Letters to the Editor
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Come on Heather!
It's called a Lychee Martini!!!!
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If only
the Pixies could release a new album...
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Crass Babes With Bucks
I find myself cringing when I watch most of the woman on this show. Banal beyond words. Empty conversations, ambitions. Except for LuAnn, classless. And utterly awash in outsider knock-off assumptions about the good life as I knew it, and know it as one who has grown up in Manhattan, has maintained a subscription to the Met for decades, has children educated at Trinity. The Housewives of New York are post Donald Trump housewives. They are crass babes with bucks. And while I might watch them on TV, except for LuAnn, and possibly Jill, I would recoil from them socially.
I like Jill, she is who she is, she has heart, but I am astounded at her willingness to expose her daughter to the world in this light. I also have shopped in dusty dirty Zarins for fabric, where the elevator doesn’t work half the time, and feel good that I’ve helped Jill buy her schmattes. Alex and her husband are extremely strange, and hard to watch. For starters their manse in Brooklyn, is a white faux brick building that is, well in Brooklyn, and everyone knows if you’re going to have to live in Brooklyn, for whatever reason then it better be is a fabulous brownstone, in the Heights. And their furniture is post college at best. I’ve never heard of that hotel he works at. He is so odd. And while they aspire to culture, it’s for all the wrong reasons. Except for LuAnn, who has a proper home, the others have apartments mostly it seems over near Third Avenue, where anyone of means would only live if they had to, as in couldn’t pass the co-op boards on Park/Fifth or Madison Avenue.
Bethenny is your stock footage New York single woman. Chiseled jaw. Gleaming hair. Rabid with ambition and loneliness. Look at Me. Watch Me. Do Me. She is like the rats in the streets. They are joyless creatures. And, there are to many of them now. They are giving this city, and womanhood a bad name.
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The Second-Best Bed
I haven't read the book, but I have read a lot of Shakespeare and some biographical material, and it always struck me that the "second best bed" remark in his will was some kind of in-joke between them, not him blowing her off of discarding her. It seems perfectly plausible to me that a husband and wife might build up a lifetime of silly stories and jokes between them, and one of them might even write one into a will to give a little smile 'from the beyond'.
But what do I know?
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Why people even care
With all that's going on in the world the fact that people even watch "Real Housewives" of anything makes me vomit in the corner and want them to roll in it. The fact that Salon even writes about it irks me. I'm going to have not read this column anymore. And it's a lychee martinee. Not litchi.
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*eyeroll*
Considering that we know next to nothing about Shakespeare and his family, any book purporting to explain their relationship is just blowing hot air. Whole careers have been made out of taking one known fact and embroidering it into volumes. I really wish people would stop obsessing on who the man was. We're never going to know that - the documentation simply DOES NOT EXIST. Why are we such suckers for the Cult of Personality? Why can't we just enjoy what the man wrote and let it go at that?
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Morgana
No doubt you are absolutely correct in your analysis. Maybe your could join the program to show them how it's really done. It would be fun to watch the real McCoy in action. I came from that world and I escaped long enough ago that it's quite entertaining to watch it on TV! Like a comic horror movie.
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Salon Culture Gurus?
Isn't this one of those oxymorons like 'military ntelligence'?
Doubt this column will last. Checking the letters to see if anyone else thought the same.
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like the concept; execution needs work
I like this idea. This time through about the only thing which appeals to me personally is Erykah Badu's album. One thing that is discordant about this list though is that about half of your critics pick things which are such downers that I eliminate them on that basis while the other half pick things which verge on the idiotic (tv shows especially). Do any of them ever indulge in intelligent work which will not increase the ranks of the nation's suicidally depressed? One final thought: find a critic who will cover a hot growth area in the arts: audiobooks. I have rediscovered great writing by trying audio books, which I can listen to while working on my art projects. carol
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Let's have a vote: Based on their tastes, which Salon writer would you most want to hang out with?
My vote goes to Havrilesky, though in an ideal world it would go to O'Hehir.
Havrilesky sounds like the woman who, if you went for a night out on the town, there'd be a slight possibility of ending up in jail.
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great idea
Great idea for a regular feature, Salon. And I second the pick of Eryka Badu's new album.
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Yes I like the feature
But the housewives tv show sounds dreadful.
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this is not about Godbama
therefore it is wrong.
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lychee, litchi, laichi, lichu, lichi.....
There are many variant spellings of the word lychee. They include litchi (the FDA's spelling), laichi, lichu, lichi, lichee, leechee, and of course lychee. These spellings just reflect an attempt to pronounce a Chinese name.
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Readers are supposed to chime in with their own favorite things...
I used to have my ear to the ground so much more than I do now. It's pathetic. It's hard to stay cool.
Anyway, here are a few of my favorite things this week:
-- Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo." I've been on a 1950s kick lately. One manifestation is tracking down some of my favorite movies from the era. This is one of them. Why it took me this long to get "Vertigo" on DVD is uncertain. But I finally got it. Salon workers should see it if they haven't -- it's chock full of San Francisco goodness. I have watched this film more times than anyone should admit. The more you watch it, the creepier you realize the film is. Every character is creepy. Jimmy Stewart is creepy. Barbara Bel Geddes is creepy. Kim Novak ends up seeming normal compared to these two orbiting denialists. Much of the middle section of the film has almost no words and consists of a perplexed, watery-eyed Stewart following Novak around and watching everything she does like some sad demented puppy with a hat. With most of Hitchcock's films following some formula or other, how he came up with this bizarre, magnificent death-poem is one of the mysteries of his career.
-- Weird Science comics. Somebody got me a few of the reprints. They're awesome. Many of the stories are by Ray Bradbury. The ones that aren't are good too. The artists are fantastic. There's also Weird Fantasy, and then they merged into Weird Science-Fantasy, which are among the best yet. My favorite story is about a children's show with a popular hand puppet. For some reason, the person who runs the show decides the puppet should run for president (ala Stephen Colbert!). The gag takes off and eventually the puppet really is elected president. At the end of the story, you find out that the puppet is actually an alien that has grafted itself onto the man's hand, and used him to gain control of planet earth. WTF? Another great story is about orange robots who are segregated from blue robots. A helmeted visitor from another planet visits them to invite them into an inter-galactic guild, but then he realizes that they're still too unevolved to join, because they're segregated. At the end of the story, the visitor removes his helmet, to reveal he is a black human. Believe it or not, the Comics Authority tried to censor this and asked William Gaines (publisher of EC Comics) to change him to a white man. Gaines's answer: "Fuck you."
-- The music of Erik Satie. I recently got a really nice CD full of one great Satie piece after another, comprising most of his work, and performed by Frances Poulenc. I could play this CD over and over, and I do.
-- Mexican food. This is my favorite thing not this week, but this lifetime. Fish tacos. Lobster tacos. Stuffed calamari with hot peppers. Green-chile enchiladas. Tortas. Burritos full of with roasted peppers and guacamole. Hot sauce -- lots, and lots, and lots of hot sauce. Black beans. Pinto beans. Refried beans. Cheese everywhere....melted, not melted. Chips. Salsa. Tequila. Lime.
-- Trivia nights at the local bar. I rule at this. Great way to meet people who are also full of useless knowledge. They usually end with me realizing that I have much less useless knowledge, or just knowledge in general, than I thought. Which only makes me feel more useless. But who cares, because the prizes are still fun: Nerf guns, bubble makers, etc. I still can't believe that I was unable to remember that the capital of Sicily is Palermo. Idiot.
-- Al Pacino. He has a new movie coming out. I hear it sucks. But it's Al Pacino. From "Attica!" to "I'm out of order? You're out of order!" to "Last of the Mo-'ricans" (in Dog Day Afternoon, And Justice for All, and Carlito's Way respectively), he's an all-time favorite. Fuhgeddabout it.