BLOGGING LOOKING FOR ALASKA: Only Posers Die

I'm sending back my copy of Looking For Alaska to MagentaBitch, because her brother is "vaguely interested" in reading it. That's a worthy cause, and I'm happy someone else gets to (vaguely) read this book. Because it's good. I could see a world in which I discovered Looking For Alaska at 15 and reorganized my life around it. I can think about the cumulative impact books like The River Why and The Catcher In The Rye had on me and can see how Looking For Alaska would have been mostly the same, but perhaps a little better. Generally grossed out by the idea of community vis-a-vis YouTube though I am, I can see how being a nerdfighter, to a lot of kids, would be fucking rad.

Hi Effy! Oh, that's another thing I have to get back to!

But that doesn't mean Looking For Alaska was fun to write about. In some ways I ruined my chances at being able to blog anything by starting with Twilight, which became exponentially more insane in ways I would never have predicted. No other book SPIRALS OUT OF CONTROL like Twilight does. Or, the ones that do, do so on purpose, which is a little less fun. So yeah, I quit Blogging LFA because I couldn't imagine anyone reading the things I was writing. Better to just read the book, which more or less comments on itself. But as I picked though the copy of the book MB sent me, making sure there were no sexy polaroids tucked in there or anything, I saw a few notes I'd written in the margins and realized that I could at least wrap the book up in broad strokes, for the sense of closure and all that.

(Previously: Part 1: Carajo, Un Balazo! Part 2: Bring Me The Sun Part 3: The Same Amount Of Ice Part 4: Get My Swan Costume Ready Part 5: Do You Hear The Rain? Part 6: Vancouver! Vancouver! Part 7: Me L'aspettavo Part 8: Ja Maar Niet Te Veel Part 9: On The Ground! Part 10: Transcript #001 Part 11: My Time Outside The Womb)

So what else happens? Alaska and Pudge spend Thanksgiving break watching porn and drinking wine. Alaska says things like, "I still ruin everything. I still fuck up." And also things like "You love the girl who makes you laugh and shows you porn and drinks wine with you. You don't love the crazy, sullen bitch." And Pudge says things like "There was something to that, truth be told." There's also this section:

I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was a drizzle and she was a hurricane.

Note I wrote in the margins of page 88: GET THIS SHIT TATTOOED ON YOUR FACES, NERDS

I mean it's a nice little paragraph, and it can be nostalgic for readers who have already moved past feeling like this in favor of wanting to FUCK EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME (I mean c'mon Pudge you just watched porn with this girl!) and it can be comforting to readers who aren't ready to incorporate sexuality into their feelings quite yet (i.e. losers). But what a goofy dismount! Tumblr URLesque is the best way I can describe it that final line. UGH. But overall, the whole Thanksgiving break bit is very nice, and sweet, and romantic. And then on page 89 Alaska misuses "winter of [our] discontent"* and I lost all sense that anyone could be attracted to her.

(*"Now is the winter of our discontent" means that our discontent is almost over. We've been through the spring and summer and fall of discontent, see? So when people use it to be like, "I'm so depressed," they're doing it wrong. ANYWAY.)

Note I wrote in the margins of page 93 (after underlined phrase "the highway's monotonous lullaby"): RELAX JOHN GREEN

Then everyone comes back. Lara tries to give Pudge a beej by just popping his dick in her mouth and sitting there, waiting for it to do something. Later The Colonel points out that you also aren't supposed to blow, despite the name. I had not read this book when I made my "Nerdfuckers" video, so I'm pretty sure John Green and I both used to watch the MTV Soap Undressed.

And then the gang pulls a prank. It involves sending forged letters home to the parents of their enemies, and it is needlessly complicated, and only slightly more fun than hearing a real friend describe a prank he pulled in high school. The Swan who lives by the pond bites Pudge on the ass, which turns out to be the bird's entire purpose in the book. So, yeah, I'm glad that was in there?

Later, Alaska reveals the rosetta stone of her MPDGdom: when she was a young girl, her mother suffered an aneurysm in front of her. And Alaska wasn't like those miracle toddlers or dogs you hear about--she didn't call 911. She froze, and watched her mother die. Pudge shares with us one of his darker last-word anecdotes: when William McKinley was dying, his wife became hysterical, crying and screaming that she wanted to go too. And he told her: "We are all going." According to Sarah Vowell in her book Assassination Vacation, Ida McKinley passed the rest of her days knitting socks in a chair. The McKinley museum displays her silk yarn bag, on which she'd sewed a picture of her husband's face.

I wish there was a funny anecdote to balance all of that out, but I read Vowell's book a long time ago and am only just skimming it now. Her McKinley section is mostly about how The Republican party turned from the antislavery party of Lincoln to the neo-con World-Dominion party of George W. Bush. So, you know, not exactly laugh-a-minute. But did you know that Thomas Edison popularized the electric chair as part of a campaign to smear his opponents at Westinghouse? Their AC electricity was becoming more popular than his DC, and so Edison started showing people how AC current could kill dogs and horses. Prison wardens were like "Hey! Do you think that could kill people too?" And Edison suggested that the verb form of "to kill with electricity" be "to Westinghouse" someone. DICK MOVE TO THE MAX. How does that relate to McKinley? Leon Czolgosz was the only Presidential Assassin to be executed that way. (John Wilkes Booth was shot during a standoff with Union soldiers, Charles Guiteau was hanged, and Lee Oswald was a patsy--JFK was killed by aliens.)

And then, the thing happens. The thing that we've been counting down to (after this the timeline reverses from "X days before" to "X days after"). Alaska gets drunk one night and makes out with Pudge. Somewhat creepily, the Colonel is sitting there the whole time. Very Pattinson in Little Ashes. A while after passing out, Pudge is woken by Alaska, who is hysterical and asking his help in getting her off campus undetected. Pudge does as he is told, distracting the principal so Alaska can drive off into the night for reasons unknown. And she crashes her car into a police barricade and dies.

You only sort of see it coming, and it hurts. And it is at once very MPDG (Alaska is so MPDG she can't even EXIST) and very antiMPDG (she doesn't help Miles grow or learn to appreciate life--she confuses him and teases his dick and then is gone and he's full of blind rage and guilt and horror). The entire school reels at her death, which Pudge both appreciates and resents. They learn that her BAC was very high, and Pudge and The Colonel try to reconcile their complicity in her death.

Note I wrote on page 157: AND YOU WANT TO BE ABLE TO EXCUSE PUDGE AND THE COLONEL, TOO. BUT YOU CAN'T, SHOULDN'T. AND THEN YOU THINK OF EVERY STUPID THING YOUR FRIENDS EVER DID, EVERY STUPID THING YOU EVER DID, AND HOW YOU NEVER STOPPED THEM, AND THEY NEVER STOPPED YOU.

Failing that, they fall headlong into investigating the cause of her death. Complicating the fact that she was drunk is the manner in which, the police report, she drove to her end: straight and fast. Pudge is angry at the idea that she committed suicide, and however patriarchal or terminally Western or whatever else his attitude about this is, at least it's honest. They chase down many leads and really only meet people who are just as fucked up and confused over Alaska's death as they are, and in the end realize they'll never know. The title Looking For Alaska ends up reflecting that "life's mysteries" theme of the whole book: What happened when Alaska died? What happens when anybody dies? What is the labyrinth?

After Alaska died, I was a little worried that we'd get moralized at, but we don't. Pudge doesn't quit smoking upon realizing that life is precious or any of that shit. He does find comfort in his World Religion class, and the teachings of The Old Man, and there's where your warnings that LFA was conceived as Christian Fiction started to worry me. But Pudge's faith-based realization is nondenominational; the book doesn't end with a "Coexist" sticker, but it almost does. But it's fine. Again, it's something a less-jaded version of me would have adored. And then the gang plays another prank, but you'll have to read the book to get the details on that. I don't have all day!

So there you have it, more or less. I mean, plenty of other shit happens (I know I haven't mentioned the character of Takumi at all in this summary. THAT WAS ON PURPOSE), and if anybody wants to have a specific discussion about one element or another LET'S DO, but I felt bad about never wrapping this series up and now I have. I mean part of me kind of thought it would be funny to leave it open-ended, like many of the book's unanswerable questions, but there's a level of meta-insufferability that even I'm not willing to cross. If you read this book, what did you think of it, overall?

Holy Shit, Day Three

Is it possible to disagree with an article on a sentence-by-sentence level? I may have reached the apotheosis of my contrarianism reading this article at Vulture. Also I've had a few drinks. Also, I'm kind of sick of this story already. I'm emotionally invested in nothing.

THE FALLOUT

I still think there is something to be said for the prudish morality of Twilight Culture--which is manifest in the books but below the surface in and around the movies--bringing pressure to bear on Kristen Stewart and causing her to fall on her sword early and probably often as this scandal (can we call it RUPSTEN?) rages. There's regular old giddy outrage around this, sure, and also garden -variety misogyny, but there's also an added betrayal of public trust thing, which is insane. Kristen Stewart isn't an elected official, but we're treating her like she is.

But there's one way in which this is not like a poltical sex scandal. When something like this happens to, say, Bill Clinton, journalists go deeper, looking for other shoes or stained dresses about to drop. But Hollywood has a seperate fourth estate, and instead of digging in, these guys prepare for liftoff; there are a dozen or so variations on the theory that All Of This Was Planned, so let's explore them! And let me say at the outset: I might actually believe some of this shit. I don't know! Most of the credit here goes to (this blog's new associate editor!) Kira, who emailed me at 12:30am last night with a half-interested, half-exasperated (the right approach, I think) breakdown of what The World was saying. The research and sources are hers, the attitude is mine. OK, so there are really only five possible interpretations for this whole thing:

1. THE SCANDAL IS FAKE BUT ROBSTEN IS REAL

Commenters at CDAN point out that Stewart went years without being caught in a liplock (because they were being guarded) with Pattinson but immediately got busted with Sanders (because they wanted to). There's also the nebulous fact that Twilight seems to be waning in popularity (unquantifiable given all the changes to the rules of the MTV Movie Awards--did they realize how much they were screwing over low culture academics with that shit?). Then there's the fact that Stewart and Pattinson's romance is pretty believable. Attractive people who spend a lot of time together generally end up fucking--it's Newton's third law of penis/vagina dynamics. This theory essentially posits, therefore, that Summit never NEEDED to fake Robsten, but were sort of aware that they could have. So once Stewart and Pattinson were more or less "out" as a couple (I know everybody is acting like this was the first anybody'd heard, but I felt like Cannes was their unofficial reveal) Summit decided to give the fans something else to chew on. Pattinson and Stewart went along with it, I guess because they don't give a fuck. And if Robsten is real, this is actually Summit's FIRST fake controversy (unless like, Rachel LeFevre's seperation from the series was amicable) the seams are showing a little. Liberty Moss supposedly initially claimed she was the woman in the photos and denied the affair, but references to that seem to have been scrubbed from articles like this one (And indeed various blogs are pointing out supposed abberations in (only a few of) the pictures, saying they've been shopped). The speed and grace of Stewart's apology even supports this theory, a little. But a couple of those sentences up there are pretty tenuous, right? So:

2. THE SCANDAL IS FAKE AND ROBSTEN IS FAKE

Kristen Stewart went years without being caught in a liplock with Robert Pattinson because they weren't locking lips! Robsten was, therefore, a construct created by Summit to sell movie tickets. This is a thing that movie studios MIGHT do all the time (many have referenced Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone--which I can mostly believe except for the palpable fucktension in every frame those two share in The Amazing Spider-Man. I literally thought they were going to tear each other's clothes off). It wouldn't even be that hard or complex, in the end. Tell your two stars to go out and get a cup off coffee together and allow themselves to be photographed. Then: stand back and do literally nothing for years while the Internet keeps the ball in the air for you. There's no need to see this as a long con, really--just a semistandard marketing technique that spiraled out of control. And so Summit, pleased with themselves for creating the greatest fake relationship of all time, decided to go big and weird with it. Like the sixth season of The Sopranos. And maybe there's no particular aim here, just random controversy. Or maybe it's a way to get Stewart and Pattinson out of their relationship at the same time they get out of their contracts. (And each one gets a nice little parting gift: a wounded, jilted romantic vibe for Pattinson, and a sexy fuck-minx vibe for Stewart--which she already had on this blog, if not at-large).

Flush with this theory is the rumor that Kristen Stewart is gay, or even asexual, as CDAN apparently claimed. It's a little troubling to think that Kristen Stewart, a young and enlightened person, would want to/allow herself to be closeted for marketing purposes. But maybe she thinks her sexuality is none of our business and she laughs all the way to the bank and then to bed (with Ashley Greene).

But if it is fake, why on earth would Rupert Sanders go along with it? Here's a little one-act play I just wrote:

A PHONE CALL BETWEEN RUPERT SANDERS AND SUMMIT CEO PATRICK WACHSBERGER

Pat: Hi Rupert? This is Pat Wachsberger
Rupert: Oh, hi!
Pat: First of all, before we begin I'm legally obligated to tell you that I, personally, am a wholly-owned subsidiary of Lionsgate Films.
Rupert: Um, OK.
Pat: So, we want to fake a sex scandal between you and Kristen Stewart.
Rupert: Huh. How and why?
Pat: I mean, maybe we'll just take some photos of you guys dryhumping in a parking lot, maybe we'll just shop Stewart's face over some pictures of you with your wife, maybe we'll make a sex tape. We haven't decided how far we want it to go. You in?
Rupert: Well, what would be the benefit?
Pat: Controversy sells, Rupes! People will freak out! And that means big box office come November.
Rupert: It does?
Pat: Yeah! Maybe!
Rupert: OK, well, I mean, why me?
Pat: You're ethnic. You're old. You were her director--
Rupert: Right, and it was my first movie. I can't imagine the starlet-fucking rumors will help me when I want to cast the next one.
Pat: You'd be surprised! Anyway, you were her director, AAAND you're married! Your wife played her mother! Gold! It's very dirty.
Rupert: Yes, my wife. I mean, how do you expect she'll feel about this?
Pat: Hadn't thought about that! But anyway, are you in?
Rupert: Of course not.
Pat: What if I offered you 0.000006% of the profits from Breaking Dawn part 2?
Rupert: Oh my god, that would be so much money! OK, I'll do it!

Pretty unlikely, right? So:

3. THE SCANDAL IS REAL AND ROBSTEN IS FAKE

Robsten is a construct created by Summit to sell movie tickets. So Stewart and Pattinson have been dating and fucking whomever they please for years while pretending to be an item, and Kristen Stewart made the unwise decision to fuck a married dude, Somebody's handler somewhere decided to dovetail this into the Robsten thing, issuing Stewart's apology with dispatch and aplomb (and indeed for some people the biggest takeaway from all of this was that it finally confirmed Robsten; maybe that was the desired effect), but other than that there's no master plan. That explains a lot of early confusion--Sanders's wife initially denying the scandal, as mentioned above. (She's since gone off the rails in a few different directions.) If this whole thing was a PR masterstroke, that frayed edge wouldn't be there. The speed and efficiency of Stewart's apology gave everybody pause--this is why. It was just some PR flack thinking on her feet.

This one is plausible, but utterly unproveable. So:

4. THE SCANDAL IS REAL AND ROBSTEN IS REAL

And then we're back where we started. This is a real scandal, which would seem like a normal Hollywood sex scandal were it not for the added weirdness value of Twilight fandom. Stewart's apology reflected real, raw guilt, or it reflected an awareness of her moralizing fanbase, or both. Maybe she meant to grovel or maybe she meant to self-destruct, a little bit. Maybe she wanted to piss everyone off. Maybe it was ordered. It sort of feels like it's all three, but how is that even possible?

5. THE SCANDAL IS SORT OF REAL AND ROBSTEN IS SORT OF REAL

The last and best variation on this is that Stewart and Pattinson have an open relationship--either by dint of being young and hot or by dint of being a couple of careerists--and maybe Rupert Sanders and Liberty Moss do too. The pictures were unstaged, but nobody was particularly romantically injured. Everybody apologized fast to keep up appearances and to keep DVD sales of Snow White and The Huntsman high in Oklahoma City, and then they went back to the orgy. Under this interpretation, both Stewart and Pattinson could be fucking Ashley Greene, which is why it feels right for this blog, and why everything about this has shiny, blurry edges, like a mirage.

So there you have it. Are these the five belief systems that Twi-fans will divide and destroy each other over? Or will some new revelation blindside us tomorrow? Various outlets are reporting that Robert Pattinson moved out of his apartment today. That changes nothing, of course, but also kind of changes everything.

THE APOLOGY

This blog never even really went full retard on the Robsten thing, because I couldn't really fit my head around it. Was it real? Was it marketing? Was it real and also marketing? How much of one and how much of the other? How aware of whatever hypothetical business arrangement that may or may not have birthed it were the gossip mags who covered it? And the fans? How does one even become a "fan" of a theoretically romance between two other fellow humans? It was easier to talk about cyberbullying and publishing and Ashley Greene's stutter step career maneuvers and other things that I could like, understand. 

And then sometime around the release of Breaking Dawn pt. 1, it became clear that they really were romantically involved. It was never official, but there were actual signals. We got them. And I shifted from avoiding even thinking about it (in the same way that I avoid thinking about calculus) to just deciding that they were both really cool and that was the end of it. Why isn't that  the only thing anyone knows about Robsten? "They're cool. End of story." No. Instead, it's a whole other thing. It's a celebrity romance above and beyond and below all others, amplified by all factors. The fans, the mystery, the money, etc. Which is why today was pretty weird.

Rumors spread fast this morning that US Weekly was publishing photos of Kristen Stewart kissing the director of Snow White & The Huntsman, Rupert Sanders (who is married, and 41, with children, and who cast said wife in SWATH as Kristen Stewart's mother. UNPACK THAT ONE). Before gossip sites even had time to push and pull with each other, legit news blogs were running with the story. It was up at 10:05am on The Atlantic Wire. 8:38am on Gawker. And by 3pm, Kristen Stewart had issued a public apology. WHAT?

I'm deeply sorry for the hurt and embarrassment I've caused to those close to me and everyone this has affected. This momentary indiscretion has jeopardized the most important thing in my life, the person I love and respect the most, Rob. I love him, I love him, I'm so sorry.

(Sanders issued an apology too, and it's so desperate as to be kind of appalling.) I love him, I love him, I'm so sorry. My advice to Kristen Stewart, in part, would have been: If you're going to apologize, don't word it in such a compelling, memorable way! Everybody in the world stopped for about five minutes to marvel at the directness of her statement. And then people started to wonder why it had to exist at all. Okay, not everybody did that. Some Twi-hards when into deep denial mode, cannibalizing each other in that familiar way:

(It's interesting to see that the bifurcated reality we've been dealing with for years in the political realm occurs so naturally and intuitively in the gossip realm. There's a chicken or egg thing going on. I hope Will McAvoy will touch on this in two years.) And others had the perspective to talk about who was REALLY hurt most by this. The children the fans:

But CLEAR-HEADED people wondered why the fuck a 22 year old had to apologize TO AMERICA for sleeping with a man who is not the man most people assumed she was normally fucking. How do we know what kind of lines Stewart and Pattinson have, if any? They are, as previously stated, cool, and modern, and young, and mobile as fuck.

But maybe they're not so modern. Maybe this was legit infidelity, and Stewart really wanted to get it out there. Or maybe Pattinson doesn't care and the apology was for the wife.* I don't know!

Why did it happen this way? Why does this feel more like a politician's sex scandal than a celebrity's? Twilight has always been symptom and cause of our culture's righteous attitude toward sex. Are Twilight actors really in a different cultural sphere than everyone else in Hollywood? Are we seeing the edges of the Meyer Bubble for the first time? I don't know. I'm dangerously close to where I was a few months ago, throwing up my hands rather than contemplate this shit. What do you think?

(*Or maybe, just maybe, none of them care, and Hollywood is a big sunny orgy, and they're fanning the flames to make stodgy, unfucked Twi-hards squirm and burst into tears on YouTube. That might be the way the Gossip Establishment is going to run with it. Normal media outlets are taking away their bread and butter, and when the going gets weird, the weird have to get even weirder.) 

Kristen Stewart's Tits For Finnick!

1. Yesterday I was at a movie theater watching The Amazing Spider-Man for the second time. As I admired the performances and chemistry of Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone, a thought occurred to me, one that shook me to my very core: Holy shit, maybe Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson ARE terrible actors! Because seriously, Garfield/Stone is Shakespeare the way it is meant to be marketed, y'all. BELIEVE THE HYPE. But the Cosmopolis trailer looks FUCKING GNARLY, so I'll keep the jury locked out for a while longer. Seriously reconsidering shit, though. 
2. As for the merit of Kristen Stewart's acting, we'll figure out whether there is any once we finish staring at her boobs. Here's Celebitchy, Jezebel, and Videogum all reporting on the fake tits story today with varying degrees of skepticism. Points to Celebitchy (newest addition to my Google Reader what upppp) for finding some sideboob-heavy comparison photos, but mostly I'd just like to point out that this blog was on this story SIX DAYS AGO, and I'm not even TRYING anymore. What gives? I except a little more dilligence from the mainstream media on the "Kristen Stewart's boobs" front. I can't wait for Aaron Sorkin to righteously correct this shit in the fourth season of The Newsroom.
3. And finally: it looks like Sam Clarifinakis, the Paul Brittain-looking motherfucker from Snow White And The Huntsman, is going to play Finnick in Catching Fire. BOOOOOOO! Who the fuck looked at that cast and thought "What we really need is another bland white guy"?!? Fuck this noise. I'm going to go stare into Jesse Williams's eyes until I calm down. 

Unexpected Follow-Up

Yes, that is correct: Esquire writer Tom Chiarella has apologized to me. I have won.

Do Kristen Stewart's Boobs Look Different To You?

 So the whole Twilight Gang is at Comic-Con for one last hurrah, and the party is JUST getting started over there. But LAist already has the hot rumor: did Kristen Stewart get a boob job? "The 22-year-old actress was photographed arriving at her hotel this morning and appeared a bit more well-endowed than usual," Lauren Lloyd writes. "We rubbed our eyes and offered a second glance, and the star definitely seems to be sporting a more voluptuous figure." Yeah, I'm sure you rubbed your "eyes." But seriously: did she? I'm colorblind when it comes to boobs, I don't even see their race at all. So I defer to your judgment. Via Instagram, here's some evidence.

If you'd like to contrast this with photos of Kristen Stewart's breasts throughout the years, please consult almost any other post on this blog. Elsewhere: Game Of Thrones Episode 6!

Esquire's Profile Of Ashley Greene Is Every Bit As Insane As We'd Hoped

The day has finally come: Esquire has finally written a profile about Ashley Greene. At least, I'm pretty sure that is who they are writing about.

"Well, I'm from Florida!" she declares. And, truth is, somehow the simple joyous force of this incongruous assertion makes us peas in a pod in that moment. She drops her anecdote, leans against the table, gets just a little closer, and I can smell her shampoo. She has her finger twirling the inside rail of her large hoop earring.

THE JOYOUS FORCE OF THIS INCONGRUOUS ASSERTION. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Remember my predictive Ashley Greene profile from August of last year? Rule #1: "Always begin in media res." Dig the first sentence:

She's telling a story with a punchline, building up to something.

NAILED IT. Rule #2: "Always focus way too much on a single gesture". I'll give myself half-points here, as Tom Chiarella (the master of bonkers profile writing) repeatedly talks about Ashley Greene's "fragile-looking" hands: the way she points around herself (I guess as if putting her comments in geographic context), the way she covers her mouth when she "barks out" a laugh, and then of course, the earring twirling from above. Rule #3: "Act like a dumb comment is really smart." Chiarella relates a portion of their conversation in which he tells her he is from Indiana and she seems to think Indiana is part of, or at least proximate to, Florida. He doesn't press her any further on this, but, as you can (sort of!) see above, interprets it as profound. OK, but now I really just want to sit Ashley Greene in front of blank map of the United States and see how she does filling them in.

Back in August I mandated that the profile then begin to describe the woman's physical form in leering detail. But as the recent profile of Mireille Enos indicates, Esquire's new jam is focusing intensely on a woman's hair. And indeed, Greene's hair "falls straight and true on the nape of her neck" in the very first paragraph. But Chiarella is just getting warmed up.

She touches the end of her hair, flicks the silky weight of it over her shoulder, and looks in like she's sharing a secret.

This is another one of those sentences that is probably hidden somewhere in every issue of Esquire, like the Superman logos in Seinfeld.

She smiles, eyes a little wet and dark. Then, without seeming to consider it, she pulls out her hair clip, runs her hand through that hair, and shakes her mane, so it seems to gain volume. There she is then: mussed up and still full of intention.

Profound implications based on the movement of hair—did Mireille Enos ghost write this? And then, the master stroke:

She laughs and a blush climbs from her chest upward along her neck to her cheeks and eyes, all the way into her hair.

Her fucking hair BLUSHED? You're right, Chiarella. This lady IS talented.

That dismount is especially amazo-galling when you read how, midway through, this piece dissolves into utter fucking madness. I can't even BEGIN to understand what is happening, Tom Chiarella is out on goddamned safari with this shit:

Nor is the petite sorority-girl Ashley Greene, who sits before me today, the least bit icy; she's just a girl with a Day-Timer pinched on the seat between her thigh and purse, a vessel of responsibility. In fact, she's so relaxed, so cat-stretched against the promise of two hours of conversation and a bowl of soup that you'd think she might have settled into a comfort zone about work. But in fact: "What Twilight gave me was years to consider how I wanted to work otherwise."

WHAT ON EARTH? I feel like I have barely scratched the surface here—I mean we haven't even gotten into Ashley Greene's sudden claim that she doesn't drink?—but just click here to read the whole, glorious thing. And also to watch a video in which Ashley Greene leads you around a house, presumably in search of a suitable surface to fuck on. Tip of the hat to StarryEyed_A, who linked me to this article this morning, and also obviously to the sociopaths at Esquire. Keep up the stellar work.

SKINS S2E5: Working Class Hero

So this is a kind of "careful what you wish for" thing, I guess: here we have an episode that almost exclusively focuses on Chris, and features Cassie more heavily than usual (I'm saying she's in it a lot, not that she's over her eating disorder issues. Whoa, sorry). Theoretically, this should be the best episode of Skins ever. And yet, it doesn't add up to much. (I had a similar reaction to Alice/Bella slash fiction. Why can I never be happy?!) However, it is a lot of fun to see Cassie playing essentially the role of the villain. EVIL CASSIE! When she says, "Well, fuck you" to Jal I was like YEAHHHHH.

What happens is, Chris gets kicked out of school for being too Chris-like. So Jal challenges him to be less Chris-like, and to actually "play the game" for once. In return she promises to say "yes" to more stuff, essentially agreeing to temporarily adopt Chris's depravity while he is on vacation from it. This Trading Places-y dynamic (or, Joey and Phoebe's meat bargain, if you will) could be kind of fun, but it is mostly underdeveloped. Jal has exactly one scene in which she throws caution to the wind (unless you count failing to use birth control, later on) and then her half of the story is basically dropped.

Meanwhile, Chris tries his luck in the private sector. Eventually, he finds a calling as a real estate agent, and he and Jal begin a romance.

Unfortunately Chris is living in one of the flats he is supposed to sell, and pretty soon a homeless Cassie is crashing and fucking there too. (The bit of this episode that rings the most hollow, to me, is the way Chris and Jal seem annoyed at Cassie interrupting their intimate moments and throwing parties without their consent. That's pretty much expected behavior from the Skins gang, is it not?) So it's only a matter of time before all that catches up to him. And when it does, so does Angie, briefly jeopardizing his relationship with Jal.

But "briefly" is the key word there, because as soon as everything goes wrong, things start going right again. A guilty Angie gives Chris a place to stay. He makes a low-rent power-point presentation to Jal to win her back and goes to find another job. Everything is coming up Chris! Oh, Jal is pregnant, but I'm sure that won't be a big deal or anything.