As a mostly disinterested observer I’ve found the overwhelming backlash against the new Sex and the City movie to be somewhat surprising. After all, it’s not as if there’s any radical departure from the series’ formula that fans might find upsetting: The show always trafficked in the most grotesque stereotypes of shallow femininity; what made it so culturally noteworthy was the willingness of women to not only buy into its overt misogyny but embrace it. Even the show’s greatest detractors would grudgingly admit an odd fascination with it. And yet we seem to have reached a moment where a growing number of former fans find themselves disgusted with its underlying philosophy and aesthetic. What accounts for the sudden revulsion?

My theory is that the radical aversion to the current installment of Sex and the City says something about the way we look at elderly women in modern American society. We would prefer that, if we must indeed be subject to their representation in popular culture, they be confined to small supporting roles in which they play spinster older sisters or embittered, loveless career women. The idea that we are not only supposed to pretend that the shriveled harridans we see on the screen might still engage in the act of sexual intercourse but that we are supposed to celebrate their enjoyment of such defies both credulity and good taste.

When “Sex and the City” premiered nearly a decade and a half ago it was still possible for viewers to convince themselves that these characters (and the actresses who played them) were vibrant and youthful enough that their carnal antics were both gratifying and arousing. All these years later the four protagonists, drained of their fecundity and more than halfway on the journey that brings every once-vibrant flower to its inevitable arid dessication, would be far more convincing as lesbian aunts or surprisingly spry grandmothers. Our visceral disdain for the most recent Sex and the City makes blatantly obvious our youth-oriented society’s unspoken bias against females who are no longer credible as potential breeders. To paraphrase Andrea Dworkin, nobody wants to think about old ladies fucking.

Now that we’ve identified the problem, is there any real solution? Is there some way we can combat these terrible attitudes about demonstrable sexuality in the aged and infirm? I would urge some kind of campaign in which we sought to reassure the great mass of Americans who find themselves physically sickened by the thought that someone who is a year or two away from collecting Social Security might enjoy a quick romp under the sheets after a leisurely day of shuffleboard and canasta that they have nothing to fear from antediluvian sexuality, but I’m fairly certain that it would be a losing effort. Our prejudices against the concept of the lust of the older woman are too deeply ingrained-probably for biological reasons-for us to change them. I am afraid that the ladies of Sex and the City will have to take a pass on these kind of roles for at least another three years or so until they enter Betty White territory and their desires are something we can laugh at rather than recoil from.

Of course, another possibility is that the movie just sucks, but I’ll be fucked vertically with a javelin before I’ll go to a theater to see for myself. I mean, get real.

“Why I like MIA more than almost any other political art is because it’s possible not to see it as self-righteous. It’s not expressing a view of the world that demands moral purity, but one that admits the complicated nature of political issues-even if Maya seems incapable of doing that on, say, her Twitter. (Though I still don’t know how you can take the statements of someone who has worn pants that light up at face value, but whatever.)”
–Digging down regarding Maya and M.I.A..

It’s only the greatest television event in the entire world. Tomorrow, 25 awesome countries line up to answer the question “Who Is The Country That Most Excessively Performs Awful Synth Pop?” This is Sofia Nizharadze who is representing Georgia! This show makes “American Idol” look like GARBAGE.

Didrik Solli-Tangen is representing Norway! WHAT IS HE WEARING!

Don’t count out SAFURA from Azerbaijan!

OR CROATIA’S GIRL GROUP FEMINNEM!

Here is my fave. It is Iceland’s Hera Björk!

That is a song that I will never get out of my head.

Anyway, enjoy streaming it on the Internet, loser Americans.

In a humorous escapade in central Wisconsin, someone managed to hack into the system which displays electronic roadside warnings. The hacker changed the warning message to “Danger, danger/high voltage/when we touch/when we kiss,” a lyric from the rock group Electric Six. The spoof message caused much confusion among Wisconsin drivers, who were astounded to learn that, seven years after the fact, anyone still remembered the lyrics to an Electric Six song, let alone cared enough to put them on a highway sign.

It’s been a jail since 1932, but our ability to acknowledge Rikers Island on our subway maps has come and gone with the times. It’s a strange omission-despite that, yes, the subway map is called the “subway map” and the only way to get to Rikers is by car or the Q101 or Q100 bus, which starts in Long Island City. But the subway map is, for some people, the only way they can find out how to get around New York City. Let’s look at the magically disappearing Rikers on the maps from 1968 to 1998.

This, above, is my favorite; it’s the map that most of us are familiar with, though it’s actually had some iterations more recently which revealed Rikers Island. But before that, it did this classic job of showing where Rikers was but actually blotting it out, as if it couldn’t be named. And it’s not like that’s the bus info to get there-that’s a drop-down of Bronx bus routes.

Ta da oh hi you’re back!

Never, ever get arrested for thieving while awaiting trial for shoplifting. Andrew Parker (real last name Pollack!) did that this week, when he is said to have used someone else’s Amex to get two Hermes bags for $11,595… Hey,$5797.50 each, after tax?? Why is he getting a better Hermes discount that me?

by Carl Hegelman

Summer is the invention of privileged classes in the northern latitudes, a time of traveling and ease. You don’t see tropical writers going into paroxysms over summer. Between Cancer and Capricorn, summer isn’t that different from the other seasons. And when it is, it’s a time of heat, when work becomes particularly sweaty and oppressive and you long for the cooling downpour of the monsoon or “the rains.” This is probably true in the southern latitudes, too: name one Australian novel celebrating the glories of summer. Modern summer was allegedly created during the Industrial Revolution, when the new capitalists finally accumulated enough wealth from steam engines and textile factories to wonder what the hell to do with it all. In other words, it began with the exploitation of the masses, and as such should be added to the list of taken-for-granted things we’re supposed to feel guilty about.

We’re taught this decadent concept of entitlement to leisure in childhood. They don’t give you long vacations in January or November, they let you out of school from June/July to August/September. As a privileged first-world kid, you look forward to summer as an endless succession-and like everything in childhood, it does seem endless -of many-houred days full of play and frolic, time spent on the beaches and in backyards. As you grow, summer means long nights of agonized flirtation and courtship, first kisses stolen in the dim, humid warmth of seaside discos, etc. Nearly all the coming-of-age movies, you’ll notice, are set in summer: American Graffiti, The Summer of ’42, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Breaking Away, The Graduate, American Pie… they all pretty much happen during the cloudless season. This may have something to do with the fact that graduation is in summer, and high school graduation is the main rite of passage from childhood. But why is graduation in the summer?

We of the first world are trained from our earliest days to regard summer as essentially a vacation, and we keep this attitude right on into adulthood. This is especially true of the ultra-privileged. Wall Street, which takes every holiday that’s going (including the ones they don’t really get solidly behind, like Martin Luther King’s birthday), basically shuts down in summer and takes off for the Hamptons or on long trips to the trendiest global watering holes (though still nominally working and cashing its paychecks). If you’re selling a deal on Wall Street, you really have to wait until after Labor Day, because nobody’s going to be giving it any attention during the lazy days. The credit crunch, you’ll recall, began in the summer of 2007, no doubt in part because the dealers and shakers were too busy vacationing to unhang those bridge loans.

Europe is much the same. On Fleet Street, in whose pubs and wine bars British journalists used to hang about in the days before Rupert Murdoch moved everybody out to cheaper real estate, they call summer the “Silly Season,” because Parliament, like Congress, is “in recess” (read: goofing off on Le Continent and in various Caribbean tax havens) and the City is closed; nothing happens in summer and they have to invent human-interest stories to keep their pages filled. Paris, as everyone knows, ceases to exist in August, its matrons flopping about on topless beaches in the south and les gentilhommes gathered there to watch.

In other words, for grown-ups in our first world summer is still basically summer vacation. In 2009, there were 992 million international tourist arrivals (and God knows how many tons of carbon dioxide liberated into the atmosphere from all the trains, boats, planes, tour buses and Viagra manufacturing), most of them in the boreal summer.

Meanwhile, for the world’s less fortunate residents-the six billion who didn’t make an international arrival-summer is mostly about working harder. In India, in the days of Empire, this was when the punkah wallahs (the men who pulled the strings to work the fans that kept the sahibs cool) were called upon to sweat. These days it’s the time when the otherwise unemployed people get jobs waiting tables and being abused by picky rich diners at the summer resorts, or caddying on the golf courses, or driving prom limos, or shepherding tourists around the Acropolis, or rickshawing fat first-worlders around Bangkok, or otherwise being especially menial. In agri-land it’s when the migrant workers get to pick apples, bale hay, and tote barges.

True, this exercise in conspicuous leisure does result in a small redistribution of wealth, as the privileged few scatter crumbs about our touristic paths. It’s not exploitation, we protest: Nobody’s forcing anyone to be a waiter. But it all looks kind of like a tip, doesn’t it? Surely there’s a better way to redistribute wealth?

Ah, yes, there is. Put down your iPhone for a second. Leave your iPad on the couch. Press pause on the Blu-Ray that’s playing on your plasma TV. Listen closely: Come the revolution, summer is going to be one of the first things to go. As Shakespeare himself noted 400 years ago, summer’s lease hath all too short a date. Those six billion underprivileged non-departures will have their day. Such a disparity can’t last forever, it’s against the Third Law of Ecodynamics. The revolution will come, and then summer will end.

Enjoy it while it lasts.

Carl Hegelman (a pen name) is a corporate bond analyst and a connoisseur of leisure.

The annual road-crossing migration of hundreds of toads from their normal habitats to the ponds where they breed in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Roxborough came early this year, and the off schedule resulted in quite a bit of toad carnage — the area’s Toad Detour that is set up annually had yet to be erected. A sad story — but one with a happy ending that came this week: “Saturday, Sunday, and Monday evenings saw an average of 2,000 toadlets crossing Port Royal towards the woods at the Schuylkill Center. Most crossed between Hagy’s Mill and Eva Street,” according to the official blog set up to chronicle the toads’ street-crossing. (Niche media will save us all, eh.) And look at how tiny those things are — “more like insects,” according to one of the toadologists! That is a fingernail that baby toad is standing on! May it ribbit its way across the road next spring without having to get past any barreling trucks.

David Cho: Hi Neel. Hmm. There’s something different about you. Have you been featured on the hit MTV show The City recently?
Neel Shah: Hilarious. Let’s talk about this MOVIE.
Neel: I should preface this conversation with two things:
Neel: 1) I enjoyed the TV series. Which is to say I would watch it when other people would turn it on, and not complain.
David: That’s a cute way to justify it.
Neel: 2) I did not entirely hate the first Sex And The City Movie.
David: Have you seen the entire series? (I have. Like, in the last four years.)
David: (Thanks HBO OnDemand and former girlfriend!)
Neel: No. I am familiar with the basic plot lines and character arcs, but I would estimate that I’ve seen, oh, 40% of the original series?
Neel: SAMANTHA IS THE SLUTTY ONE, RIGHT??
David: So more like 80%.
David: Got it.
Neel: Yes. Like the rule, in which you can safely cut in half the number of women a guy tells you he’s slept with.
Neel: Anyway.
David: Yeah, I’m not touching that one.

THE MOVIE

David: What did you think???
Neel: I thought it was perhaps the worst movie I’ve seen in the past three years.
Neel: Like, I am having a hard time thinking of something I hated more. You were sitting next to me. How many times do you think I checked my BlackBerry?
David: My cellphone battery was dead by the end of the movie.
Neel: The over/under would probably start at 50 times?
Neel: It was epically, cosmically, comically bad.
Neel: Actually not comically bad. There was nothing even remotely funny about its badness.
David: But more specifically, what did you not like?
David: To me, and maybe because I’d already read all of the bad stuff about it, and also because I had drank a fair amount to drink without eating dinner, I thought it was pretty much what I thought it would be?
David: SEX AND THE CITY IS NOT A PARTICULARLY CEREBRAL TV SHOW.
Neel: That is true.
David: Like, was it that far a departure from the TV show?
David: Or the first movie?
Neel: Yes.
David: How?
Neel: The show, in economical episodes, had at least had some pithy dialogue, and made some incisive comments about the nature of female friendship/dating mores/what shoes are totally great.
Neel: This movie, as far as I could tell, was about…
Neel: What, exactly?
David: You’re giving the TV series A LOT of credit.
David: So you would say this movie is something other than 7 (it’s 2 hours and 20 minutes folks) episodes back-to-back-to-back-to-etc?
Neel: It felt twice as long.
Neel: Look, I’m not saying that a popcorn chick flick like this has to actually “say” anything about anything of even remote significance. But this movie was about what, exactly?
Neel: These four women go to Abu Dhabi.
Neel: Stay in $22k-a-night suites.
Neel: Have their own sexy Arab butlers.
Neel: Drive around in white Maybachs.
Neel: And then flip out when something goes wrong and then they all of a sudden maybe have to fly back to New York IN COACH?
Neel: Come on.
David: To me, I almost think that you could throw this on TV now and people would be okay with it.
David: I MEAN, HAVE YOU SEEN THE ARC WHERE THEY GO TO LA?
David: See, my problem with the movie is less the execution.
David: But more with the premise.
David: I think that women talking about how annoying their kids are and menopause and etc. is less fun and entertaining than them talking about their sexy exploits and foibles!
Neel: Also, what the fuck was with the clothes in that movie?? It was like basically like watching Priscilla Queen of the Desert with more Louis Vuitton.
David: Well, I thought the clothes were alright. There were audible gasps in our crowd when she wore that one Galliano dress.
David: They weren’t “horrendous” per se.
David: But we’re not really the right people to gauge that.
Neel: Certainly not as horrendous as the puns.
David: Ba-dum-ching!
David: I mean! You say that, but SATC was always about the punnary!
David: Often horrible, horrible punnary!
David: There have been SNL skits about this very fact!
Neel: Maybe it was more palatable in episodic form?
Neel: Michael Patrick King needs to have his pun license taken away. Lawrence of my Labia? Bedouin Bath and Beyond?
David: We’re probably retreading on the other reviews that have lambasted the movie better, we should take this to a place where only we can go.
David: A male viewpoint on the characters and how awful they all are!
David: Both in personality and aesthetic!

Next: The Characters!

THE CHARACTERS

David: Who are the characters on SATC that you actually like?
Neel: I guess Charlotte?
Neel: I feel like she’s every guy’s favorite?
David: She’s the most attractive for sure, but as a character?
David: Do you like that prim sort of girl?
Neel: I will tell you that I derived no erotic pleasure from watching Kim Cattrall yelp as she is getting drilled on the hood of a jeep.
David: SPOILER ALERT!!!!
Neel: SORRY.
Neel: Personality-wise, are any really likeable?
David: I think the most redeeming characters, as much as the women like to complain about them, are the guys.
David: Steve
David: Smith Jared
David: Big
David: All a-okay in my book.
Neel: Yes.
Neel: The guys are all decently likeable.
David: Miranda = Terrible and insanely selfish.
Neel: YES.
Neel: Steve is a nice guy!
David: Well, he cheated on his wife in the last movie.
Neel: Because she was terrible!
David: So, likable, but human? I don’t know.
Neel: His cheating in the last movie was not some Tiger Woods shit.
David: Yeah, I hold a pretty anti-infidelity stance, but he was “driven into the arms of the other woman”, I guess?
Neel: Only once!
David: Once too many!
Neel: And felt really, terribly bad about it.
David: Yeah, I guess that’s true.
David: But women apparently identify with these characters?
David: Or rather, at least like spending time with them?
David: Which is why this TV show is one of the most impactful [ED. NOTE: NOT A WORD.] of our generation?
David: Presumably?
Neel: I feel like every time a female friend of mine is asked that question, she answers “Carrie.”
David: Is there a bigger disparity than the perceptions of how attractive Carrie is by women and by men?
David: I mean, she is nothing close to attractive.
David: But I have very vivid memories of girls from college arguing over how “beautiful she was”.
Neel: Agreed.
Neel: In general, women are TERRIBLE at gauging the attractiveness of other women.
David: Like “cute” girls that they set you up with?
David: Although Facebook has mitigated a lot of those issues.
Neel: I don’t know how many times a female friend of mine has been like, “Oh, I really want to set you up with X, she is SO HOT.”
Neel: And then you see a pic, and it’s like, “Whaaa?”
David: You know what though?
David: The digital equivalent of a girl’s recommendation on another girl’s attractiveness is the Macbook Photobooth picture.
David: Does anyone ever look unattractive in those?
David: If you see a girl who you’ve never seen IRL in a Macbook Photobooth picture, NEVER TRUST IT.
Neel: YES.
Neel: I think maybe it’s because girls like to pride themselves on having “attractive” friends, and so they lose perspective on whether or not they’re actually “objectively physically attractive” if they like them as people?
David: MOVING ON!

THE ABU DHABI/RACIST(?) STUFF

David: Thoughts?
Neel: Oh man.
Neel: I felt really sad to be American, or at least Indian-American, during this movie.
David: AGREE.
Neel: Did it make you uncomfortable?
David: It was weird that in a situation where you control everything that’s happening, you would make your characters seem like such obnoxious Americans.
David: The kind that you see abroad, that make you be all like, “Ughhhhhh.”
Neel: Basically watching these poor Arab dudes with waxed torsos parade around in service of these spoiled American hags?
David: One of them was Indian.
Neel: Yes. Gorran!
Neel: He was great.
David: Kind of good for you and your ilk.
David: Up until now all you’ve had is Kal Penn.
David: Which is cool.
Neel: He repped my peeps well.
David: How do you think Abu Dhabi feels about this movie?
Neel: If I was Abu Dhabi’s Minister of Tourism, I’d be pretty pissed!
Neel: These four white broads sashay in, can’t respect local customs, flip their shit out, throw a tantrum, and then run.
David: In the trailer there’s the line where Charlotte’s daughter compares it to Aladdin and Carrie says, “Yes, but with cocktails” (which, WTF?).
David: But also-
David: Didn’t it look sort of like Aladdin?
David: Like when they’re in the street fair.
David: You kind of expect a monkey to steal an apple and guards to chase him and his street urchin owner around while they participate an elaborate musical number?
Neel: It wasn’t just the stereotypes. It was their insanely boorish behavior in spite of the fact that these people were all going out of their way to make things extremely pleasant for them.
Neel: Like, I know Samantha prides herself on being sexually progressive or whatever, but does she really need to try to fondle some Dutch architect’s penis in public?
David: That pretty much says it all I guess!

FINAL THOUGHTS?

Neel: DO NOT SEE. Seriously.
David: I think our crowd liked it, and if you currently enjoy watching Sex And The City when it airs on TBS and HBO OnDemand, I don’t think you’ll hate it?
Neel: Did our crowd like it? Everyone I asked afterwards was like, “that was atrocious”
David: There was a lot of LOL-ing with the movie and not at it.
Neel: I guess some people laughed at some things?
Neel: But really. Is laughing at “some” things enough reason to sit through the other 2.5 hours of inexcusable garbage?

We are on record as being fans of New York Times dining critic Sam Sifton-his review of ultra-hip Carroll Gardens abattoir Prime Meats this week was extremely enjoyable-but we’ve got to admit, this Sifton Mad-Libs construction is also pretty great. It is obviously the product of close reading.