Fox Run

Nas, rapper and husband of my hair crush Kelis, has taken the intuitive and spoke out against Fox News. Nas led a petition orchestrated by the Color of Change organization demanding that that Fox News stop racist smears.

Fox News is owned by evil Australian and friend of Bush, Rupert Murdoch. Its home to blonde bobble head anchors, Bill O’Reilly, and my favorite, Sean Hannity (I scored two free lattes off the guy in a book store in Long Island. Thanks, Sean!). Murdoch owns the News Corporation, the largest media conglomerate in. the. world. Meaning, Murdoch owns almost all media and probably me.

So what racist smears you ask? Fox News referred to Michelle Obama, a lawyer and former dean of the University of Chicago, as Obama’s “Baby Mama.” Fox News contributor Liz Trotta referred to Barak Obama as “Osama” and stated that they should both be killed. Michelle and Barak pounded fists after Barak won the Democratic nomination; Fox News referred to the pound as a “terrorist fist bump.” I realize that the white anchors of Fox News don’t understand much outside of Starbucks and Dancing with the Stars, but just because you don’t understand something, that doesn’t mean it’s an act of terrorism.

Like a preteen girl, Fox news is just jealous that both Michelle and Barak Obama are intelligent, charming, and cool. I’d like to laugh the news station off in a Stephen Colbert-esq manner (after all, Stephen did model is caricature after “Papa Bear” O’Reilly) but Fox News is the most watched news in America.

Nas dedicated a whole song to the fake news channel called Sly Fox.

Tall, Dark, and Handsome: "The Dark Knight" Reviewed

You'll always be Theodore "Laurie" Lawrence to me, Christian Bale.

On Thursday night I fastened my LBC (Little Black Cape) and flew to the midnight showing of “The Dark Knight” with my father. Surrounded by brahs and sci-fi geeks alike and feeling rather claustrophobic and agoraphobic, , I settled into my seat at the Rave Multiplex to watch one of the best films—that was supposed to be The Best Film—I’ve seen.

Aside from stellar performances, the best aspect of the latest Batman installment is that it did not present itself as an superhero movie. Sure, Batman (a smokin’ Christian Bale) flies and wears a cape, but he strays from being a hero. Batman, or Bruce Wayne, is not appointed by any government (although he is anointed by Lt. Gordon, the police commissioner); he is essentially a vigilante, albeit a good one, taking the law into his own sexy hands. Citizens of Gotham either love him or hate him and as viewers want to love him, but should we?

Batman, the sort-of hero, wants to take down a different kind of vigilante, The Joker. Everything you’ve heard about Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker is true. The dearly departed actor, Australian, hunk, father, and Brooklyn resident is nothing short of mesmerizing. I expected as much (see Brokeback Mountain. Really, see it!), but I did not anticipate sympathizing with some reasoning behind the Joker’s crazy. After much terrorizing of Gotham, the Joker, wearing a wig and a nurses’ uniform (yeah, it’s weird) explains why he does what he does. Gotham, like many nations, is a corrupt city from the top (see Sudanese president). There are some good forces at work, but there is substantial distrust in and for the government, leaving the citizens of Gotham not knowing who to trust. The Joker gets it; stating that only anarchy can suffice. In all of his sadistic glory, the Joker also asks the very topical question: whose life is worth more than whose? Does he kill a gang-banger or blow up a bus of schoolchildren? Guess who the citizens of Gotham would choose to die.

While the Joker is clearly psychotic, his response to the Gotham government provoke human rights questions of today. In a world where American-Knows-Best, whose life is more important: an Iraqi or an American (see coverage of decade old murder of JonBenet Ramsey v. lack of coverage of nearly 1 million dead Iraqi civilians)? Guess who the citizens of the U.S. would choose.

No matter how heart-pumping the explosives and high speed chases are, this action-hero movie is only as good as its acting. And it’s good. Christian Bale, almost eclipsed by that face looking “as if it had been carved with a chisel” as The New York Times film reviewer Manohla Dargis so rightly states, is excellent as playboy making good Bruce Wayne. Batman is aided by his superb friends, Alfred (Michael Caine), Lt. Gordon (Gary Oldman), and Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman). Aaron Eckhart perfectly embodies Harvey Dent, the politician you want to trust. Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, who took over the role from Katie Holmes, presumably too busy with Xenu to be involved in the second film) is charming, if not the stereotypical woman in a superhero movie; her biggest dilemma is figuring out who she’s crushing on more, Bruce Wayne or Harvey Dent. And, well, I’m no Roger Ebert, but Ledger’s portrayal of the menacing and maybe misunderstood Joker is Oscar-worthy.

As Heath Ledger proves to be more than a pretty face, The Dark Knight is more than a superhero movie. The film moves past the Good v. Evil theme of superheroes to ask who is good? Who is evil? And who is to decide?

Do yourself a favor and see this movie. I'll be watching the 2009 Academy Awards (probably drunk), hoping that Heath Ledger receives a much, much, much deserved posthumous Oscar.

Bush Tours America to Survey the Damage Caused by his Presidency

couldn't have said it better myself

Victoria's Secret is an abomination and should be stopped. Thank you Slate's XX Factor for calling bullshit.

"The Advertising You Can't Live Without. Period."

The latest development in Victoria Secret's inspiring e-mail solicitation campaign comes in the form of a subject line: "The Bras You Can't Live Without. Period." My sister forwarded it to me with the accompanying note: "After reflecting on this subject line, I understand now why some portend that feminism is dead."
I'm struck by how resoundingly the death toll sounds, illustrated by the boldness of these lame advertising campaigns.

It's the "Period" addendum that gives the tagline its je ne sais quoi. Not that I am surprised, coming as it does from the same company that brought us such inventive names for their different bra lines as "Very Sexy". If the lingerie-seller's home page is any indication, in the world of VS, young college-bound girls hop off to campus wearing thigh-high rugby socks, a pair of underwear, a belly shirt ... and a cute pink hoodie. You know, because it is autumn after all, and it gets cold. So while your exposed buttocks and navel chill in the fall wind, you can be sure that you're covered from head to midstomach-ish; from toe to lower thigh. A VS girl is sexy and sensible, it seems.

I really wonder about Victoria Secret's vaguely dire world view. Take for example another VS subject line from February: "What is Sexy? TM ... New! Very Sexy ® Low-cut Push-up." Oh! I had been wondering what sexy was ... I thought it had something to do with confidence or being healthy. Thank you for clearing up my confusion. Question: What is sexy? Answer: You Spending Money on This Bra.TM

If they are going to shamelessly push their wares upon my person, I'd appreciate a little more creativity. Where are the days of subversive advertising? Is it me, or is Victoria's Secret doing a really sloppy job when it comes to fooling me into thinking a $40 bra will turn me into an impossibly hot Brazilian, accent not included?


Published Thursday, July 17, 2008 3:38 PM by Amaka Maduka

Brought to you by the number 4

All the news that's fit to print

Sunday Morning is a time for God (or it is my favorite Velvet Underground song?). But while some of my fellow Americans are dressing in their Sunday Best and preparing marshmallow Jell-O salad for the church buffet, I am engaging in a much more secular Sunday tradition: coffee and the Sunday New York Times.

I think you can judge a lot by a person by the section of the Sunday Times they read first. Whether it is the Business (soulless), Travel (pretentious), Sports (stupid), Week in Review (thoughtful), the Magazine (interesting…and probably selfish. We all want to read the Magazine first!) or Styles (illiterate), the section you choose first says a lot about you. Naturally, this causes me much anxiety. If I am in a public setting, such as a coffee shop or a park, I choose the Week in Review first to show my fellow patrons that I do care about gas prices and Darfur and stuff. If I am in the privacy of my own home or with close, personal friends that already know I am slightly shallow and illiterate, I read my Sunday Styles first.

Oh, as I page through some irrelevant headline story about the secret life of socialites and through the 3 millionth Ralph Lauren ad, it is just like Christmas Morning. I peer to see who’s profiled on “Night Out With” (oooh, the indie artist, Santogold, I love her too!) and mutter “MmHmmm, yep” at the advice written by Phillip Galanes in “Social Q’s,” realizing that he might be my middle-aged, gay soul mate.

But, as embarrassing as this is to confess, my oh-so-very favorite bit of the Styles is the Wedding Announcements. As Carrie Bradshaw once said, The Times Wedding Announcements is “straight woman’s sports pages.” These stale, bleach-white announcements should have been left in Eisenhower’s time, but god, do I love them. The supercilious wedding announcements breathe some aristocracy into a world gone Wal-Mart.

Coincidently, after years of reading the announcements, I could write a case study. Mrs. Hamiliton, 25, was until recently a curator at the Guggenheim Museum. (Read: she quit her job to plan her wedding!) Her husband, Mr. Hamilton, 27, is a hedge fund manager at Goldman Sachs. Her father is the vice president of Citigroup and her mother is a trustee of the MET. Mr. or Mrs. Hamilton might be related to an obscure president, like Millard Fillmore, or railroad tycoon, in which case they’d get prime real estate on the front page. An Asian woman, who’s keeping her name, married a Jewish man at the Rainbow Room. They’re in their early thirties, met at Columbia med school, and now live in San Francisco. Once and awhile you’ll get your really good-looking alterna-couple. She’s older than him, keeping her name, and works at a non-profit. He’s a graphic artist and they live in Colorado. Every week, you’ve got your token Indian doctors, Distinguished Black Couple, and elderly newlyweds (she’s divorced, he’s a widower), so the reader knows The New York Times isn’t racist or ageist, or just obsessed with WASPs.

A few burning questions after following the nuptials of the elite for many years: how are these people so blond? How uninteresting is Harvard grad no. 876? Do the announcements without pictures mean the bride and bridegroom is really ugly? And perhaps the most easily answered: how many of these marriages end in divorce? About half.

My mother likes the Catholic Church because of the Pomp and Circumstance; I like the Sunday Times, the wedding announcements in particular, for the same reason. She had me look at the wedding announcements in the local paper for a slice of “real life” which I liken to making her attend a silent Quaker mass in a clapboard chapel. Mrs. So and So, 18, is a manager at the Dress Barn? Mr. So and So, 21, attends community college? Ick.

I’ll stick with my Wedding Announcements (which the ever so politically correct NYT has renamed “Celebrations” to include the gays). After I’ve breezed past the latest It-Bag profiled in Styles, I’ll move on to the Week in Review, Arts & Leisure, Travel (if I’m feeling crazy), and finally, saving the best for last, the magazine. They say that newspaper readers are a dying breed. But I’ll be the last one, because there is nothing quite like newsprint stained thumbs, good coffee, and an easy Sunday morning.

George Bush would like us to believe there are only two kinds of Americans: god-fearing Christians and latte drinking liberals. And as I sprinkle some cinnamon on my latte and gingerly unfold the Sunday Times, I’m okay with that (as long as everyone votes for Obama in November!).

Who Wears Short Shorts?

When I run, I wear shorts. Short shorts. My thighs rub together, but the shorts are comfortable I can move in them—essential when one is running. I admit I run so maybe my thighs will rub together a little less, but mostly I run to get away from it all. In the muggy, green nature preserve which I run, I can forget it all; what I’m doing with myself and what I’m not doing with myself, what I look like and what I should look like. I can just think, dream, and breathe.

Could I run in a skirt? No way. And this from the girl who got involved tennis for the skirts. So, when I read an article called “The Rise of Skirt Culture” in Runner’s World magazine, all I could do was sigh.

Women have long been forced to wear skirts in sporting events. At the turn of the century, female athletes wore long, cumbersome skirts in every sporting event. As the hemlines began to rise in fashion in the sixties, they did in sports as well. After Title IX, high school athletes still wore kilts in lacrosse and field hockey and skirts and dresses in tennis, although some of that is changing.

The one sport that has avoided skirts is running. In the fifties and sixties, women runners wore skirts because they had to; they also weren’t permitted to run in road races. In 1973, Katherine Switzer illegally entered the Boston Marathon, being the first woman to enter the all-male race. Subsequently, she did so in a skirt.

In the seventies, running swept across the country. Everyone from hippies to New-Agers, to yuppie businessmen engaged in the running lifestyle. Steve Prefontaine set the mile record and made the University of Oregon the running bastion it remains today. Women, including my pregnant mother, began running in droves, in shorts. Women wore shorts because they were most comfortable and practical. Perhaps also, in the wake of the feminist movement, women were fighting to be taken seriously and to breakdown the gender roles society forced men and women to play by.

The “skirt culture” of running bothers me most because it is gendering an activity and a sport that does not need to be gendered. Just as girls are gendered to play with dolls and boys play with trucks, women who run feel they need to be feminine and pretty when they run. Writer Kristen Armstrong says about a friend, who designed and popularized the running skirt, “Her motivation has never been just to look pretty, but to look pretty while kicking butt.”

Women like to look pretty. We like to look pretty partly because we are told we need to be attractive to get a man, get a job, a raise, to be successful. When I run, it is one of the only times I don’t worry about being pretty or feminine; it a release of the everyday pressures of life and of beauty. I am sweaty, puffing and panting, with mud splashes on my shins and dirty hair. Even when I pass someone, a fellow runner, I don’t worry about what I look or what she looks like. You nod and smile; saying “isn’t this hellish/great/exhausting/euphoric.”

Armstrong continues, “…some people aren’t thrilled with the idea. They seem to think that women who run in skirts aren’t serious athletes…The same people probably insist that women need to be in pantsuits to be taken seriously in the workplace. But I believe that a woman in even more powerful when she feels pretty. Besides…it’s nice to have clothing that reflects our multitasking lives; it performs on the track and looks presentable when you roll directly into the supermarket or elementary school.”

Sigh. Venus Williams won Wimbledon this month in a skirt. Last year, after she campaigned (and won) equal prize money for women at the stuffy all-boys club of Wimbledon, she won Wimbledon and equal prize money. In shorts. Like Venus, women in modern society have the choice to wear skirts, shorts, or pants (or skorts! Or Gaucho pants!) in athletics, in the boardroom, classroom, or shopping. Call it a success of feminism.

I reject Armstrong’s assertion that a woman is more powerful when she feels pretty. When Hillary Clinton was at the Iowa caucus, I bet she ironed her pantsuit and put on some lipstick, but I believe that she cared to talk more about health care than who does her hair. Clinton was, in fact, criticized for her pantsuits; called “mannish” by Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Clinton said she favored pantsuits so that photographers could not snap pictures up her skirt. Call it a success of our patriarchal culture.

I’ll continue to run in shorts. I’ll continue to play tennis in a skirt. I’ll continue to wear pants or skirts in my every day life. I love that I have the choice to do what I want. But when I run, my legs pound on the dirt and I am strong. And that is pretty, pretty powerful.

Summer reading list, here I come

This seems meaningful and tasteful. I don't think he' rolling over in his grave due to this film. It's probably due to acid running through his spine.

America, Fuck Yeah.

"This summer when you're being inundated with all this American bicentennial Fourth Of July brouhaha, don't forget what you're celebrating, and that's the fact that a bunch of slave-owning, aristocratic, white males didn't want to pay their taxes."
-dazed & confused

Just A Girl

Emily’s latest obsessions with Robyn and Paula Cole (was that not public knowledge?) got me thinking about the pop “girl music” of my childhood and the music available today for a 9-year-old girl. As someone too young to attend the Lilith Fair or to really know what Alanis meant when she sang “would she go down on you in the theater?” I can still remember very different women making music in the mid to late 1990s. Then, mainstream female artists were keeping up with the boys (Alanis and Gwen Stefani) and carving out new music venues that were distinctly female (Sarah McLauchan and the Lilith Fair) Now, female artists are fifteen (or made to look like 15-year-olds), represented as hypersexualized parodies in 30 second snippets on MTV and mp3s.

I was an 8-year-old in 1995 when Alanis Morissette debuted Jagged Little Pill. At the time, I was becoming interestingly more interested in music, television, and fashion; I adored loose trousers and clogs and my friend Kate and I would dress up in the likes of Gwen Stefani and listen to Tragic Kingdom repeatedly, which I owned on cassette. After ordering Jagged Little Pill from my brother’s BMG music order, I loved Alanis too. She had a powerful voice and real lyrics (she said fuck!). I didn’t know what my idols like Alanis and Jewel were talking about; all I knew is that these women were absolutely kick-ass and I wanted to be kick-ass too.

Fast forward to 2005: I graduated from high school and Gwen Stefani went from Just A Girl to a Hollaback Girl. Maybe it’s the same message Gwen was singing in ’95 as SoCal ska darling, but now as a solo artist and 20lbs lighter. And in yesteryear, when Jewel sang “You always tell me that is impossible to be respected and be a girl” might she have known that her predecessors would be singing, “What you gon' do with all that junk?All that junk inside your trunk? I'ma get, get, get, get, you drunk, Get you love drunk off my hump.”

In 1996, Paula Cole asked “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone.” Within a decade, I ask, where have all the legitimate female artists gone? These women did not disappear due to lack of interest; Jagged Little Pill went platinum sixteen times in the U.S. and sold over 30 million copies worldwide. The Lilith Fair filled huge venues with over 60 acts for three years straight and made Sarah McLachlan, Natalie Merchant, and Paula Cole into household names. No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom sold over 16 million copies worldwide. But while we ushered in the new millennium, we traded “Ironic” for “Hit Me Baby One More Time.”

Under the Bush Administration, the government harkened back to the Reagan Era’s “family values.” Apparently Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Mandy Moore, and Jessica Simpson, mainstream’s new girl music, jived well with the conservative agenda. What’s more threatening, real women singing “So take me as I am, this may mean you'll have to be a stronger man” (thanks, Meredith Brooks) or plastic ingénues singing “I’m a genie in a bottle”? I do not envy 8-year-olds today; the pressure to be pretty! blonde! skinny! has gone up tenfold since I was 8, listening to Jewel. Just ask Jewel herself!

There are, of course, very talented female artists today like Cat Power, Regina Spektor, and Leslie Feist, who have all been moderately successful in the mainstream. Still, even Feist, who has made the biggest mainstream headway hasn’t reached Jagged Little Pill epic proportions. I would guess it has something to do with indie v. mainstream; showing tits v. not.

With the exception of Gwen Stefani, who traded ska for cheap pop and okay, freakin’ fierce fashion, only Sheryl Crow remains from the Lilith days, staying in the game by being skinny, dating Lance Armstrong, and selling “If It Makes You Happy” to a car commercial. Sarah McLachlan made a Christmas album and both a video and commercial that make me cry. The rest of the Lilith Fair crew, who not only performed but promoted non-profits like Planned Parenthood, Amnesty International, and The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence with the Fair, have all but disappeared, leaving people like me to idolize the 90’s.

The lack of real female musicians is, perhaps, just a part of a bigger problem in the music industry; a problem that qualifies Fall Out Boy as punk, Nelly as rap, and Fergie as every girl’s role model. “Girl music” was once on the cutting edge of pop music. Now, the most an aspiring singer-songwriter can hope for is for her hit to appear in an episode of Grey’s Anatomy.

doche of the day

waiting to see how many frat boys wear this.
they are also available in children's sizes, so your child could wear it too.