Thursday, June 05, 2008

Auto-Fun of the Day :: 6-5-2008

FYI, our advice column is totally gonna rock! We're going to change people's lives, like Sally Jessie Raphael and Joni Mitchell. Our first installment is coming together as we speak. Keep sending your questions to askautowin@yahoo.com!
quote: "At a time when increasing numbers of women were demanding the right to take up more space in the world it is no surprise that they'd be hit with the opposite message from a culture that was (and still is) both male-dominated and deeply committed to its traditional power structures. Women get psychically larger, and they're told to grow physically smaller. Women begin to play active roles in realms once dominated by men (schools, universities, athletic fields, the workplace, the bedroom), and they're countered with images of femininity that infantilize them, render them passive and frail and non-threatening. The female body is the place where this society writes it's messages, writes Rosalind Coward in Female Desires. A response to feminism was etched with increasing clarity on the whittled-down silhouette of the average American model: Don't get too hungry, don't overstep your bounds." (Caroline Knapp, "Appetites")

links:
1) I thought this was a good article, but then I read this: New Yorker Film Critic Anthony Lane Has Female Trouble, and so now I take it back. Per always/often, Jezebel is right ... or, rather, I am wrong. (@jezebel)
2) "Every theory we have about the human world and about the future is vulnerable to the black swan, the unexpected event. We sail in fragile vessels across a raging sea of uncertainty." Fun!: Nassim Nicholas Taleb - the prophet of boom and doom. (@times uk)
3) So You Want to Write a Memoir?: "Make sure your life hasn't already been lived." They've catalogued addictions, trauma, diseases, disorders, family , foodstuffs, religion, upbringing, employment, travel, etc. Really, an extraordinary list ... read it. (@ew.com)
''The bar keeps going higher,'' says Sara Nelson, editor in chief of Publishers Weekly. ''Well, you were a drug addict, but did you kill anybody? Well, you killed somebody, but did you do it with your bare hands? Well, you were hungry, but were you as hungry as Frank McCourt? The more that's written, the harder it is to come up with something new or dramatic to say.''
4) Finally a movie-to-musical adaptation that makes sense -- Saved! the musical. (@culture vulture)
5) Fuck SATC -- The entire series of Absolutely Fabulous is now available on DVD. (@afterellen)
6) From "Next-Door Neighbor: A Series of True-Life Webcomix Featuring Today's Best Artists and Writers" - "My Neighbor the Dickhead" by Ed Piskor (@smith magazine)
7) The beauty of shared items -- Alex shared this, then I shared this, then LK shared this -- howevs, I still can't get any of these wallpapers to actually download. Rawr! Desktop Wallpaper Calender: June (@smashing magazine)
8) Three Poems: Focal point of repeated ekphrastic stanza, A least feast, An image play: Center Stage, by Bob Hicok. (@Fou)
9) "Women's Studies" Does the fairer sex need its own instructions on how to do ... everything? (bookslut @the smart set)
10) Illustration from Anne de Renzis

17 comments:

frank said...

this is four consecutive posts that have involved sex and the city. seriously. are you going to start blowing 22-year-old male models?

Landlady of Fat said...

I need advice. How do I get over my internets addiction. ;)

:::waving::::

Anonymous said...

I have a lot of feelings about your inability to set your own desktop wallpaper.
Please follow carefully, grasshopper:

1. Your link is wrong - it has an extra "%22" at the end of it... I hate that "%22" it ruins links lives.

2. Find out your screen resolution: System preferences > Displays (mine's 1920x1200)

3.Go to the for real link, and click on the corresponding resolution.

4. When the wallpaper opens up in another window, click and drag it onto your desktop or wherever you want to put it.

5. Set your new desktop wallpaper in System Preferences > Desktop/Screensaver

Holla!

Also, this is for Macs... I don't touch PCs anymore kids, and you shouldn't either.

Jaime said...

Yeeeeah, Saved movie --> musical makes sense, in theory. But, um... does not end up working so well.

Haviland said...

1. you know i was asked to come in for "saved" right?

2. best autofun quote EVER today. oh madame knapp.

Anonymous said...

Wait, early or late Sally Jessy? I need to know how controversial you're willing to go, in case I need to prepare any questions.

JD said...

Yeah, I liked the Lane article too, although I thought that it swung wildly between being an insightful commentary and, being just plain bitchy. However, I saw this review by CBS's David Edelstein on Sunday morning (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/05/25/sunday/main4125938.shtml) and was happy to see a male reviewer give praise (despite Jezebel's pretty accurate analysis). Really, although Carrie isn't my fav character, I think Edelstein's praise for SJP is spot-on. I think she's hands-down the best actress of the group.

And AbFab...it's about time.

JD said...

Don't know if that link is coming up:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/
05/25/sunday/main4125938.shtml

eric mathew said...

Haviland would have been really good in Saved. I mean I have not seen the musical, but in general I could see you in it.

BTW Laura Benanti is on the front page of bway world and Riese said you get compared to her and it is SO true.. although you are prettier.

anyway, SATC is just very overwhelming. I know where you are going with it Riese, don't listen to David.

Anonymous said...

fyi, your blog alone has changed my life. also your satc post was brilliant. made me think of the i heart new york episode a lil bit.

Meghan said...

Auto-fun makes me so pleasantly lazy. Why find my own links when with you and Jez and the Bookslut blog I have hours of reading every day. That compilation of memoirs is effing insane. I would have added a category of memoirs about being a writer/writing memoirs, cause I'm meta like that.

Adam Tiller said...

flame-bait alert:

What was wrong with the SatC review? It looks like Jez quotes a perfectly reasonable passage and confuses negativity for mysogyny. It seems to me the hight of perverse to suggest that it's more sexist to criticize straw-sucking shots than to accept them.

Even the excerpt re: Tina Fey didn't seem to me to be over the line. Tina Fey is a woman shaped woman, neither fat nor waif-thin (and smoking hot to boot), and that's pretty unusual in the movies. It merits comment because it's uncommon. If anything it's anti-sexist/progressive to call on her to stop emulating the caricatures of women that have become Hollywood furniture and use her real body to do something real (and yes, cultivated gracelessness is as real as acting gets...it's called 'acting' for a reason).

Is it really too much to ask people to read writing with a modicum of charity? Two seconds thought about what he might have meant in writing the two selected passages would show that they're not nearly so objectionable as they're made out to be (esp. by the zealots in the comments).

riese said...

lozo - Are you going to start blowing 22-year old baseball players?

tina-licious.com - omg! askautowin@yahoo.com, and all your solutions will be solved. I mean, problems will be fixed. By Haviland. and me, sorta. That's a toughei.

a;ex: Okay, I got to about step 3 and then decided officially that I am just going to make you do it for me. Kisses!

jaime - really? okay. thanks for saving me the time of having to find out myself. can you go see crybaby for me tooooooo?

haviland - yes, yes, i do. except i kept getting it confused with that election project. tracy flipp is the role you were born to play, omg.

julia - we are so new-now-next that we're going late sally, like, balls to the wall, let it all out, kick your sister in the face, give us all you got, we got it.

jd - that's true, i think, because her reaction at the wedding felt so authentic and soul-crushing and real that I even stopped caring about all the external factors -- that it seemed predicatable, that it was feeding into all these gendered and high fashioned fantasy cliches and just felt her honesty, SJP's honesty, just a woman who was gutted, and it worked, it felt real. That felt, despite itself, so unbearably real.

eric - oooo LB is on the cover of broadway world? we're taking my mom to see gypsy on sunday, maybe we should just tell her omg, that's haviland, and see if she gets super excited to see haviland sing!

jld: yes, i loved that episode. when she goes to the paris movie theater by herself, which i used to do all the time. sometimes it feels unrequited though -- my relationship with nyc, like i keep loving it and it doesn't give enoug back all the time. but when it does, it's beautiful and all i could ever ask for. and -- thank you. i hope i've changed your life in a good way and that you're not doing crack, 'cause if i ever endorsed crack, i was kidding. ha ha! I kid. I kid!

meghan - Oh I know, they should've done that. I can think of a few including one by Steven King, like "On Writing" or something? And didn't Annie Dillard do one? Writing about writing memoirs is whole bookstore subsection, holy moly. Maybe emily gould's nytimes magazine article, in a book form, could fit neatly in.

adam - see i think you make a good point, but did you see the picture? I think the picture seemed to suggest a certain attitude towards the women that the article maybe unfortunately had to latch onto by simple phyiscal placement. Maybe we're all a littl sensitive right now -- Emily Gould, SATC, Hilary Clinton. Not a good week for the feminists. I dunno. I think anyone could change my mind on this at any moment, which might prove nothing but that the SATC movie is possibly way less meaningful than the media suggests it is. Maybe it's just a stupid movie with shiny colors and funny laughing and little drama and girls and boys on the big screen in shiny shoes.

frank said...

start?

dani said...

Oh I'm so late and I missed some fabulous auto-funs.
Just wanted to say that I can't wait for the advice column...I bet it's fun for people like me...with no own problems...just kidding.

P.S.: the quote is gold.

xo

Anonymous said...

Lincoln

lePetitOeil said...

Merci pour la publication !