Thursday, June 25, 2009 - Posts
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Michael Jackson was blasting on the streets of New York City last
night, out of car windows, restaurants, bars, and radios set up next to
makeshift fruit stands. People were paying their respects, but also up
to something more. They were taking the first steps towards reclaiming
his music, turning it on, turning it up, and finally, finally, ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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I was 10 years old when Charlie’s Angels debuted in 1976. This is my school picture from that year, my aggravatingly straight and unstyleable hair awkwardly plastered into the style that was referred to, at least in Texas, as “wings.” Wearing your hair in wings, with a middle part and plenty of hairspray, was near-obligatory in the fifth grade at Helotes Elementary. Even the boys, at least those aspirationally cool enough to have left behind the childish mushroom bowl cut, feathered and sprayed their hair. When the girls played “Angels” at school or at each others’ houses (tossing our wings, pointing imaginary guns and shouting “Freeze!” in breathy voices), I usually took the part of Kate Jackson’s Bree. (She was the "brainy one.” Now there’s a low bar: The brainy Charlie’s Angel.) But the beautiful, athletic, popular girls, the ones who could run fast and had hair that feathered right (and who lacked the pink plastic glasses and epic overbite on view in this photo), got to be Farrah Fawcett's golden and gleaming Jill Munroe ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Tracking celebrities' final moments has become a kind of collective,
Internet parlor game. The e-mails start flying: Who's getting the best
scoop? Who can spot the first credible death announcement? I'm
currently standing vigil over Michael Jackson's Wikipedia page,
wondering if I can catch the moment when someone adds in a date of
death and all the verbs fall, like dominoes, into the past tense. ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Has there ever been a major celebrity who so wholly turned himself
into a freak? He destroyed his face (the tabloids loved to get photos
of him sans surgical mask, a prothestic tip taped to the end of his
ruined nose), he was involved in endless pedophillic scandals, and it
was awful to think of him as a father. What happens now to his
children, who have been trapped in his mansions, forced to live out his
fantasy of the childhood he never had? And don't you just wish you
could reach out to the beautiful, supremely talented boy he once was
and make it all ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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The Los Angeles Times confirms that Michael Jackson has died of cardiac arrest. Two pop icons down in a day, and to me their lives moved in opposite directions. After her flash appearance as a sex symbol, Fawcett spent the rest of her years backing away from that image, playing (and looking like) a battered spouse in the Apostle, making a video about her anal cancer, generally reminding us that body beautiful is fleeting, and we all go to dust in the end ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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This seems to be the week for obituary headlines I hope I never have. On the New York Times homepage now, Farrah Fawcett is called “A Sex Symbol Who Wanted to Be More.” Pretty pathetic, but not quite as bad as the treatment Ed McMahon got on the hompeage on Tuesday: “Quintessential sidekick.” (The headline on the article itself isn't much kinder, calling him the "top second banana.") Sidekick ... who wanted to be more? The headline didn’t specify, but one can only assume that "second banana" is not anyone’s first aspiration.
So in the spirit of Emily Yoffe's excellent poll on whether you'd rather be the wife of Sanford or Spitzer (which is generating some thoughtful replies in the comments section), I’ll offer another “which is worse”: Would you rather your obituary call you a sex symbol who wanted to be more, or a quintessential sidekick? ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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A guest post from Double X intern Nicole Allan:
In the wake of Farrah Fawcett's death this morning, thoughts turn to the superficial. Ellen has already focused on her hair—those "feathered bangs, feathered layers, feathers, feathers, feathers"—but what about her teeth? Those shiny, snow-white teeth? Or her endless, hairless legs? All of these assets were duly capitalized upon by America's beauty product industry, leading to a few spectacular TV ads from the '70s ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Farrah Fawcett paid dearly for being a beauty queen with great hair and very white teeth. In the beginning it must have been fun to be a contestant on the Dating Game, marry a 6-million-dollar man, become an Angel (then an ex-angel), and have her own personal complicated love story with Oliver Barrett IV. But through it all, she was more of an image than a real person: a one-dimensional cover girl whose real life fell short in so many ways. Being a former sex symbol must have been difficult. Illness and addiction don’t have to follow, but objectification can’t be that great for the soul ...
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Have you ever feathered? Feathered extravagantly? Feathered desperately, in an effort to give off the Farrah-mone? If so, please e-mail photos of yourself to doublex.slate+farrah@gmail.com, and we will post the best ones on the blog. I’ll offer myself up first for ridicule. Here is me, on what must have been my 12th birthday (I believe there’s a Go-Go’s cassette in that stack). That poor sap with the 'fro is my older brother. Include your own Farrah memories. Here are mine ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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I'd heard about The September Issue, a documentary that screened at Sundance, now slated for an August 28 release, that goes behind the scenes at Vogue and focuses in particular on editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, she of the unmessable bob. The trailer makes the film look better than I'd expected ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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For a boy growing up in the 1970s and ‘80s, Farrah Fawcett was a dreamgirl; but for a girl growing up then, she was a nightmare. Everyone knew that she was the quintessential Charlie’s angel. She was the prototype. Jaclyn Smith was the brunette. Kate Jackson was the “brainy” one. But Farrah, she was perfect—pretty, blonde, and with a gorgeous body, posterized in a bathing suit and adorning every teenage boy’s bedroom wall. I remember the first time I saw that poster at Spencer Gifts and was shocked on two accounts: that the poster was so overtly sexual, and that a human could actually have a body that looked like that. When Farrah left the show, the producers tried to replace her with a series of other, lesser blondes: Cheryl Ladd, Shelley Hack, but no one compared to Farrah. She even had an unusual and angelic name.
And her hair ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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The Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional this morning the strip search of Savana Redding, the 13-year-old student who was supposed to have somehow been hiding prescription ibuprofen in her underwear, only wasn't. That's a relief. At oral argument, some of the male justices got all jokey about their own school experiences of people sticking things in their underwear in middle school while they were changing for gym. That particular reminiscence came from Justice Stephen Breyer: Here's Dahlia's great write-up of the argument. And today, Justice David Souter specifically notes, in his majority opinion, that "changing for gym is getting ready for play." A strip search in response to an accusation, by contrast, is "fairly understood as so degrading that a number of communities have decided that strip searches in schools are never reasonable and have banned them no matter what the facts may be." I want to live in one of those places ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Slate’s Will Saletan has a provocative defense of Sanford today:
I feel awful for Sanford's wife and kids. But compared with all the cheaters who have gone before him, I don't think less of him for genuinely loving the other woman or for admitting it. It beats the hell out of seducing somebody, kicking her to the curb, and pretending she was nothing to you—or really meaning it.
I suppose there is some honesty in that. But let’s remember that he was doing it at a press conference ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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“We careened… from not having enough information about the governor to having too much. Way too much,” says Ruth Marcus at the Washington Post. “There was Sanford talking about ‘that whole sparking thing’ and ‘serious overdrive.’ Really, if Sanford’s sparking, I don’t want to know about it, whatever drive he’s in.”
Well, neither do I ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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