It’s so much easier to bitch than to gush. Or just be. Why must everyone and everything be so incendiary? Or finish with a punchline? Why can’t anyone just stop. calculating. everything.

Kristen Cabido, a 24-year-old who has managed
employees from 17 to the late 20’s at the Lower East Side outpost of
American Apparel, thinks the age gap between people her age and
teenagers is becoming more and more negligible. “More than ever,” she
said, “people in their 20’s are living at home or getting their bills
paid by their parents and going out and getting wasted like it’s 1995,
so hanging out with 15-year-olds is not outside the realm of normal.”

“Interns, the Founts of Youth” in the NYT

Did you sleep last night? I didn’t, because I was too busy playing with the New York Times Choose-Your-Own-Nightmare Interactive Election Map! I adore these maps. They make me feel like the times they may be a-changin’. Of course, after manipulating the map six ways to Sunday, I realize they are probably not.

I was, however, totally engrossed by Hendrik Hertzberg’s piece in The New Yorker last week about what the hell is going on with Joe Lieberman. Born and bred in Connecticut, Lieberman has been my hometown homie for most of my life. But this indictment, especially the line “Lieberman single-handedly guaranteed that the new Senate would be Republican” made my blood run cold. Read it, I swear you’ll have an Oprah-style a-ha moment.

For the millions (billions?) of Chickarina readers who have been awaiting an update in The Continuing Saga of My Eyebrows, you may now exhale.

Since calling two weeks ago and being told that my caterpillar situation was not to be accommodated before today, I have been living a wretched life (if you could even call it that) as a Groucho Marx lookalike. The before pictures, well, there aren’t any because it was so hideous. This eve I did pay a visit to the one who is known as Meany McHatesMePants. And while she did not compliment my fortitude in holding out so long–I assure you I did not pluck one hair since last I reported–she did tell me that my brows were “beautiful” when she was done.

She then ushered me over to the mirror and added a caveat: “You see, they’re perfect until you do that.” That, my friends, is raise my eyebrows, which in normal faces is a regular occurrence, and in my face is a quite frequent and involuntary one. I’m no Acknowledge-You-With-Just-Brows Jackass, but I do have, as I have been told, an “expressive face.”

That said, I present to you the overtired, sweaty, possibly sun-spotted and yes, expressive face of a writer who’s been in so-co all weekend working but who has, you must admit, some very close-to-perfect brows. Watch out, world.

M. Night Shyamalan gets another gratuitous keelhauling today. This follows, of course, the brilliant Janet Maslin hate letter to the “Night” biography last week.

I mentioned that I was excited about The Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez and I’m here to report it’s just dazzling, impossibly good, I insist you read it. In fact I insist that you not hate me for needing to keep it out from the library even though it’s due today because I’m not done yet. Anyway, within, there’s an amazing passage about a critic who brilliantly pans everything:

[W]hen I read somewhere what W.H. Auden said–that it is impossible to write a bad review without showing off–I thought how true this was of Val. His knowledge, his wit, his intellectual acuteness and moral authority were always on display, and it did appear to be practically a rule: the worse he made the work under attack sound, the stupider and coarser and more bungling its creator, the cleverer and more dazzling Val himself came across.

The Auden quote is “One cannot review a bad book without showing off.” Is this true? Remember that (in)famous  Believer essay excoriating “snark”? It is indeed easier to bury a book/movie/person/&c. than it is to praise. And it’s more entertaining to read a pan. The best critic can love something or be equivocal about something and still write a compelling review. There was a positve theater review in the New Yorker once that was so beautiful and honest I got a little weepy. I don’t remember when this was. Anyway.

This, we can all agree, while entertaining, is probably not the way to go about criticizing. But it is, of course, a hoot.

Previously:
Janet Maslin, I Love You
My Library Love Affair

I’ve been quiet. But here’s what’s on my mind.

• An obsesssion that’s growing.
• A totally intriguing talk I went to.
• This article, oh and this one.

Stay very tuned.

I have one question for you: just who the hell does MITCHUM think it’s targeting with their newest ad campaign? What would make a product–an ANTI-PERSPIRANT for that matter–decide that they wanted to be the underarm deodorizer of choice for the world’s idiot misogynist jackasses? Who greenlit this crap?

The original Mitchum subway campaign was deplorable, but, it wasn’t as kegstandingly repulsive as the current one. Was being a turnstile-jumping rapscallion not MANLY enough? Before, in order to be a Mitchum Man, you had to be willing to punch out a subway window in an emergency. Now, the words “menage a trois” have to be the only French you know in order to make you one. Wow, I liked that Mitchum Man before, but now that he’s really pushing the boundaries of despicability, I like him even better!

The new campaign is evidently to introduce the public to “Sensitive” Mitchum–used, natch, by “Sensitive” Mitchum Man. So we’ve got two ads next to each other. They say something akin to this:

• If you’d give up your seat for a pregnant woman on the subway, you’re a Mitchum Man!
• If you’re very careful who you assume is pregnant, you’re a “SENSITIVE” Mitchum Man!
      (accompanying blurry photo is of a woman, not visibly pregnant, clutching her midsection, wearing short shorts)

• If you’ve ever considered installing one of these (subway) poles in your house, you’re a Mitchum Man!
• If you’d ask your better half for her opinion first, you’re a “SENSITIVE” Mitchum Man!

And who, who, who is going to actually walk into a drugstore and BUY a stick of Mitchum? I mean, at least there’s some logic behind Maxim and other soft-porn mags. But blatantly broadcasting that you espouse the meathead ethos of the Mitchum Man? Or even worse, the “Sensitive” Mitchum Man? Who are you people? Stand up and be counted!

Plus, Mitchum??? I mean MITCHUM? “I’m thinking of trying a new deodorant. I’m thinking…Mitchum?” I don’t think so.

There’s no getting around it: You simply must read Janet Maslin’s hilarious review of Michael Bamberger’s new biography of M. Night Shyamalan. It’s terribly cruel but also just what you want out of arts criticism: a sense that the critic has earned the right to pan the subject, and had a whopping good time doing it. I don’t want to read the book, I just want to read the review over and over again.

Behold:

“The Man Who Heard Voices” isn’t really the filmmaker’s fault. His only
serious misstep was allowing it to happen. It was Mr. Bamberger who met
the auteur at a dinner party (”Night’s shirt was half open–Tom Jones
in his prime”), became awestruck (”What kind of power could he have
over me?”) and started taking deeply embarrassing notes.

Tom Jones in his prime!!!!

Please tell me that this image takes you back to a place in your childhood that you’d all but forgotten about, that it awakens some thing in your unconscious you’d totally forgotten about. Tell me that I’m not the only one who was deeply obsessed with this as a child.

So around noon I was on the phone in the phone-talking area at my workspace and I returned to my desk in the ssssh pindrop room and the Internet was gone. Which cramped my style, because I needed a thesaurus and I lost a document that I needed and think I accidentally deleted but I think you can get stuff back that’s been deleted on Macs BUT you evidently need to be online to access Mac help. Which is lunacy. So I’m saying I didn’t know about North Korea and the missiles until late, like 11, when Stefanie told me.

One can put down roots in a little bubble of ignorance quite easily.