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Turn the corner in any major American city of late, and you're bound to bump into a man sporting a curiously un-summery combo of greasy, shoulder-length hair and a full, bushy beard. No, this hirsute fellow is not destitute, and he is not going to rob you or abduct your child; if you look closely, he's actually meticulously dressed and is probably on his way to his job as a professional mixologist, molecular gastronomist, or furniture designer. His look, inspired in equal parts by The Royal Tenenbaums, nineties grunge, seventies rock, and the New Testament, has become almost comically ubiquitous. But recently I was shocked to find him in the one place I thought he'd never show up: the J.Crew catalog.
It's no secret that J.Crew has been working to change its image. J.Crew President and Creative Director Jenna Lyons has breathed new life and daring into a company that made its name marketing boring basics as preppy classics. That marketing was largely done through the J.Crew catalog, which, season after season, created a sunny and comforting world of fresh-faced American beauties frolicking in iconic New England settings, often aboard boats.
The current catalog is set in an empty, industrial loft, but most of the models are generally still of the typical J.Crew mold: relatively clean-cut and boyishly good-looking. They wear warm, quirky expressions, smiling shyly into the camera or looking adorably befuddled. They layer jean jackets underneath Barbour jackets, pair ties with cardigans, and topsiders with suits. The message is new, but not that new. The models seem to be saying: I know the clothes are suddenly more expensive and I'm a little scruffier than I used to be, but this is still J.Crew: Check out my bluchers! Indeed, these might be the very same models, from catalogs of yore, who once proudly stood at the helms of sailboats wearing ribbon belts, salmon colored polos, and cargo shorts.
But in their midst is an interloper, a long-haired, long-bearded, sallow-skinned hipster who looks like he'd kill himself before putting on a pair of lobster- festooned khakis. There he is on Page 11, discordant in a slim cut gray Italian wool suit and skinny gray tie, staring longingly out the window at the non-J.Crew world where he belongs. There he is again on Page 20, wearing the same bored expression and limp posture but slightly more at home in a fisherman-style toggle cardigan, chambray shirt, and a pair of rolled gray chinos. Is his hair thinning, or is that just the lank way it falls against his scalp? Is it the light, or does he seem a bit sickly around the eyes? Is he not getting paid enough to look as if he wants to be there? J.Crew is certainly getting cooler, but what is this unkempt downer doing in its still peppy, optimistic, and well-groomed world?
A bit of digging reveals the identity of this sullen tramp: He's Will Lewis, who recently walked the runway in Paris for John Paul Gaultier and starred last year in a Diesel jeans ad campaign, appearing mostly without any jeans on. In an interview on the blog of fashion PR man Marcelo Burlon, Lewis reinforces the notion that long hair and a big beard do not necessarily a dirty slacker make. "I'm big on hygiene," he says. "I do modeling most of the time but ... I also do computer and internet technology consulting and set up." A computer nerd who's also a model? It sounds a bit like a hippie who likes to wear J.Crew.
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Buckling to the pressure of incessant media requests, Conan finally unveils the name of his new show.
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There have been rumblings of trouble at American Apparel for quite a while now, and so far the vertically-integrated hipster retailer has defied expectations, weathering the storm. But with its stock dipping lower than a shiny Maillot-V, it may actually soon be forced to close its doors, according to Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Bloggers have taken this opportunity to poke fun at American Apparel's most ridiculous offerings—the spandex monokini, the assless tights. Slate's own Lauren Bans wondered about the fate of the gold-lamé legging in a post-Apparelyptic world. How, indeed, would one go about procuring golden gams should the retailer go out of business?
If you're looking for gold lamé leggings, you can stock up at Halloween—fall fashion starts at Costume Craze this year. Or at Amiclubwear, where the leggings come helpfully pre-slashed and paired with a matching halter, for that goddess-scraped-a-few boulders-on-her-tumble-from-Olympus-and-into-a-70s-rollerdisco look that I'm sure you've heard about from all your most fashionable friends. And they're a bargain at $9.99, even accounting for the missing fabric.
Or you might want to take this opportunity to reconsider your choice of legging fabric. Lamé is a type of brocade, the formal fabric of kings and queens from Henry VIII to RuPaul. Regal, yes, but perhaps not suited for everyday wear; Wikipedia, a reliable source of fashion advice, notes that "an issue with lamé is that it is subject to seam or yarn slippage, making it less than ideal for garments with frequent usage." There are plenty of auriferous alternatives. For gold polyester leggings, try Victoria's Secret, which has a cloud-print pair, gold-leaf on black, or Target (only $12.99!), or Viktor Viktoria. If you're not married to gold—and isn't platinum the matrimonial metal of choice these days, anyhow?—you may want to let your eye wander to Viktor Viktoria's purple sequin zebra print.
And if, forced from the American Apparel teat, you choose to invest in leggings that will withstand the test of time, there are higher-end options: Balenciaga famously made a $100,000 mirrored pair, donned by Beyonce at the 2007 BET awards. (Exact material inderminate, but presumably there was some fool's gold spun in somewhere during the process.) For a more sensible purchase, go with the $1,020 intarsia-ed silk and wool Alexander McQueens.
So with or without American Apparel, leggings devotees can shine on. Acolytes of the gold lamé bodysuit, however, may be on their own.
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Not long ago, following a breakfast of black coffee and All-Bran and a call to his dentist's assistant, Copy-Editing the Culture left his modest apartment dressed in his late-summer best and strolled to a nearby bus stop for a coach across town. It was a hot day, and the bus was late by several minutes, but a gentle morning breeze was up, and as Copy-Editing the Culture settled into some light reading (The Chicago Manual of Style: 16th Edition), he allowed himself a small frisson of bliss. The joy did not last. Barely had your grammar-loving correspondent made it to Section 5.51, "Demonstrative pronouns defined," when, glancing up from the cream-colored page to relish a particularly ravishing line ("The antecedent of a demonstrative pronoun can be a noun, phrase, clause, sentence, or implied thought, as long as the antecedent is clear"), he found his gaze turned toward a poster advertising a new movie: Eat Pray Love—a big-screen version, starring Julia Roberts, of the best-selling book Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert.
One often hears that movies based on books are disappointments; something gets lost in the journey from the page to the screen. In this case, evidently, what got lost was punctuation. Where did it go? Eat Pray Love is not a title. It's a random and nonsensical jumble of words. It is a score card in the most boring game of Scrabble imaginable. Gilbert's punctuated title made a kind of grammatical sense, directing a forceful, three-verb command at the narrator (and, perhaps, the reader, too). Eat Pray Love makes sense only as something that an aphasiac might scream at the walls.
This latest crime against the English language was especially unwelcome, because you, Copy-Editing the Culture's eagle-eyed and well-spoken readers, have lately been bringing to his attention so many similar abuses that an Elizabeth Gilbert-style escape tour sometimes seems the only recourse. Reader Justin Babcock laments the gross indecency of an Apple ad for "the funnest iPod ever" (possibly the "hideousest" phrase Copy-Editing the Culture has ever encountered). Another reader, Teddy Murray, describes his horror at "Live Solid. Bank Solid," the slogan for Suntrust Bank. "Will they allow me to put any solid in the bank?" he asks. Good question, Teddy—one hopes prudent investors won't linger to find out.
This crisis hasn't concerned only the written word. Reader RoseEllen Pederson describes her disgust with a "popular song that has been overwhelming radio waves as of late": "Cooler Than Me" by Mike Posner. (A more discerning vocalist, Copy-Editing the Culture needn't tell you, would sing "Cooler Than I.") Powerful minds have lately gotten caught up in tracking every (frequent) misuse of lay and lie on the popular AMC drama Mad Men. And in a particularly ghastly display making the rounds, the BBC broadcast a notice in the queen's tongue but without her majesty's punctuation. The results, it's no surprise, were dangly.
Still, Copy-Editing the Culture retains a small amount of optimism for this planet's future. Following this column's previous rant on the perverse title Grown Ups, reader Natalya Minkovsky photographed an act of divine subterfuge at one enlightened cinema in Bethesda, Md.:
Hope remains.
Spot a grammar clunker in the cultural limelight? Send it to copyeditingtheculture@gmail.com.
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Kanye West's "Gold Digger," gets transformed by the National Jewish Outreach Program just in time for Rosh Hashanah.
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Helen Vendler is the most estimable scholar of poetry alive in America—her reputation so well-established that the bio on the jacket of her forthcoming book, Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries, reads simply: "Helen Vendler is A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University"—no droning on about her long bibliography, her studies of Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, John Keats, W.B. Yeats, William Shakespeare. It's the academic equivalent of Barack Obama calling himself an expert in constitutional law.
I have little doubt that Dickinson is as rigorous and insightful as Vendler's other works, but judging from the cover, it's a piece of trash fit for the bargain bin. The picture at left does not do its ugliness justice. It doesn't adequately capture its glossy sheen or its mauve tone. At first it was unclear to me what the photograph was even depicting—a leather jacket abandoned in the woods? It's the sort of thing a designer might choose for a thriller about a sexually perverse kidnapper. Maybe it's a clue! The jacket must have fingerprints! But, no, the inside flap identifies the cover art as "Part of plant against silk," a 1959 photograph shot by Elspeth Ross. Still channels pervert kidnapper, I think.
Typically, academic publishers go for rather bland art—a picture of a poet looking moody against a dark background, say. Obviously the Dickinson designer wanted to avoid this familiar trope, but if there's a more discordant cover out there, I haven't seen it. Maybe bland is good.
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The September issue is uniquely special to the annual cycle of a monthly magazine. It is an occasion for the debut of new visions and fresh makeovers, and it is a critical month for the tallying of ad pages: "the best single-issue gauge of the media marketplace." It is as fine a time as any, then, to turn our attention to Cat Fancy. Its September book—76 pages of perfect-bound felinography—is now on animal-clinic end tables everywhere, a dignified British shorthair on its front. (An identical-looking cat—very possibly the same busy model—graces an ad for Arm & Hammer Double Duty clumping litter on page 3.) Another two British shorthairs grace the centerfold, serene and stately in a cuddly-wuddly way, as befits the breed that inspired the grin of the Cheshire Cat.
It seems necessary to say that Cat Fancy is for real. The title is so often invoked as a joke that its factual existence may surprise some humans who do not especially fancy cats. "The world's most widely read cat magazine" has a circulation of approximately 250,000. I detect a small seismic activity created by those of you leaping to assume that the typical Cat Fancy reader is a batty old lady sitting alone in a musty living room. This assumption strikes me as ageist, sexist, and not totally inaccurate.
That said, the issue here in my hands is a tribute to the great diversity of cat fanciers. The hed and dek of the "Life's Purrfect" column only begin to address the variety of our sensibilities: "Kitten vs. Cat: Would you rather have cute and chaotic or older and refined?" The article itself is a first-person essay about the joys and responsibilities of companionship, sweet and uncomplicated. Regrettably, it sits opposite a regular humor column bearing the orange visage and dread byline of Garfield, miraculously even less impressive here on his "Garfield Weighs In" page than in the comics.
Flipping back from this spread, we discover a service-y package on senior cats, a "Breed Snapshot" of the cymric, and a profile of an American bobtail who makes his home on a schooner ("Within a few minutes of the crew's retiring, the clattering of the cat door can be heard as Gussie makes her way down the ladder and into the Captain's bunk"). Turning ahead, we find a report on adoption campaigns, a behaviorist's advice column, and a list of "45 tips for a cat-safe home." Despite its many genuinely helpful reminders—"36. Dental floss is dangerous if ingested...."—this list also exists as an excuse for an inset photo of a mackerel tabby spreading its jaws for a forbidden hot dog.
All told, there are approximately 70 editorial photographs of 55 separate cats in the issue. My count is merely approximate because my powers of attention were frequently dismantled by the cats' cuteness. Though none of these cats is quite so cute as my own—save perhaps the little fella climbing out of a cardboard box on page 36—they are notably less aloof. An old Salon piece by David Futrelle likens the cats in Cat Fancy to the models in Playboy: "Like the Playboy bunnies, they offer themselves up to the viewer without hesitation." In life, cats have a tendency to be rather catty. Cat Fancy wishes away this fact. A magazine for people who love cats, it succeeds by allowing readers to believe that their love is perfectly reciprocated.
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Sometimes they're too busy. Sometimes they're absent-minded. Sometimes they just don't require the same caloric intake as mortal men. They are the profile subjects who don't eat.
James Franco, WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, and Seattle Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll have all been described in recent magazine features as big-time meal skippers. But those guys better move over—it's time to make room at the nondinner table for another chronic food avoider.
In this weekend's New York Times Magazine profile of Democratic congressman Joe Sestak, writer Michael Sokolove tells a classic tale of gustatory self-denial. After a long day of campaigning, the journalist and the politician make a stop at a Western Pennsylvania fair. Sokolove writes:
At this point, we had been going for 10 hours without stopping for food or water. (We did finally get a bathroom break at a gas station.) It turned out that Sestak doesn't believe in eating during the day; he says it slows him down. He figured he was still operating on the entire medium pizza he had "slammed down," as he put it, after midnight the previous night in his motel.
I had done no such thing, so as we walked through the county fair, I broke off momentarily and bought a plate of pirogi, or Polish dumplings, from a booth. They looked good, and I sort of had in mind that I might share them with Sestak, who is of Eastern European descent. And the pirogi did, in fact, get his attention. He looked at my platter and commented, "Those are going to make you sleepy, you know."
In this case, as in profiles of McChrystal and Carroll, the subject's minimal food and water intake is designed to make him look superhuman—pirogi are for the weak. The twist on the genre, however, is Sestak's slammed-down medium pizza, eaten in the dead of night. This detail makes you wonder about Franco and his ilk: Could it be that they're all gobbling down pizzas on the sly?
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American World Cup fans—the ones who like soccer, and not just the vuvuzelas and the clairvoyant cephalopods—have had a rough go of it since the tournament ended last month. The New York Red Bulls' signing of past-his-prime French superstar Thierry Henry injected a bit of excitement into Major League Soccer by giving the league a second global celebrity—albeit one who can ride the train to work anonymously. Otherwise, it's been a slow month for MLS. Despite hopes of a World Cup bounce, the league's TV ratings are down significantly from last season.
The lack of interest in televised MLS games does not, however, indicate that soccer will languish forever as a quadrennial pastime in the United States. I'd argue that the stateside popularity of the English Premier League is a better gauge of American soccer fandom. The EPL, home to iconic teams like Liverpool and Manchester United and celebrated players like Wayne Rooney and Didier Drogba, is the best soccer product available to American consumers. Most EPL games are now televised by the Fox Soccer Channel and ESPN2. Unlike MLS games, these telecasts have seen a sizable World Cup bump.
According to the Nielsen Company, overall household ratings for last weekend's EPL season kickoff were up 55 percent over last year's opening weekend. This year's debut game on ESPN2—a 0-0 draw between Manchester City and Tottenham Hotspur—drew 293,000 viewers, nearly doubling the audience from last year's season opener. Monday's game between Manchester United and Newcastle United was one of the most-watched Premier League games ever in the United States, pulling in 412,000 viewers despite its mid-afternoon weekday start time. Meanwhile, a primetime MLS showcase between Henry's Red Bulls and the David Beckham-less Los Angeles Galaxy drew lower ratings than four morning and mid-day English games.
On the plus side for MLS, average attendance is up to the point that it's surpassed that of the NBA and NHL. The television product, however, is getting worse ratings than the WNBA—a fact I think is directly attributable to MLS's obvious inferiority to both the international game and the corresponding leagues in Europe. While I'd happily soak in the atmosphere of an MLS game, I wouldn't spend an evening watching one on television when I could just as easily watch Arsenal and Liverpool. The Premier League, though, is the perfect gateway drug. The more people are exposed to the EPL, the more they'll like soccer. The more they like soccer, the more successful the MLS—the only option for Americans who want to watch professionals live—will become. The more successful the MLS becomes, the more star players it will attract. The more star players, the better the quality of play—and the more likely I'll be to flip on ESPN and watch an MLS game.
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Recently, an editor at Slate asked me to write a back-to-school shopping column about the new technology that students are using to stay organized academically. I agreed enthusiastically: I’ve heard that children undergo a surgical procedure at age 9 to attach a cell phone to their tiny little texters (what the rest of us still call fingers), and that most without developmental disabilities can jailbreak an iPhone by 18 months. What mysterious digital devices are they buying to keep track of their geometry assignments?
My first e-mail was to a teacher at a New Haven, Conn., public school. Surely, I wrote, “current students don't use the same simple paper calendars or Trapper-Keepers that we did.” Actually, that’s exactly what they use, she replied: She spots the occasional Trapper-Keeper amid the extremely popular school-issued official planners. Her school also offers an online version of the planner, but several kids I interviewed averred that “no one uses it.” As for cell phone calendars and the like, kids are using them with greater frequency, but often employ them exclusively for social engagements (especially in schools where cell phone use is verboten during class).
I felt cheated. Maybe I just wasn’t checking on posh-enough kids—the rich are different from you and me, right? I e-mailed administrators at Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass., who said that, yep, kids use a combo of the official planner and their smartphones.
Perhaps Americans are just falling behind the rest of the world in our educational gadgets (the ripple effect of our math/science deficiency)? My sister works for a university in the world’s wealthiest country per capita. Her students, she tells me, use … the free planner the school gives them. And their BlackBerrys. No mention of either being diamond-encrusted. Maybe the Trapper-Keeper will never go out of style—certainly cocky teenage insouciance won’t: A friend’s 14-year-old sister replied to my query about how she stays organized: “Um, I just remember.”
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Sarah Palin's been speaking on behalf of mamma grizzly bears for too long! In this video, mamma grizzlies speak for themselves. Compliments of @theawl.
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I just had my first brush with reality television. Before you wonder if I lost the TV remote for 10 years, I should say that I do watch a few unscripted shows: I have an unhealthy obsession with Project Runway, and I've seen several seasons of contests like The Next Food Network Star and Design Star, but they're more like televised auditions. The Real L Word was my first prolonged exposure to the kind of show that's premised on a bunch of people doing whatever it is they usually do while another bunch of people follows them around with cameras.
It was awful.
There's no big insight here: Everyone who saw the show seemed to hate it and the women who were on it. But why was it so vile?
The problem with The Real L Word is that it was all about problems. Since Mikey was self-employed, at least we got to see her work life (elsewhere, for the most part, we saw side lines like modeling gigs and "comedy" acts), but it was a downer because she was so stressed out. Jill and Nikki spent all their waking hours planning their wedding—apparently a nerve-racking enterprise. Rose had relationship woes (and was also a complete douche nozzle), and Tracy was unhappy because her mom wasn't cool with her being a lesbian. Whitney had girl trouble—and although having too many partners is probably better than having too few, it's still a negative.
Doom, gloom, and boo-hoo. Every script needs conflict, but reality requires happiness.
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One of the funniest things about the very funny Danny McBride is the gap between how poorly his characters dress and how good they think they look. In The Foot Fist Way, there's a scene in which McBride's Fred Simmons goes out on the town in a silken, short-sleeved dress shirt with flames licking upward from its hem—a glorious eyesore he pairs with oversize denim shorts. In Pineapple Express, his character Red wears a yellow tank top, tucked into distressed baggy jeans, beneath a kimono. As Kenny Powers, on HBO's Eastbound & Down, he alternates between shapeless gym duds and filigreed Western wear.
So it's awesome but odd that K-Swiss has hired McBride to play Kenny Powers in an ad campaign for new sneakers. (The sneakers are called, with a mildly discomfiting whiff of reproductive anatomy, "Tubes.") In one sense, the pairing seems perfect: Garish and goofily "high-tech" (the soles appear to consist of hollow, spongy cylinders that compress with every step), Tubes are exactly the sort of sneaker you could see Kenny Powers rocking with buffoonish pride. In another sense, the pairing seems disastrous: Tubes are exactly the sort of sneaker you could see Kenny Powers rocking, and who wants to wear that, except maybe on Halloween?
It's a risky strategy on K-Swiss's part, representing as it does a rare (unprecedented?) incursion of irony into the selling of high-priced, high-concept athletic gear, which typically brooks none of the stuff. Steroid-abusing, hateful, and lazy, Kenny Powers is a piss-take on professional athletes, so it's hard for a performance-gear ad campaign that stars him to function as anything but a piss-take on performance-gear. Irony can play just fine in ads, of course, but not, it would seem, if you want people to shell out for your Grip-Maximizing, Torsion-Enhancing, developed-in-concert-with-NASA TubuflexPro4000 technology. Kenny Powers, lovably boorish, lends the sneakers something they wouldn't have otherwise: a distinct personality, or at least a strong association with one. But is it the right personality? We buy all sorts of things that come packaged in quotation marks, but the Kenny Powers Tubes campaign gambles on the existence of something difficult to get one's head around: the ironic workout routine.
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Picking on Starbucks for its gimmicky and sometimes confusing ordering system is a time-honored tradition, and can be annoying or funny depending on who's doing the picking. Customers did it back when I served a brief stint as a barista in my younger days, and Paul Rudd's character did it to great effect in Role Models.
But a New York woman took such complaints to new heights on Sunday. According to the New York Post, Lynne Rosenthal ordered a "toasted multigrain bagel" and was outraged that a barista had the nerve to ask her "butter or cheese?" "I refused to say 'without butter or cheese.' When you go to Burger King, you don't have to list the six things you don't want."
Actually, Ms. Rosenthal, Burger King might invite you to "have it your way," but if you don't want pickles or lettuce or mayo on your Whopper, you have to let them know.
Rosenthal also told the post that she prefers to order her coffee "small" or "large" and not "tall" or "venti" as Starbucks indicates on its menu. Which raises the obvious question: Why go to Starbucks? Surely, in New York of all places, one can find a place that serves delicious bagels and understands what "large" means.
Rosenthal is an English professor and insists that she is a "stickler for correct English." Two points: There is correct English and there is PRECISE English. She placed a perfectly "correct" order for a bagel, but her barista wanted to be "precise" and followed up with a question, for which she could have given the correct answer of "Neither, please." (Starbucks can't read its customers minds and presumably has a lot of customers who order a bagel without requesting butter or cheese but who DO want a spread.) Secondly, you don't have to have a Ph.D. to learn courtesy. That's something that is usually covered in kindergarten.
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Another golf major, another unheralded champion. A tweet from New Yorker writer Tad Friend summed it up best: "golf post-tiger: major championships now in receivership at the unloved law firm of mcdowell, oosthuizen, and kaymer." Martin Kaymer, a young German, beat Bubba Watson in a three-hole playoff—a playoff that should have included Dustin Johnson. The long-hitter from South Carolina* was assessed a two-stroke penalty on the final hole for touching his club to the ground in a sand trap. A no-no in the rules of golf, as doing this could improve your lie.
The penalty was ridiculous. DJ had hit the ball into the gallery, who had to carve out a space for him to swing and aim for the green. The ball looked like it was sitting in a patch of dirt, when, in fact, it was in the remnants of a sand trap that spectators had been shuffling through all week. The course at Whistling Straits has an uncountable number of bunkers. PGA officials defended their decision by saying that they had told all the players to watch out, because every bunker will still count as a bunker. To which I say, if a professional golfer can't tell that he's standing in a bunker, it's not a bunker.
On to the more pressing question: How did Moneygolf fare in the tournament? Last week, I published a series on the new golf statistics that show it's the long game—not putting—that most determines who consistently triumphs on Tour. And, indeed, the long hitters cooperated with the thesis and kindly dominated last week: Bubba Watson is the second-longest driver on tour, with Dustin Johnson ranked just below him. Tiger also lived up to Moneygolf's findings that his long-iron shots are the bedrock foundation of his excellence. His week was sunk by terrible driving and just so-so putting.
But the real issue looming here, and the place where Moneygolf can help, is the notion that a golf major should be a "true test of golf." Whistling Straits, a Pete Dye-designed course commissioned by the plumbing magnate Herbert Kohler, was a the real loser on Sunday. It's a long, modern course filled with all sorts of eye candy (all those bunkers) and borderline gimmicks like blind tee shots. It represents a trend to make golf courses longer, hillier, more "fearsome"—more like Golden Tee. The result is the golfers don't so much play the course as it plays them. And it obviously makes it hard for short-hitters to stay in contention (kudos to Steve Elkington on keeping up).
Maybe it's time to halt the arms race in golf between the pros and championship golf course designers who are using length to keep the pros in check. We should rediscover the pleasures of shorter courses, where the entire field has a shot. If the pros go out and destroy the course with low scores, that's not something to be frowned upon, or a black spot on a course's reputation. That may just be a "true test of golf" we're watching.
Click here to listen to Stefan Fatsis, Josh Levin, and Mike Pesca discuss the PGA Championship on Slate’s sports podcast, “Hang Up and Listen.”
*Correction, Aug. 25, 2010: This post originally misidentified Dustin Johnson as being from Southern California.
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Cartoonist Cathy Guisewite announced yesterday that her long-running comic strip, “Cathy,” will end on Oct. 3. In 1987, the New York Times called it “a clever running commentary on the joys and frustrations of being a single woman.” In 1991, the paper cheered that the strip “documents the trials of being an imperfect thirties-ish woman in a world that expects perfection,” to the “delight” of its legion of devotees. No less a leading light than Charles Schulz was a fan—but in his 2000 Times obituary, the writer directly followed that revelation with a quiet slight:“His favorite ice cream flavor was vanilla.” It was a sign of the changing times: By 2002, the Times downgraded Cathy to “insecure, romantic and eternally single.” And in response to an article on the demise of the strip in yesterday’s Times, many commenters were gleeful: “Oh man, what a needed drop,” one wrote. “It's a terrible comic, and does nothing but paint a picture of sad lonely women that isn't humorous in any way, but just plain pathetic. Good riddance!”
Lately, the strip’s been the butt of more low-hanging punch lines than it has actually manufactured—the main character is easy shorthand for the sort of pathetic single lady no one wants to become. (One recent Friday night, my roommate warned that I shouldn’t turn down an invite in favor of sweatpants and television, lest I turn into Cathy. I was out the door in 10 minutes.) Andy Samberg* mocked the character on SNL; Tina Fey on 30 Rock. (I think Kathy Geiss, Don’s cat-lady daughter, is an overlooked Cathy-gone-extreme reference on the show.)
Why did Cathy fall out of favor? When the strip debuted in 1976, her career-woman-making-it-on-her own status signaled that she was an explicitly feminist protagonist—like Mary Tyler Moore or Maude, only more relatable, as she was more obviously flawed. Then there was the feminist backlash, and the backlash to the backlash, etc. Whatever the scorekeeping along the way, at some point it became clear that a woman preoccupied with the horrors of bathing suit season wasn’t going to cut it as a feminist heroine. Relatable morphed into pathetic, and Sex and the City—surely a reaction against Cathy culture, on some level—became the dominant vision of singledom. Even Cathy’s 2005 marriage to her longtime boyfriend did nothing to change the perception of her as a particularly inadequate specimen—and quashed any remaining narrative suspense.
There are still people buying Cathy mugs and collections (Shoes: Chocolate for the Feet or $14 in the Bank and a $200 Face in My Purse, for instance), so not everyone has ceased to find her charming. But like many (most?) comic-strip characters, she just hasn’t managed to remain funny and culturally relevant for a mass audience.
*Correction, August 13, 2010: This post originally credited Adam Sandler with Andy Samberg's SNL Cathy sketch. Ack!
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A shirtless 45-year-old man posts an ad on his Web site looking for a gal to sing karaoke with. No cowgirls please.
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Two male Fox anchors try to engage in a riveting discussion about bras with three Victoria Secret models.
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From infomercials to soft-core porn, Jodie Fisher, who is identified as the contractor in the HP sex scandal that led to the ouster of CEO Mark Hurd, has done it all on the silver screen.
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In what appears to be an earnest series about caring for opossums, this video is about giving your ferocious critter a pedicure (that is if you can somehow trap it, domesticate it, and make it sit still).
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