The Untold Dilemma: To Groupie or not to Groupie?
I knew there was ample evidence to characterize me as such: all of my boyfriends before I reached twenty-five and a lot of my friends played in bands. The evidence against was that I was more opinionated than beautiful, more likely to slip into the role of friend who can talk about underrated 1970s’ New York City punk bands or why Sandy Denny’s voice—especially in her music with the Fairport Convention—haunts me for hours after I listen to it. Having and sharing my opinions was a role that I coveted and shirked in equal measure. It has taken me a long time to justify my fascination with groupies and to reckon with my possible inclusion in that club, to see hanging around in the proximity of musicians not as a betrayal of feminism but as a celebration of fandom.
We’re Living in the Joan Rivers Age of Comedy
I read an interview with Chris Rock a few years ago right after Joan Rivers died. “The compliment you give of a comedian,” he said, is: “Who wants to follow them onstage? Nobody wanted to follow Joan Rivers, ever.” Even in her 80s, Rivers was testing her material in small clubs a few nights a week in New York City, hawking her jewelry on QVC, and keeping a schedule that would exhaust a person half her age. She never told a stale joke—when her Liz Taylor material got old, she moved on to Lindsay Lohan, then Kim Kardashian. No one was safe. Rivers was a brutal truth teller, someone who shakes up the status quo by skewering important things—everyday sexism, casual ageism, manifold other forms of inequality—and leaving destruction in her well-heeled wake.
In Defense of Trash: Why Pleasures Should Never Be Guilty, From Valley of the Dolls to Bonkbusters
There are two books I am very much anticipating this season which you will not see on any fall preview lists: Killer Diamonds by Rebecca Chance and Mount! by Jilly Cooper. One explanation for their exclusion is these are British books, and though both writers have substantial fan bases in the UK they do not have much profile on this side of the Atlantic. But the other reason why is both Cooper and Chance write long, juicy, sexy, funny, plotted to bursting, over-the-top books (Chance, a former crime writer, calls her sexy thrillers bonkbusters; Cooper is known for her racy covers), which are often dismissed as having little literary merit.
On Rape Culture In Crime Fiction
Do we like reading about fictional rape? An affirmative answer would make us sleazy and voyeuristic, but it’s a common enough fantasy and so present in our culture that to answer with an unequivocal no can’t be right either. Yet it’s conundrums like this that make living in rape culture so confusing. The proposition that we do indeed like it validates fears about our most debased impulses, that we (or enough of us) get off on violence at some primal level.
Rape Stories Are Crime Stories
The last time I wrote about rape here I focused on rape in crime fiction. In asking questions about how rape culture infuses our crime fiction, I wanted to start a conversation about why violence against women is so endemic in crime fiction, and what desires it evokes or satisfies in readers. In this essay I want to probe even harder issues, because I want to ask the same questions about true stories of rape. These stories are usually classified as memoir—some of the books I’m referring to include Lucky by Alice Sebold (1999), Jane Doe January by Emily Winslow (2016), The Other Side by Lacy M. Johnson (2014), My Body is a Book of Rules by Elissa Washuta (2014), and the just released anthology Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, edited by Roxane Gay.
Breaking Up With The Bachelor
Last night, The Bachelorette had its 14th season premiere, with Becca Kufrin, a reject from humdrum Arie Luyendyk Jr.’s season of The Bachelor, taking up the mantle as the lucky woman bombarded by 28 suitors. In all, The Bachelor and its spinoffs have been around for over 22 seasons, or since 2002. That’s Jurassic in TV years, and even more so in reality TV.
Read at Avidly (Los Angeles Review of Books)
The Underappreciated Genius of Justified
Let’s say the current golden era of high-quality television shows started 20 years ago with The Sopranos. When we watch these shows, we are usually watching crime shows. Nearly every prestige show has a crime element to it, from the obvious like Breaking Bad to the subtler shows like Mad Men, which is really just the story of a long con.
The People vs. Courtney Love
Open "Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love" to almost any glossy page and you will see a picture of Love, or some simulacrum of her: a smear of lipstick, a doodled self-portrait, a poem, ephemera of her band, Hole, scrawled lyrics, a Polaroid, an artifact of her very productive and self-absorbed imagination. Calling the book a diary is a ploy to prey on the desire for access to Love's private thoughts. It's actually closer to a yearbook for a school with only one graduate; or maybe Love, albeit in the coolest, most punk-rock way, has succumbed to that most Martha Stewart of pastimes: scrapbooking.
Buffy the Boyfriend Slayer
The most jaw-dropping moment in the lastest installment of the Avengers franchise, The Age of Ultron, was not a fight sequence or a CGI robot or even the relvelation about those creeepy twins. It was the discovery that Hawkeye/Clint Barton (played by Jeremy Renner) had a family. While the other Avengers made clumsy romantic overtures toward each other—particularly The Hulk/Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) and Black Widow/Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson)—Hawkeye had been presiding over an ubertraditional domestic scenario in his other secret life, complete with two towheaded kids and a pregnant wife, Laura Barton, her countenance alternately radiating farmfed good health and requisite worry (the longsuffering Linda Cardellini).
A Little More Like a Career and Less Like a Stunt: An Interview with Robert Kolker
Robert Kolker’s first book, Lost Girls, is a heartbreaking and methodical account of women whose bodies were found on an isolated Long Island beach. It’s a true-crime book, but one where the violence is not the point. There is a tremendous amount of heart in Kolker’s writing and reporting: he makes you care about the people whose lives are destroyed by violence.
