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The flurry of and endlessly changing discussion surrounding AMC television hit Mad Men is to be expected. But the water cooler conversation, creative fan tributes, and shrewd, encyclopedic commentary are often totally out of left field. Of the many branching forms of homage, this video parody, featuring an all-female Sterling Cooper, is the funniest. Watch as the female account executives ogle their male assistants (the crotch shot at 0:53 is not to be missed), and the assistants in turn scheme about getting a wealthy woman to light "a fire in the bed." In this world, men don't write ("Who would answer the phones?"), but one roguish man-cretary decides he has "bigger plans"—and something to say about that "relaxicizer" his female bosses are having such a tough time understanding.
Image is a screenshot.
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To kick off her long-gestating comeback, Whitney Houston performed on Good Morning America yesterday. It didn’t go well. Houston’s speaking voice, as she incited the crowd to get pumped, sounded as gravelly as an octogenarian’s with a seven decade, two-pack a day habit. Her singing voice, the one that matters, sounded a little better, though it lacked almost all of its former range and strength. (On the upside, at least Houston looked nice). It turns out all the magical thinking in the world can’t make years and years of drug use and extremely hard living good for a person’s voice. For the next few weeks, as Houston goes from one splashy publicity event to the next, we’re all going to be witnessing a tragic spectacle. (She’ll be on Oprah on Sept 14. Be there, or be forced to watch clips of it afterwards.)
Whitney Houston was once great. Her voice—clear, clean, communicative, and with all the uplift of a gospel choir—is the only necessary evidence, but there’s plenty more supporting material. In the MTV era, there have only been two female performers, Madonna and Mariah Carey, to match her—and she has better pipes than the former and, hard as it is to imagine now, once had a lot more class than the latter. Whitney Houston has 11 number one singles, including all-time love ballad “ I Will Always Love You,” and insanely infectious ’80s tracks like “How Will I Know?,” the seventh-most of any performer in history. Back in 1992, when Houston starred in The Bodyguard (the soundtrack has sold 42 million copies, making it one of the top 10 selling albums of all time), her eventual descent into some perfect tabloid hell would have seemed as likely as the possibility that, 10 years from now, Reese Witherspoon will be recovering from a career-, fortune-, and reputation- destroying crack problem.
But since 2002, when she released her last album, Houston’s most interesting contribution to pop culture has been the indelible conversation she had with then husband Bobby Brown on his reality show Being Bobby Brown about doodie bubbles. (If you want to know, read here.) As much as it disappoints me to say this, (and, seriously, I was routing for a comeback. “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” has been on heavy rotation on my iPod since before I had an iPod), her new album, I Look To You, is, if not quite terrible, thoroughly dull. She sounds fine (better than most of the singers who’ve been run through pitch-correction programs. As weathered as her voice sounds, it’s still better raw material than the likes of Britney Spears are working with), but the R&B songs could be Muzak.
Becoming a lesser version of yourself, as Houston has, is sad (and pathetic), but becoming a lesser version of yourself because of yourself, well, that’s tragic, in the classical sense. Whitney had a gift, and it’s her own flaws (drug addiction, hubris, love of a bad man. I’m sure there are other possibilities) that killed it. Now we have to watch her sing on national television, something akin to visiting Michaelangelo’s David if his entire torso had been destroyed. It’s interesting, but it’s hard to appreciate what’s left, when you’re always thinking about what used to be there.
Photograph of Whitney Houston by Larry Busacca/Getty Images.
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Oh, MTV. The meaningless acronym channel that killed Daria in favor of Date My Mom has latched onto the 1985 Michael Fox classic Teen Wolf. The film that taught us all about the joys and compromises of male puberty is in the hands of the network that made "Speidi" a household name. Happy Wednesday!
Yeah, I know, it makes sense. Just not to my heart. Mythological creatures are in, particularly the blood-sucking variety. (See: True Blood, Twilight.) Everyone likes a bit of escapism when the Dow is in the doldrums. And tweens have always loved their fantasy narratives. Junior high is dull. It’s much nicer to fantasize that the wan pixie stick of a boy in the corner has fangs a la Robert Pattinson rather than a serious case of social anxiety.
But when I read the network’s “vision” for the Teen Wolf remake, I can only see dancing feet on the grave of a sacred childhood gem:
It has a fresh take and is very different from the original," said Liz Gateley, senior vp MTV series development. "It has more of an 'American Werewolf in London' feel to it. It's a dramatic thriller with two best friends in the center who provide a great comedy element: They are two very relatable characters on the outer circles of popular cliques."
Oh, phew. A fresh take. I'm picturing Hills-style narration, coupled with constant teen-to-wolf morphing montages to reworked Lady Gaga songs like "MYMYMYMYMYMYMY Hairy Face." Accepting silver bullets to the heart now, please.
Image is a screenshot from the Teen Wolf trailer.
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In a blockbuster New Yorker piece this week, David Grann persuasively demonstrates that in 2004, Texas executed an innocent man, Cameron Todd Willingham. It is chilling reading. Whatever you think about the death penalty, you can't want it to misfire. So how did we get here, to a legal regime in which a junk-science arson investigation was never questioned by indifferent defense lawyers, as Grann portrays them, nor by unsympathetic judges, parole board members, and Texas Governor Rick Perrry's office?
My answer starts with the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which President Bill Clinton signed in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombings. The Supreme Court also gets a share of the blame for the noose-tightening way in which it interpreted AEDPA. Justice Antonin Scalia has led this charge and went so far as to write recently, in the appeal of Troy Davis, “This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.” But more centrist justices also lined up on the side of "finality"—the idea that there is value in closing the doors of due process. Grann quotes Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who wrote in a 1993 case that the "execution of a legally and factually innocent person would be a constitutionally intolerable event." But in that case, Herrera v. Collins, O'Connor ruled against the defendant. And that is one of a string of rulings from her that made it more and more difficult for defendants to bring to light new evidence and to get the courts to pay attention to flaws in their convictions. Cameron Todd Willingham is dead because of a bad and abstruse law and a series of even worse legal rulings from our high court.
Photograph of death penalty protesters by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.
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The juicy bits from Levi Johnston's article in Vanity Fair are now online. The most talked-about excerpt is sure to be that Sarah Palin wanted to keep Bristol's pregnancy a secret:
Sarah told me she had a great idea: we would keep it a secret—nobody would know that Bristol was pregnant. She told me that once Bristol had the baby she and Todd would adopt him. That way, she said, Bristol and I didn’t have to worry about anything. Sarah kept mentioning this plan. She was nagging—she wouldn’t give up. She would say, “So, are you gonna let me adopt him?” We both kept telling her we were definitely not going to let her adopt the baby. I think Sarah wanted to make Bristol look good, and she didn’t want people to know that her 17-year-old daughter was going to have a kid.
Levi's credibility is dubious at best, and it's about time to move on from Palin's potentially sordid personal life. If she does remain in politics, the constant attention to her Alaskan circus is only going to distract people from her lack of knowledge about, well, everything. Levi's continual spilling is actually making me vaguely sympathetic to Palin, especially since he gleefully points out to Vanity Fair that Sarah "doesn’t cook." No female Governor has time to come home and cook her kids dinner every night. I'm over it.
Photograph of Levi Johnston by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.
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By now you've already heard: Based on the thunderous applause for the three-inch photograph of plus-size model Lizzi Miller on p.194 of September's Glamour, the magazine is now going to feature naked plus-size models in the November issue. I don't see this as progress.
It's true that Lizzi Miller’s photo underscores just how freakishly tall and whippet-thin standard models are. But the unattainable silhouettes of the birds correspond perfectly to the unattainable lifestyle that is promoted between the covers. And, personally, I don't like facts mingling with fiction. When women's magazines get out of the ad business—when journalism trumps mere product placement—then yes, I'll embrace Susan Meiselas-style documentary fashion spreads instead of fantasy productions.
The psychological stress incurred by a bombardment of impossible physical standards runs deep. I've watched two people close to me nearly die of starvation, and the number of women I know with disordered eating is too high to count. But rather than greet Lizzi Miller as progress I think we should be asking: Is it wise to seek redress from a mainstream publication? Furthermore, why isn't anybody questioning the merits of "regular" women demanding to see representation of themselves everywhere? Why must everything be a mirror? Narcissism, it appears, isn't just a Beautiful People problem. It runs rampant among the fat, the short, and the not-young too.
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