belong in the proximity of coleslaw, but then again, it stands too tall to be compared to anything. Not the reporting the TV war correspondents, or even Seymour Hersh's New Yorker dispatches.
This is graphic and profane -- more than Black Hawk Down, Saving Private Ryan, or Anthony Swofford's excellent Gulf War memoir Jarhead. It contains an episode more violent than anything I've read or seen. And man, this book is a hell of a thing. It taught me more about war and current events than anything in my 20-book library on the Bush Administration's post-9/11 foreign policy. Wright's narrative is detached and evenhanded. He makes you love the soldiers and hate the war, in a way that isn't some stupid slogan or an armchair polemic. In comparison, Farenheit 9/11 has the gravity of Family Circus cartoon.
*In an attempt to streamline our often-lengthy posts, I'm writing this review in two parts. Part II will discuss the book's lessons about the Iraq War, the U.S. military, and war reporting.
"Irv, we were never in aisle seven!"
When I was a child, I remember trips to the supermarket as kind of a hedonistic, spring break-style rampage, but with more jicama. If I wasn't riding in the cart (always standing up in the front, never in the seat), I was out running around and wreaking havoc like the Butler kids and trying to sneak that extra box of pudding pops into the cart, under the produce. My parents were never particularly laissez-faire about other aspects of my upbringing, so I used to wonder why I had such free rein at Rego's.
Thanks to some Canadian scientists, We now may surmise that I was an ugly kid. How else to explain it? I'm not a scientist, and to be honest, not even that smart. But I do have my doubts about this:
Thanks to some Canadian scientists, We now may surmise that I was an ugly kid. How else to explain it? I'm not a scientist, and to be honest, not even that smart. But I do have my doubts about this:
They also rated each child's physical attractiveness on a 10-point scale.
A 10-point scale of attractiveness.
Cole Slaw Blog is suddenly very skeptical of a scientific study based on such a thing. When were these children rated? As they came in the door, before parents let them roam free (or not)? Or later, after they'd been observed gamboling through the dairy section?
Of course, there are arguments to be made for the scientists' theory. It doesn't surprise me that one might reasonably expect parents to be more protective of attractive children, as they would quite literally be seeing the best of themselves in the attractive children.
Also, it's conceivable that the parents of upper-class male children might feel they have more invested in a male heir. I was informed by my grandfather (an upper-class male if ever there was one) that, as his only grandson, I "had to carry on the [Flop] name." A serious trip to lay on a seven-year old, to be sure.
But this is just speculation. And I remain skeptical (especially of the methodology), although open to further discussion. After all, I was a fan of Desmond Morris' books and documentary series "The Human Animal" in high school.
(For my co-blogger: Morris also writes about kitties.)
Addendum from CrimeNotes: Flop may be skeptical, but as an avid reader of sociobiology (no joke) I am not. Cynical, but it makes perfect sense that parents invest more in an heir they see as more genetically marketable. Parents freak out about sex, but in the end, it's all about getting their kids laid a few years down the road, preferably to someone smart, rich, and hot.
Monday, May 02, 2005
Monday Substance!
Fresh off another spin through The New York Times revenue-generator known as Sunday Stylin', it was refreshing to read a story about New York City that didn't pander to the sensibilities of the idle wealthy. Of course, said story was in the features section* of The Washington Post, not that of the Times. Then again, rent control is an issue that affects very few of the fabulous ones whose coveted shoes walk the streets of the meatpacking district.
* The Washington Post's features section is called the Style section, and it happens to be one of the best newspaper sections in the country, in the opinion of precisely 50 percent of Cole Slaw Blog.
* The Washington Post's features section is called the Style section, and it happens to be one of the best newspaper sections in the country, in the opinion of precisely 50 percent of Cole Slaw Blog.
Sunday, May 01, 2005
Pluralism on CBS
This is a real-time recap of 30 minutes from a TV movie, Riding the Bus With My Sister.
Rosie O'Donnell plays a retarded lady who gives moral support to a karate-practicing black man in a park. She holds a stack of cookies and demands that her sister photograph the "cookie mountain." A dour waitress looks down on Ms. O'Donnell's character because she is developmentally disabled. Ms. O'Donnell's character does a lot of shouting -- a real know-it-all, bossing everybody around. She denies that she loves "all mankind," but encourages her sister to hook up with bus drivers. Bus passengers resent Ms. O'Donnell's overacting and get snippy. Ms. O'Donnell declares Ricky Martin and Will Smith "hot" while standing in a laundromat. Then she says some stuff that hurts her sister's feelings -- goddammit, just because you're developmentally disabled doesn't mean you get to be an asshole. But now it's wacky because a washing machine overflows with soap, Brady Bunch style. Cut to a shot of Ms. O'Donnell eating a lollipop. Now the karate-practicing black man defends himself from robbers. Some completely wild acting ensues, and I turn off the TV.
Rosie O'Donnell plays a retarded lady who gives moral support to a karate-practicing black man in a park. She holds a stack of cookies and demands that her sister photograph the "cookie mountain." A dour waitress looks down on Ms. O'Donnell's character because she is developmentally disabled. Ms. O'Donnell's character does a lot of shouting -- a real know-it-all, bossing everybody around. She denies that she loves "all mankind," but encourages her sister to hook up with bus drivers. Bus passengers resent Ms. O'Donnell's overacting and get snippy. Ms. O'Donnell declares Ricky Martin and Will Smith "hot" while standing in a laundromat. Then she says some stuff that hurts her sister's feelings -- goddammit, just because you're developmentally disabled doesn't mean you get to be an asshole. But now it's wacky because a washing machine overflows with soap, Brady Bunch style. Cut to a shot of Ms. O'Donnell eating a lollipop. Now the karate-practicing black man defends himself from robbers. Some completely wild acting ensues, and I turn off the TV.
Sunday Stylin': the story behind "coochie couture"
In today's desperately pathetic attempt to fill space and gain advertising revenue, the Times discusses Paradise Hotel, the Met's embrace of corporate branding, and gets some really awesome letters.
Weren't You Famous? Sunday Styles sends a love letter straight to our heart, and makes fun of reality TV stars who try to capitalize on their fame but fail. There's a lot about my all-time favorite guilty pleasure, Paradise Hotel, a structureless program whose major premise was to drive beautiful, angry binge-drinkers into hysterical fits. (Salon.com's Heather Havrilesky renamed the show Drunken Asshole Hotel.) For those who appreciated the show, it makes sense that Tara is in love with a baby monkey and that Toni is hoping to be a commentator on Love Cruise re-runs.
The Times describes Toni as follows: "It feels good when I'm recognized, but it's not because I did something well," said Ms. Ferrari, who is now bartending to pay the bills.
Eric Nies from Real World got sucker-punched at an Iowa bar. This wounded his dignity.
The only disturbing thing in this article is that Rachel from The Inferno makes $240,000 to $360,000 a year in speaking fees. Pardon my subtlety, but anyone who gives a shit about the blabbering of that stupid, arrogant fucknut needs to be punched in the face. Apparently she and Veronica are opening a T-shirt business or something.
But for once, skank liability rests not with the Times, which appears to hate these people as much as I do. Sunday Styles, you coy little vixen, you. Just when I think I hate everything about you, tease me like this.
A Peek Into Coco's Closet : Sunday Styles has been flogging a Chanel exhibition at the Met, and it's time Cole Slaw Blog asked a question: The Metropolitan Museum of Art is putting on an exhibit about Chanel? And who is a sponsor? Chanel, you say? And are there a bunch of Chanel ads in the Times today? (There are.) Cole Slaw Blog is skeptical.
By which we mean, what the fuck? Why don't we just do an exhibit on the history of all sorts of luxury brands? Maybe the Met can just become the LVMH Museum of Shit You Covet. Next week: Hugo Boss.
But at least the exhibit is controversial. One of the curators, Harold Koda, acknowledges as much: "My fear is that all the people who are completely immersed in Chanel, and there a lot of women who wear only Chanel, are going to be mad," he said. "Because we don't have their Chanels in the exhibition. That's my nightmare."
Ours is slightly different and involves the Meatpacking District and a shrill I-banker named Stephanie, but suffice it to say, a cultural pillar shilling corporate brands is close enough.
The Drums of India Hip-Hop Toward a Hit : The anecdote at the start of this one tells it all: Suphala, a pretty lady who dedicated herself to an obscure Indian drum called the tabla, was basically ignored by fancy partygoers. Maybe they should have read this article about her to know she was up-and-coming.
A Tale Threads Through It. Parker Posey likes needlepoint. Mary Queen of Scots gets a shout out. Triviality abounds.
A Medley for Mother: Huzzah! Advertorial content! Shit to buy for your mom if she's part of the Sunday Stylin' crew. Included are "handcrafted macrame bracelets" ($159-$299), "insouciant aprons" ($55), and "fragrant Air Candelas by Molton Brown ... wrapped in buttery leather cocoons" $62. Seriously.
Making Sweet Music. There's some fucking lounge with a sugar cane theme. Owner says pretentious shit like, "We all like sugar in the coffee, alcohol in the drink and music on the mind." The reporter eavesdropped on four young ladies griping about their ex-boyfriends.
Mail Call: The Stylin' Section gets letters, and it turns out we're not the only people who hate the section. Victoria Neilson, legal director of Immigration Equality tears apart "Liza Monroy's flippant article about marrying her gay friend to assist him in getting his green card," pointing out that the couple in question committed a federal crime.
Even better is Leah Edmunds of Charlottesville, Va., who quite rightly trashes last week's article on Brooklyn, calling it "typical of the blinkered, trend-obsessed tone of the [Stylin'] section." She notes that "people who have never spent a moment worrying about whether it is sufficiently hip are being forced out of neighborhoods they consider to be home." Perhaps she's among them, considering her current location in the Old Dominion? Regardless, she's stuck this landing, and if we had Cole Slaw Blog promotional T-shirts or trucker hats to give away, we would give her one.
Miscellaneous Stylin'. Someone once had an alcoholic dad and it sucked (no snark here), a person who likes to buy shoes goes and buys some for cheap in a small French town that's kind of like an outlet mall.
Weddings/Celebrations: It will be Cole Slaw Blog policy not to mock the Times's wedding announcements. The announcements are symptomatic of people who've been corrupted by the Sunday Styles worldview. They are the victims. Instead of mocking them, we seek to offer hope, Coaster Pong, and a small glimpse at a better way of life.
*Ed. Note: this post was jointly composed by CrimeNotes and Flop.
Weren't You Famous? Sunday Styles sends a love letter straight to our heart, and makes fun of reality TV stars who try to capitalize on their fame but fail. There's a lot about my all-time favorite guilty pleasure, Paradise Hotel, a structureless program whose major premise was to drive beautiful, angry binge-drinkers into hysterical fits. (Salon.com's Heather Havrilesky renamed the show Drunken Asshole Hotel.) For those who appreciated the show, it makes sense that Tara is in love with a baby monkey and that Toni is hoping to be a commentator on Love Cruise re-runs.
The Times describes Toni as follows: "It feels good when I'm recognized, but it's not because I did something well," said Ms. Ferrari, who is now bartending to pay the bills.
Eric Nies from Real World got sucker-punched at an Iowa bar. This wounded his dignity.
The only disturbing thing in this article is that Rachel from The Inferno makes $240,000 to $360,000 a year in speaking fees. Pardon my subtlety, but anyone who gives a shit about the blabbering of that stupid, arrogant fucknut needs to be punched in the face. Apparently she and Veronica are opening a T-shirt business or something.
The designs (with phrases like "switch hitters" and "coochie couture") parlay their image - as the two girls who took part in a threesome during an episode in 2002 - into what they hope will be a successful business.Skanks.
But for once, skank liability rests not with the Times, which appears to hate these people as much as I do. Sunday Styles, you coy little vixen, you. Just when I think I hate everything about you, tease me like this.
A Peek Into Coco's Closet : Sunday Styles has been flogging a Chanel exhibition at the Met, and it's time Cole Slaw Blog asked a question: The Metropolitan Museum of Art is putting on an exhibit about Chanel? And who is a sponsor? Chanel, you say? And are there a bunch of Chanel ads in the Times today? (There are.) Cole Slaw Blog is skeptical.
By which we mean, what the fuck? Why don't we just do an exhibit on the history of all sorts of luxury brands? Maybe the Met can just become the LVMH Museum of Shit You Covet. Next week: Hugo Boss.
But at least the exhibit is controversial. One of the curators, Harold Koda, acknowledges as much: "My fear is that all the people who are completely immersed in Chanel, and there a lot of women who wear only Chanel, are going to be mad," he said. "Because we don't have their Chanels in the exhibition. That's my nightmare."
Ours is slightly different and involves the Meatpacking District and a shrill I-banker named Stephanie, but suffice it to say, a cultural pillar shilling corporate brands is close enough.
The Drums of India Hip-Hop Toward a Hit : The anecdote at the start of this one tells it all: Suphala, a pretty lady who dedicated herself to an obscure Indian drum called the tabla, was basically ignored by fancy partygoers. Maybe they should have read this article about her to know she was up-and-coming.
A Tale Threads Through It. Parker Posey likes needlepoint. Mary Queen of Scots gets a shout out. Triviality abounds.
A Medley for Mother: Huzzah! Advertorial content! Shit to buy for your mom if she's part of the Sunday Stylin' crew. Included are "handcrafted macrame bracelets" ($159-$299), "insouciant aprons" ($55), and "fragrant Air Candelas by Molton Brown ... wrapped in buttery leather cocoons" $62. Seriously.
Making Sweet Music. There's some fucking lounge with a sugar cane theme. Owner says pretentious shit like, "We all like sugar in the coffee, alcohol in the drink and music on the mind." The reporter eavesdropped on four young ladies griping about their ex-boyfriends.
Mail Call: The Stylin' Section gets letters, and it turns out we're not the only people who hate the section. Victoria Neilson, legal director of Immigration Equality tears apart "Liza Monroy's flippant article about marrying her gay friend to assist him in getting his green card," pointing out that the couple in question committed a federal crime.
Even better is Leah Edmunds of Charlottesville, Va., who quite rightly trashes last week's article on Brooklyn, calling it "typical of the blinkered, trend-obsessed tone of the [Stylin'] section." She notes that "people who have never spent a moment worrying about whether it is sufficiently hip are being forced out of neighborhoods they consider to be home." Perhaps she's among them, considering her current location in the Old Dominion? Regardless, she's stuck this landing, and if we had Cole Slaw Blog promotional T-shirts or trucker hats to give away, we would give her one.
Miscellaneous Stylin'. Someone once had an alcoholic dad and it sucked (no snark here), a person who likes to buy shoes goes and buys some for cheap in a small French town that's kind of like an outlet mall.
Weddings/Celebrations: It will be Cole Slaw Blog policy not to mock the Times's wedding announcements. The announcements are symptomatic of people who've been corrupted by the Sunday Styles worldview. They are the victims. Instead of mocking them, we seek to offer hope, Coaster Pong, and a small glimpse at a better way of life.
*Ed. Note: this post was jointly composed by CrimeNotes and Flop.
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