Moot Point

Aw, I kind of loved Jenny’s guerilla fashion show. It reminded me of that scene in…I want to say Girls Just Want To Have Fun, where they crash a society party with their contemporary dance or whatever.

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Ugh. I am sick, and the only thing worse than being sick and missing work is being sick and not actually having work to miss, and then wordpress doesn’t want me to upload images anymore, so anyway I am sorry my Gossip Girl post is two days late! Continue Reading »

The three best things about last night’s Gossip Girl. Continue Reading »

This week on Gossip Girl: a blackout pushes dramatic action forward! What a novel plot twist! (Like it matters.)

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Embedded below is Leighton Meester’s cover of “Bette Davis Eyes.”

It’s not laughably bad, but it’s resoundingly mediocre, which is something that Blair Waldorf would never allow.

(via Jezebel)

Oh wow, I completely forgive them for the slightly awkward season premiere, because this whole episode was magic.

Before I get to it, though, uh, Leighton’s making an album?! A music album? Oh, how I hope this is a lie; I don’t think I can deal with Blair Waldorf putting out a vanity project album, either of the Hayden Panettiere uncomfortable pop music writhing in high heels or of the Scarlett Johanssen pretentious Tom Waits cover, nuzzling Salman Rushdie variety. Continue Reading »

So, I was really excited that Gossip Girl is back for a new season. I have been rewatching the old season for …research (really), and I have to say that this was not exactly a top episode. Continue Reading »

Weekly Movies is probably going to be short on detail this week. I hurt my back and it still hurts to type a little. I did watch movies and not spend the whole week being obsessed with Gossip Girl, I promise. (Oh, but while we’re on GG: an entire (awesomely detailed) tumblr devoted to the greatest episode of TV ever.)

1. Labyrinth of Passions (Pedro Almodóvar, 1982): This is Almodóvar’s second film, when he still was a wacky, trashy punk. How many Academy Award-winning directors have appeared in their own films, in drag, performing a New Wave song that if I’m not mistaken is partly about having sex with rats in the sewer? I’m guessing not very many.
2. Waiting For Guffman (Christopher Guest, 1996): I had never seen this, but I had seen Best In Show. This is better. It actually really reminded me of the best episodes of The Office, because you have the mockumentary factor, the fact that these are people whose lives you don’t necessarily envy and whose denials you can see through, but there’s still something really beautiful about them. I really loved the one guy on town council or whatever who was just completely enraptured with Corky.
3. Southland Tales (Richard Kelly, 2007): Okay, I’m not going to lie. This isn’t (as I’d hoped), a secret masterpiece. It’s not a good movie. Some parts of the story still don’t make sense, and not in a “man, this movie’s so complex” way, in a “there is no explanation for this chain of events” way. I was kind of okay with that, because all the porn stars and Marxists and WWIII and the oil running out and the scary government internet surveillance and the Rock being wrapped up in this big, sprawling messy narrative where everyone in the movie ends up riding a zeppelin kind of captures something real about the culture, even if I do think it was at least half accidental. But, more importantly, it’s a hell of a lot of fun. Every scene with Sarah Michelle Gellar is comedy gold (I’d really forgotten ho funny she is); and obviously all the Amy Poehler and Cheri Oteri stuff was also actually funny, because Richard Kelly was all up with the political satire, but he still seemed to get that a lot of “Marxists” are really lame. For me though, the highlight was definitely Justin Timberlake, scarred and on drugs, lipsynching to “All These Things That I’ve Done” and pouring beer all over himself. Don’t ask me why.
   
4. Romance & Cigarettes (John Turturro, 2006): This is another neo-musical (which Southland Tales almost is), with actors singing along with old songs that express their feelings, and the ways that the musical sections, which start out clearly coded as fantasy, kind of seep into the world of the movie a bit. This one is strange, but it’s actually worth seeing. There’s an amazing cast (James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, Kate Winslet, Steve Buscemi, Mandy Moore, Mary-Louise Parker, Amy Sedaris, etc), it’s set in a working-class neighbourhood, it’s really depressing, and I have been thinking a lot about pop cultural nostalgia, of which this movie is a really interesting example. It’s like Woody Allen movies, in that it’s apparently set in the present day, but all the references are about a generation too old for everyone.

From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 by Michel Foucault, trans. Robert Hurley, pub. Vintage Books, pp. 71-72

Dating a gay guy is one thing, but lying to your friends about sex is unforgivable.

Perhaps this production of the truth, intimidated though it was by the scientific model, multiplied, intensified, and even created its own intrinsic pleasures. It is often said that we have been incapable of imagining any new pleasures.

We have at least invented a new kind of pleasure: pleasure in the truth of pleasure, the pleasure of knowing the truth, of discovering and exposing it, the fascination of seeing it and telling it, of captivating and capturing others by it, of confiding it in secret, of luring it out in the open–the specific pleasure of the true discourse on pleasure.

The most important elements of an erotic art linked to our knowledge about sexuality are no to be sought in the ideal, promised to us by medicine, of a healthy sexuality, nor in the humanist dream of a complete and flourishing, and certainly not in the lyricism of orgasm and the good feelings of bio-energy (these are but aspects of its normalizing utilization), but in this multiplication and intensification of pleasures connected to the production of the truth about sex.

The learned volumes, written and read; the consultations and examinations; the anguish of answering questions and the delights of having one’s words interpreted; all the stories told to oneself and others, so much curiosity, so much scandal, so many confidences offered in the face of scandal, sustained–but not without trembling a little–by the obligation of truth; the profusion of secret fantasies and the dearly paid right to whisper them to whoever is able to hear them; in short, the formidable “pleasure of analysis” (in the widest sense of the latter term) which the West has been cleverly fostering for several centuries: all this constitutes something like the errant fragments of an erotic art that is secretly transmitted by confession and the science of sex.

Must we conclude that our scientia sexualis is but an extraordinarily subtle form of ars erotica, and that it is Western, sublimated version of that seemingly lost tradition? Or must we suppose that all these pleasures are only the by-products of a sexual science, a bonus that compensates for its many stresses and strains?

In any case, the hypothesis of a power of repression exerted on our society on sex for economic reasons appears to me quite inadequate if we are to explain this whole series of reinforcements and intensifications that our preliminary inquiry has discovered: a proliferation of discourses, carefully tailored to the requirements of power; the solidification of the sexual mosaic and the construction of devices capable not only of isolating it but of stimulating and provoking it, of forming it into focuses of attention, discourse, and pleasure; the mandatory production of confessions and the subsequent establishment of a system of legitimate knowledge and of an economy of manifold pleasures.

We are dealing not nearly so much with a negative mechanism of an exclusion as with the operation of a subtle network of discourses, special knowledges, pleasures, and powers.

At issue is not a movement bent on pushing rude sex back into some obscure and inaccessible region, but on the contrary, a process that spreads it over the surface of things and bodies, arouses it, draws it out and bids it to speak, implants it in reality and enjoins it to tell the truth: an entire glittering sexual array, reflected in a myriad of discourses, the obstination of powers, and the interplay of knowledge and pleasure.

XOXO

Okay, I’m not even a little embarrassed about liking Gossip Girl anymore after the hour of wonder that was last night’s show. There’s still all the amazing catty campiness (”And to think, I almost asked you to wear a matching dress tonight”) but it was actually really fantastic asterisk-free gripping drama all the way tonight. (I am behind-the-folding this because I talk about the big! revelation! and it’s really not the kind of thing I want to spoil for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet!)

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