Your Update on My Thoughts on Current Pop Culture
You’re welcome.
TV
America’s Next Top Model
Rebecca and Kahlen need to lighten the hell up. I’d rather hang out with drunken, mooning, double-fisting Brittany than two uptight blondes narking on people for being drunk. Hello, idiots – the restaurant totally doesn’t care if Brittany dances on the table in y’all’s private room. They enjoy the advertising, you dum-dums.
Also, Kahlen has a weasel jaw. Not that that makes her less of a person – I’m just saying. Not Top Model material, in my book. So far Keenyah takes the best photos. I wanted Naima to win, but she’s not really bringing it lately, is she?
The Bachelor
I haven’t seen it at all this season. In fact, I’ve never seen an episode of it or The Bachelorette in my life. However, I have to say that I’m sad that the local DJs keep ranking on Jerry O’Connell’s brother. Remember, way back when I started this blog, seven thousand years ago, I used to have a crush on Jerry O’Connell? When he was on Sliders? Yeah, that was funny. Anyway, I’m sorry that Jerry’s taking over of Sliders on the SciFi Channel didn’t work out for him and his family. I’m sorry that his cameo in that Mariah Carey video didn’t pan out into anything bigger, either. I’m sorry that he has to prostitute his brother to The Bachelor.
Desperate Housewives
I haven’t seen this one, either. By the time it got big enough for me to notice, I’d missed too many episodes to get into it. (This is the same thing that happened to me with Sex in the City and every other popular show of the last five years, basically.)
Movies
Closer
I saw this over the weekend. It was overrated, first of all. Second of all, Julie Roberts is not attractive to me at all, nor is she, in my mind, interesting to watch for any reason.
However, I must say that Clive Owen is funny, nasty, crazy, and sexy. He was the only interesting thing in that movie, besides Natalie Portman’s stripper routine. And I loved Clive Owen in Arthur, too. And, while I didn’t love him in Sin City, he did invoke one or two affectionate thoughts in that otherwise unaffectionate film. Therefore, it is scientifically proven that I must love Clive Owen. I guess that means I have to start thinking dirty, graphic, impure thoughts about him now. Okay, fine. Whatever.
Sin City
Lisa S. already pointed out the hookercentric sexism of it all. I saw this movie expecting nothing, and got 5% more than that. Josh Hartnett’s shitty acting in the first and last scenes made a poor frame for what was supposed to be comic-ly raunchy. Elijah Wood was funny. Jessica Alba does good stripper dancing. Brittany Murphy can’t act. They shouldn’t have let Tarantino include the Japanese hooker-assassin. That’s all. I don’t care enough about it to say any more.
Amadeus
I saw Amadeus again. It was pretty good – not at all horribly ’80s like I was scared it might be. My kids complained that it bored them, and yet they sat through the whole thing.
Music
I broke down and bought Skip James’ Greatest Hits. You know – the one with that song that Thora Birch got obsessed with in Ghostworld? The one with that song that guy sang at the campfire in O Brother Where Art Thou? The one with the song that Clapton covered – “I’m So Glad”?
I love that CD, but no one else does. My kids make fun of it behind my back, in the backseat. My boyfriend Tad and my cousin Randy, music lovers both, whose taste I respect, sit with teeth politely clenched while I try to sing along atonally with James’ sarcastic “Let Jesus lead you/all the way.”
But it’s a good CD, if you need some spooky blues by a crazy person at this point in your life. I do. I listen to it in the mornings. In the afternoons, I switch to Trance Nation 3.
Literature
Possession by A.S. Byatt
I just finished it. It was very good. So good that it made me kind of embarrassed to call myself a writer, actually. But, by the end, I was saved from that shame by the fact that it was too good. Too smart. “Who in the heck is gonna like this besides a bunch of grad students?” I asked the stuffed Sanrio character on my bed. We laughed cynically and moved on to something else.
(The copy I got from the library had Gwyneth Paltrow and some goofy-faced actor on the cover. The fact that I was able to enjoy the story, anyway, says a lot.)
A Confederacy of Dunces
I finally got around to reading this one some time before Possession. It was funny. Once I realized that it was okay to hate the protagonist, I had a really good time with it. You should read it. It’ll make you smile.
Aimee Bender’s An Invisible Sign of My Own
This one was okay. I liked it, but it made me think of my own writing, also, again. “Maybe I don’t have enough weird-ass shit going on in my writing,” I thought. “Maybe my stories don’t have enough kooky-ass hijinks and motif-ing symbolism that can be interpreted into really profound messages about contemporarily important things. Maybe,” I thought, “I should have gotten my MFA so I would know how to manage these things.”
The Lovely Bones
The author cheated, starting out with this intense-ass page-jerking device that made your heart pound, just like they tell you to do in that book, How to Write a Novel that We Swear to God Will Get Published in 90 Days. And it worked. I was reading my butt off to find out what was gonna go down. And I did find out, sort of. And it was a satisfying read, in an Ann Tyler sort of way.
Moby Dick
I’ve been trying to read Moby Dick, but it’s not easy. I’m only at the part where the guy is looking at the paintings in the inn. Doh. Oh, well. That’s not current popular culture, anyway.
Okay, well, neither are half the other things I’ve mentioned. You see? That’s why I don’t sum up pop culture for you that often. You should be glad I did as much as you see here. Whew. I’m exhausted. Now I’m going to reread Pride and Prejudice while playing Liz Phair and waiting for my Bruce Lee DVDs to arrive in the mail. Until then, y’all keep it real.
