“’My American Revolution’ gives geography and meteorology overdue recognition as historical catalysts, pointing out, for example, that strategically placed 18th-century signal points metamorphosed into cold war missile sites and finally into 9/11 memorials, in a trajectory that suggests a continuum. A revolution, after all, is something that orbits, or comes full circle, which Sullivan eventually does in a world ‘before straight lines ruled the day.’ The reader more or less returns to the starting point, but with a brand-new perspective.”
 — There was a fairly glowing review of Robert Sullivan’s My American Revolution in this weekend’s

Times Book Review. Back in August, Sullivan took us on a tour of how the Battle of Brooklyn would transpire today. Also receiving praise over the weekend was the new collection of stories by Sherman Alexie, whose “Pachyderm” — a poem that made several people who hate poetry break down and cry — appeared here in May.

Monkey buffet festival slideshow!

If you’re wondering whether any new SARS-like virus killed people in the Middle East over the long American holiday weekend, the answer is yes. The coronavirus, only discovered by researchers in September, is the confirmed cause of death for victims in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, while another case is being treated in Britain. The number of known cases doubled on Friday, so be careful out there, when you’re breathing.

There are several puzzling parts in Suzanne Venker’s article “The war on men” from this weekend, not least this paragraph: “In a nutshell, the women are angry. They’re also defensive, though often unknowingly. That’s because they’ve been raised to think of men as the enemy. Armed with this new attitude, women pushed men off their pedestal (women had their own pedestal, but feminists convinced them otherwise) and climbed up to take what they were taught to believe was rightfully theirs.” Here’s a sentence-by-sentence reading of what it all might mean.

Or did Venker imagine it happening more like this?

Related: After The End Of Men

Jim Behrle tweets at @behrle for your possible amusement. “In a nutshell” joke purloined with consent from Lizzie Skurnick.

“It may sound like a plot straight out of a science fiction novel, but a U.S. mission to blow up the moon with a nuke was very real in the 1950s. At the height of the space race, the U.S. considered detonating an atom bomb on the moon as a display of America’s Cold War muscle.”

Andrew W.K. is (maybe) a party rocker and motivational speaker. He is also, by his own unreliable admission, an actor who plays “Andrew W.K.,” which is a creation of a shadowy group of entertainment industry lawyers and mind-control experts. He may or may not be “Steev Mike” or “Dave Grohl.” Also, he/it is mostly known for a single ridiculous orc-lite 2001 punk-pop anthem called “Party Hard” and a live-action show about exploding things, with children, on the Cartoon Network. (Late-night masochists will also know him from frequent appearances on the alternate-universe Fox News program “Red Eye.”)

Whether he’s a self-created troll or something entirely more disturbing is the fuel for much more Internet speculation than his actual music inspires. And now, according to the unimpeachable sources of Pitchfork and Andrew W.K.’s own website, the U.S. State Department has named Andrew W.K. the new American cultural ambassador to the entire Middle East.

All conspiracies eventually meet, so here we have the conspiracy theories about the State Department and the Clintons and the Arab Spring and the current chapter of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Fox News and mind control and Nirvana all coalescing around a dubious report (quickly repeated by music bloggers and the Huffington Post) that a pop-music enigma who barely registers on the celebrity scale has been given the kind of government-sanctioned propaganda role once held by the likes of Louis Armstrong in postwar Europe.

All it takes is a simple denial from the State Department this morning (UPDATE: which already happened), and the entire tale will go from “something posted on an entertainer’s website over a long holiday weekend” to Official Illuminati Coverup. Everything is involved. What do you think ‘The Awl’ stands for, anyway? (Andrew W, with the l being the next letter after “k,” which obviously means “the second Andrew W.K.”)

If you want a picture of the future, which began “for real” in 2001, imagine a blood-speckled white sneaker partying on a human face, forever.

Congratulations, everybody: Black Friday retail sales topped a billion dollars, which means everybody is rich and happy again. Whether shopping from a laptop in bed with a variety of empty bottles and pie crumbs or “at the actual store” with your fellow shoppers in their sweatpants, you helped make America great again.

How much greater? How about 26% better than Black Friday 2011! That is just a phenomenal amount of spending, for a phenomenal amount of consumer goods, electronics, gifts, and whatever else people buy. Pretty much everything is a Black Friday sales item in 2012. Cars? Oh hell yeah, go buy a car on Black Friday. Vibrators? Of course. Anything you might buy, for yourself or anyone else, counts as a Black Friday Christmas Holiday Gift. Thanksgiving Day online shopping was up 36% over 2011, as millions of people realized it’s now socially acceptable to leave the idiot family arguing about global warming for some “Christmas shopping,” alone.

There were incidents, of course. There are always incidents. When you get a couple hundred million people riled up into an old-fashioned frenzied mob, things happen. Children are left in cars and parents are arrested. Fistfights break out, and sometimes even the Walmart workers launch small revolts. There are must-haves, and great temporary sadness for those who cannot get the must-haves, even though the must-haves will probably be available again in a few days, without wrestling a lot of angry people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDpAkjD3wXo

Are these mini-riots a hint of things to come? Of the social unrest that will finally break this country apart? Maybe! Or maybe not, maybe it’s just the closest thing most people get to “being a part of the community” in our current era. It’s good to get out of the house and beat the crap out of strangers once a year. Takes the edge off. There is probably a good research study to be done, by some researchers, that proves people who get to wrasslin’ over an iPad Mini are less likely to … strangle their children? Dress up like The Joker and shoot up a movie theater full of random people? New research will most likely suggest that having public rituals of minor violence such as Black Friday or the Hunger Games or Death Race 2000 or the Giants winning the World Series give people a reason to get nuts and smash stuff so they don’t kill their families. Science can prove this, we bet!

Congratulations to the American Consumer for once again winning the award. Come back next year, if there’s a next year. Anyway, what did you buy, or not buy, over this long weekend? Tell us in the comments, and make your country proud.

Picture via @AdamNMayer.

So the argument at my Thanksgiving table this year centered around gay marriage; specifically, should gay marriage be something we affirm through the judicial process because it is a human right or should it be something we pass through the legislative process so we avoid another Roe v. Wade where people who would be opposed to it no matter what can pretend that they are bothered by it because it bypasses federalism or whatever? Now, granted, my Thanksgiving table was composed of decadent liberal Easterners, but as someone who has been around close to 40 Thanksgiving tables at this point I can guarantee you that this was a very new argument, one that almost made me hopeful about things until I reminded myself that in the end we are all going to die and no matter how quickly that happens there will still be all the attendant sufferings of existence to contend with in the meantime. Anyway, what did you argue about at the Thanksgiving table? Tell us in the comments!

11 Liz Taylor Things It Was Fun To Watch & Read While “Liz And Dick” Was On

1. Elizabeth Taylor as Helen Burns in the 1943 version of Jane Eyre.

The movie, which had Orson Wells as Mr. Rochester and Joan Fontaine as Jane Eyre, was made when Taylor was 11. It was filmed right before National Velvet made her famous. Just a year before, a casting director at another studio had complained, “Her eyes are too old, she doesn’t have the face of a child.” About this role, a biographer writes: “So tiny was her part, as one of the classmates of young Jane (Peggy Ann Garner), that she got no billing on the credits; and years later when she wanted her own children to see the film on television, she discovered she had been entirely cut out of the version re-edited for commercials.” (“One of the classmates” — poor Helen, poor Liz, both keep going unbilled.)

2. The very best primer: Scandals of Classic Hollywood does Elizabeth Taylor, Black Widow.

3. A November 1954 appearance on “What’s My Line?”

The husband mentioned is Michael Wilding, who was 20 years older than Taylor. He’d just starred in The Egyptian.

(Go here to fall down a “What’s My Line” rabbit hole — Eartha Kitt! Taylor clip via.)

4. The Michael Todd — Eddie Fisher — Richard Burton saga as played out in a selection of Photoplay covers from 1957 to 1964.

October 1957.

April 1960.

October 1960.

January 1961.

July 1962.

June 1964.

5. A 1969 profile & interview of Taylor and Burton by Roger Ebert.

“Elizabeth just got a new sapphire,” he explained to Charles Jarrott, his young Canadian director. “It’s 39 carats I think. She’s so fascinated by it she won’t even come down on the set. She’s sitting up there adoring it with one hand and eating steak and kidney pie with the other.”

“A gift from you?” Jarrott said.

“Well of course,” Burton said. “Who else would give her anything?”

Laughter.

6. A report on a scientific study that compared the eye motions of autistic and non-autistic adults watching Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?:

When Ms. Taylor flirted with George Segal, playing a young professor, as her husband lurked in the background, the gaze of the nonautistic adult described a triangle as he followed the expressions of all three. The autistic man never looked at Mr. Burton or anyone’s eyes.

(Via Via.)

7. At Vanity Fair, a bunch of candid photos from Taylor’s stint at a “fat farm” in Florida in the late 70s with her friend Maury Hopson. From that description, the photos won’t sound like much fun (and Hopson like such a great friend) but they’re delightful. From his account, the trip was partly about weight loss, partly about abstaining from booze for a while, and partly giddy friendship adventure. Hopson suggested the trip when Taylor was languishing in D.C. during her marriage to Sen. John Warner. He and Taylor named their bungalow at the spa “Butterfield Ate.”

8. A 1987 interview with Rolling Stone: “Now, I’m fascinated by cats.”

9. The White Diamonds commercial, filmed in 232 B.C.

The perfume White Diamonds launched in 1991, and as of last year, it was still the best-selling celebrity fragrance in the world. Here’s a description of its scent, from Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez’s indispensable Perfumes: The Guide: “This is a soft woody floral in the classic mold, slightly low-budget but pretty good — lush, creamy, and sweet, with a tropical white-flowers accord smelling slightly like ripe bananas, all bolstered by some of those big, powdery musks you’ll recognize from your laundry soap. Seems designed to waft up from cleavage.” They give it three stars (out of five).

10. The sad sateen carnival of the Liza Minnelli-David Gest wedding, as recorded in a 2002 People article:

“In walked Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor, Diana Ross and Diana Ross’s son Evan,” says hairstylist John Barrett, who fashioned Minnelli’s Cabaret-influenced do for the big day. “ [Evan] proceeded to do his moonwalk for Michael and Elizabeth. I thought, ‘If I never see anything else…’ “

Taylor was matron of honor and forgot her shoes, so showed up wearing her slippers. (Or Liza hid the shoes so Liz couldn’t run away

.)

11. And then, Elizabeth Taylor makes up her eyes in 1974’s The Driver’s Seat.

Related: Elizabeth Taylor and AIDS: A Brief History of the 80s

Downtown Brooklyn has a temporary “glut” of parking, which is mandated for new developments, because in part there is just so much transit available. (These are all transitional issues; also, this is only specific to like, the 18 or so square blocks of downtown Brooklyn.) So the City is working on rezoning to give developers back the parking spaces. “’They would turn it into more luxury housing,’ [Councilwoman Letitia] James said, suggesting that it was naïve to think developers would volunteer to turn their extra parking into subsidized housing or a community space.” YA THINK.