On For The First Time Ever, We Thoroughly Agree With The 'National Review' Crazies
Far be it from me to puncture anyone's vigilante fantasies, but rude behavior has been around in the theater ever since Thespis stepped out of the chorus line. Do we really want to give approval to violent assault as a reaction to bad manners?
And before you say it, no, I hate cell phones in the theater too, and I mostly go to the opera where you can really, really hear the ringing in the acoustical environment. But part of being a grown-up, besides being able to drink as much as you want and fuck whoever you can talk into going to bed with you, is having to live in society, which means you don't get to punch out everyone you disagree with.
This guy's a thug and a showoff, and that's assuming he's telling the truth. Since he's writing for NRO, that's a pretty huge leap of faith.
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On "The Good Gay"
It is always heart-warming to see one entitled white gay media figure standing up for another of his kind.
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On Job Creators Offering Employment To The Disabled
This is transparently a stealth ad for the return of Arrested Development, because it's a throwaway Lucille Bluth joke, right?
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On South Brooklyn Has Lost Its Real Estate Mind
Queens. Just the one word: Queens.
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On When Are They Going To Put That Woman In The Ground Already?
"Every day is children's day."
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On Baby Names Beyond Parody
You'll be laughing out of the other side of your face when you're unemployed and Miss Dudgeon has a cushy job as a minor character in a Dickens novel.
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On Gay Life Is So Pedestrian Now That You Can't Even Film A Porn At A Sex Party
The up side of this piece is the author didn't have to go to the trouble of making travel reservations, going through passport control and figuring out how to get to the Airbnb apartment in order to act smug and patronizing about the other.
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On The Five Worst Kinds of Co-Workers
@sharilyn Part of being an adult is having the self-control to give your children rather stiff, formal-sounding names, so they will be able to use the nicknaming process as a model for rebellion. Mrs. Woolf had the chance to make up cutsie names already in her life, when she was a kid. Poor little Reverie and Fable (besides always sounding like they belong in a Choire snark about Park Slope) will probably end up calling themselves Cynthia and Eugene just so nobody will make fun of them at the law firm.
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On 'Mommie Dearest': Once More With Wire Hangers
@bluebears I think the "midnight gardening" consisted of Crawford being drunk and angry in the middle o of the night and then grabbing whatever she found in the tool shed to whack at the trees. She'd be yelling and cursing during all this, which would wake up everyone in the house, and the idea was, "now that you're up, help me clear some of these goddamn branches."
The slightly disingenuous part in Christina's writing is that she doesn't distinguish clearly between stuff than happened once and stuff that happened habitually. Anyone who had a parent who drank to excess has at least a handful of wild stories about strange shit that happened that one time. CC's book, and to a greater extent the movie, makes it seem like Joan was chopping down trees a couple times a week for most of the 1940s, which really wasn't true.
The book (and, again, even more the movie) really skates over Joan's extremely busy professional life up to the early 1950s, when she was making two or three pictures a year, plus doing lots of professional appearances in support of these projects, plus lots of industry entertaining, 200 people over for dinner and dancing, that kind of thing. Little of that is indicated in the book and almost nothing of it in the movie (a restaurant date where Joan has to join Louis B. Mayer at his table), and so the picture is very distorted. All we see is Crawford putting on her stockings and yelling at the maid, like she has nothing else to do with her time.
What Dunaway has on her face is not cold cream but vanishing cream, which is an oily moisturizer you'd slather on and it would sit there looking greasy for a while and then would after a while absorb into the skin. (Cold cream doesn't really absorb that way, so you either had to sit around for a while with the stuff on your face and then wipe it off, or else go to bed and get the goo smeared all over the pillow cases. Going to bed with cold cream was considered a comic thing that vain middle-aged women did, along with the curlers in the hair, and the husband would be like, there's a monster in my bed and all that hilarity.)
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On How To Make Math Stick
New York magazine cover story in 3, 2, 1...