Chick lit—the range of fiction by women about contemporary city life, friendships, sex, jobs, climbing out of the wreckage of youthful dreams—gets a lot less respect than the male equivalent, which people tend to approach as if it were automatically more artful, more written. Women write “thinly veiled accounts”; men write “romans à clef.” Women writers may have a room of their own, but men who thrash around in front of the mirror and record their every failure, humiliation, moue, and excretion for an audience’s consumption still own the house, even if all they do in it is lie on the couch—and then write about it.
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nancy franklin, talking about tv but also just about life. i like quotes like this that make me say “DUH” but also make me say “damn.” i need at least one a day to keep me going.
Sigh. this is what we feared. Why must the tramps ruin perfectly good stamp locations for the rest of us?
More importantly: where else can discreet, non-trashy tattoos be located (we’re operating under the assumption that such a thing exists. we’re very classy ladies!)?
(namely, mine and MsMandrake’s) want to know: is it possible to get a tattoo in one’s general lower back region without it automatically being a tramp stamp?
My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: Writers are always selling somebody out.
while i wouldn’t want to profit off of doom, i wouldn’t mind being a prophet of doom.
you guys it’s like i write for videogum or something! they’re Professors I Only Have Four Jokes over there! AMIRITE?!! (i know both +J and El Sam do NOT think i am right at all and would drink gabe’s bathwater because they don’t understand germs and disease). but this isn’t about my love/hate/punch with videogabe. this is about BREAKING NEWS (it broke yesterday but continues to be broken today): in the upcoming ”Rex Is Not Your Lawyer” Jeffrey Tambor is your psychiatrist (he’s very good)! but—and i’m just wondering aloud now—what is nbc’s strategy here? they kinda already know that going for the arrested development/30 rock/20-something who-believe-themselves to-be-clever demographic doesn’t pay (at least not in moneys. it pays in emmys but emmys don’t keep food on the craft services table or six-figured salaries in the bank accounts of our beloved actors who we pretend are humble and good but are actually just rich famous people who have been very well cast in very good shows)…
WHATEVER, I’M VERY EXCITED FOR THIS SHOW :-) :-(
leilacohan:
noraleah:
From The New Yorker:
Only seventeen per cent of New York women rate themselves “highly satisfied” with their sex lives, compared with twenty per cent nationally and twenty-five per cent globally. On the other hand, New York women have more friends than anyone else on the planet: the average New Yorker would invite at least sixty-five friends to her wedding, compared with a national average of fifty-nine. Called upon to explain this phenomenon, [Michael Silverstein, author of Women Want More: How to Capture Your Share of the World’s Largest, Fastest-Growing Market] remembered a recent visit to a New York Bikram-yoga studio. “I have been to Bikram yoga all over the country, and this was the friendliest, most conversational, most open yoga class I have ever been to—like, in a different category,” he said. “I have been there twice, and the instructor knows me by name. I have been to the studio in Chicago forty times, and the instructor doesn’t know me.”
With regards to the second part of the above paragraph, I agree wholeheartedly. I was lucky enough to arrive in this city with a posse of my college besties and it’s been up, up, UP from there. And given the popularity of my current mate, I think we’d have to have multiple weddings across at least three continents to accommodate everyone with whom we’d like to celebrate.
As for the first part, what a pity! No wonder they’re so obsessed with shoes.
I dorkily just counted: I am inviting 41 friends to my wedding and there at least ten more I very much want to invite, but probably can’t because our venue is too small for me to invited anyone I became friends with after I got engaged. New York, in my own experience at least, is extraordinarily friendly, much more so than Boston or London (the only other cities I’ve lived in).
i’m going to have to disagree with leila about her own hometown. boston is incredibly friendly! new york is a great place to be social but this whole city is BYOF (where F is friends). you only make friends through friends and the more friend capital you have the more it can grow, for sure. but you can’t just come to nyc and not know anyone unless you’re trying to experience a whole new level of loneliness in preparation for a role you’re playing or a book you’re writing or something. but in boston, you could definitely start out with zero friend capital and be just fine. i’ve met people in kind of random small town ways (at the market! at the park! at a street fair!) and they’re people my age who are interesting and nice. i mean, i’m not judging new york harshly: it’s circumstantial. it’s too many people crammed into too small a space for you to feel safe and welcome if you’re treading public grounds alone (if i’m walking through a park alone or even a “safer” place like a library, i’m too scared to approach or be approached). i feel like the only reason strangers in nyc are nice are because (a) they’ve been paid to (nyc waiters are the nicest! because it’s a part of their job!), (b) this person chatting you up is homeless and about to ask you for change after you finish giving him directions, or (c) someone is trying to sell you some Jehovah or Ralph Nader (although i have to admit, who can compete with the Harvard Sq LaRouche people? no one. those people are relentless.) anyway, i’ve found boston to be way friendlier than nyc, but neither compares in friendliness to my home region of northern california. i swear, if california weren’t constantly battling bad governors, crazy debt and wildfires, then i’d be homeward bound.
