The end of the Obama presidency is the last thing we want right now–but news that Obama just locked down a deal for a post-presidency book means there’s least one good thing about Obama’s time being up in eight (!) years. As part of a deal to abridge “Dreams From My Father” for young adult readers, Obama has also committed to a non-fiction book about his time in the White House.
While we never read Bill Clinton’s “My Life,” the prospect of reading a presidential memoir in the “life 2.0″ era from a president who not only revived popular faith in government, but who also had to deal with meeting the Jonas Brothers at least twice, makes us pray book publishers are still around in ten years (and that it’s as big as Clinton’s paperweight of an autobiography).
(By the way, our advice for the PG version of “Dreams From My Father”: Take out the foul language, but leave in your experiments in youth–future YA readers shouldn’t get a sugarcoated version of our audacious president).
Yesterday was a Terry Richardson day — first we saw him sitting on a fire hydrant on Spring Street, and then we got home and saw his “sexy” Gossip Girl photoshoot for Rolling Stone plastered all over the internet. Mildly-interesting photographer sightings aside, we’re kind of bothered by the whole thing: first, Rolling Stone‘s blatantly sensationalist cover, then, the cover’s timing to coincide with the worst episode of Gossip Girl yet (just look at all the Twitter results for “Gossip Girl sucked”).
We at Flavorwire are divided in our Gossip Girl levels of tolerance — some of us never miss it (cough, cough, Caroline), some of us started boycotting it back in January (and the rest of us probably have never cared). But regardless of whether or not we think the show has been the most amazing thing on TV, it’s time to drop the “Best Show Ever” narrative and hope that the actual plotlines get better before we have to deal with Blake Lively’s re-creation of Lindsay Lohan’s Marilyn Monroe re-creation (after this photoshoot, could that one be too far off?).
TV can be an art form, or it can be absolute crap — Gossip Girl is inching closer to the latter while attempting to be the former and failing, then overcompensating with photos like these.
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We haven’t been shy about our SXSW envy this week, but thankfully there’s a group of bloggers that are abating our jealousy by slaving through the abundance of music at the festival for our curated pleasure.
We still wish we could be there, but we also love good band recommendations that you don’t have to sit through fifteen sets (and thousands of songs) to find. After the jump, we highlight the hard-working music bloggers who have been listening to all the SXSW band mp3s and recommending shows–so you (and we!) don’t have to.
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True story: At last fall’s New Yorker Festival “Evening with Paul Rudd” event (of course we went to that) we decided to nervously queue up to ask Paul Rudd something during the Q&A. Our question was about TV — we were gigantic fans of his appearance on Veronica Mars, and we wondered, would he ever consider getting involved in a TV project? His answer made our day: “Of course,” he said, “I’ve actually been talking with my old friend [Veronica Mars creator] Rob Thomas about doing something together.”
Two of our favorite things — Rudd and the genius behind Veronica Mars, together, on our TiVos? We started dreaming. “Please do,” we told him, and we like to think he listened to us. A bit later, a friend of ours who had just moved to LA told us about the new show he was working on — Party Down, created by Rob Thomas and produced by…Paul Rudd. It was happening!
Now it’s finally here, premiering tomorrow on STARZ. And much to our happiness, it might actually be as good as we’ve always hoped it would be.
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Today at Flavorpill, we followed The Daily Show’s John Oliver on his amazing report into the White House press corps, wondered why M.I.A. would name her son Ickitt, but loved that the story was randomly broken by Latina magazine, learned that everyone can be a cited movie critic as long as they make YouTube comments on the preview for a bad Joshua Jackson movie; we felt kind of bad for this 55-year-old intern (and crossed our fingers); we adored this This Recording piece about recently-gray New York even if it made us depressed yearn for brighter times; declared it was no longer OK to write “ella, ella” after every time one uses “umbrella” in a headline; got really queasy reading about the scent created in Amanda Lepore’s honor; watched Jon Stewart blatantly skewer the Oscars; fell vindicated when we read Gossip Girl doesn’t satisfy Miranda July either; creepily noticed that James Franco is seemingly (and awesomely) holding a Don DeLillo novel in this paparazzi shot; started counting down the days until Hangover, with Bradley Cooper, Zack Galifianakis and Ed Helms, comes out in June after we watched after this teaser trailer; we hoped Lonny Ross’ return to 30 Rock was legit and that he gets actual lines next time; and remembered to not to forget to remember that Daylight Savings Time begins on Sunday! You shouldn’t either. Or maybe you should? We’ve confused ourselves.
Is there a better comedy on TV that suffers from such an undeserved absence of buzz than Ugly Betty? We think not. Sure, it’s a TV show that practically screams “uncool,” with its bumbling protagonist, exaggerated aesthetic, and cyclical family-values moralizing. It exists in that odd purgatory of hip, where it’s not wild enough to be popular ironically, or kitschy enough to be enjoyed by a marginal crowd of tastemakers. But while it may appear to belong in the cultural equivalent of limbo, that doesn’t mean it’s not a quality, spectacularly-written show. Cheesy, yes, but who doesn’t love at least a bit of cheesy, when it’s done right?
Plus, dare we say, it’s actually quite zeitgeist-y, and sometimes it’s really fun to watch a show try so hard to incorporate New York realities into a fantasy world.
After the jump, we break down what makes the show so good, still delivering on it’s third season.
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Audrey Hepburn’s legacy is not having a stellar week. First, this photo of Emma Roberts “channeling” the icon as part of Glamour magazine’s hit-or-miss anniversary portfolio made us wonder if the photographer had ever even heard of Hepburn. Then, the news of the My Fair Lady remake re-surfaced with Danny Boyle attached to the project, and rumors of Keira Knightley in the starring role — a predictable yet poor choice to reprise the role of Eliza Doolittle.
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In a pretty fascinating role reversal, Miley Cyrus revealed this week that, supposedly, she’s an obsessive fangirl who could “die happy” after a meet-and-greet with her favorite band, which just so happens to be…Radiohead. There are so many intriguing layers to this story, that it’s already a few days old and yet we can’t get over it. By recounting the story of how she was miserably snubbed by Radiohead after requesting to meet them at the Grammys, Miley wins the “highbrow meets lowbrow” award of the week, blowing our minds with her seemingly earnest admission that the tweeny bopper who most resembles her own Madame Tussaud’s wax figure probably sits in her trailer getting in fights with her friends about how underrated Amnesiac was.
Perhaps the most intriguing part of this whole “Miley’s on Pitchfork!” business, at least to us, is the extent to which this was met with general blogger awe, as if by admitting this she was messing up the general musical hierarchy. Miley Cyrus is a product, a pre-packaged superstar molded by Disney, and because she is Miley Cyrus, she can’t possibly listen to anything other than what her fans listen to, right? Is this like the time everyone got a bit sick reading the Nick Jonas/Elvis Costello interview? Why is this so jarring?
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We started reading Lowboy only a few days before we walked into Barnes and Noble and saw its dark cover prominently displayed, featured next to other titles from the weekend’s Times book review. Since then, we haven’t been able to stop reading it, much less reading about it. We’re just glad we got drawn in by Lowboy’s visions and hops through the New York City subway system mere moments before the Times gave it a rave review and New York Magazine declared Wray’s novel “a long-deserved breakout from a phenomenally versatile writer.”
We got the chance to ask Wray a few questions about his third novel, which follows Will Heller, a sixteen-year-old with paranoid schizophrenia who stopped taking his meds, and is traveling through the NYC subway system, steadfast and alone. After the jump, we ask him about the writing process, being an MFA drop-out, and what it feels like to be compared to J.D. Salinger.
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Some might remember that hiiilarious “Books That Make You Dumb” chart from a few months back that collected data from Facebook and matched up different university’s favorite books to their SAT scores. If a school’s average SAT score was below 1150, The Book of Mormon and The Devil Wears Prada were big favorites, whereas on the higher end of the spectrum, 100 Years of Solitude and Freakonomics ruled. We remember being amused by it, and thankful that we had carefully omitted The Bell Jar from our Facebook profile so as not to skew our school’s numbers.
Well, the creator has produced a new chart, and this time it’s about music. The problem is, this one is a lot less funny and a lot more complicated–whereas lower SAT scores predictably produce students who read less compelling literature, the music chart reflects a less causal relationship between taste and “intelligence.” It’s alarming to think that one needs higher test scores in order to enjoy “better” music, as the chart would imply.
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