Steve Martin’s new novel, An Object of Beauty, is a true delight if you’re into Sex and the City, art world scandal, and coming-of-age stories. As with his first book, Shopgirl, Steve Martin continues to amaze me for his effortless impersonation of a twenty-two-year-old girl. Sometimes I feel like he has employed a ghost writer who fits my exact profile. Maybe he hired a young woman my age to sit next to him in his LA mansion while he writes. Sounds like my dream job.
The new book is all about Lacey Yeager whose first job out of college is in the bowels of Sotheby’s. She moves up in the ranks and becomes a player in the contemporary art market. The novel follows Lacey through the extreme ups and downs of the stock market from 1990 until the recent crash (and the corresponding art world bubbles and bursts).
I think that Steve Martin writes books that can be deeply appreciated by girls just like me. He’s a great writer, but perhaps my vision is skewed by the fact that I relate to his subject matter firsthand. Why do you think that a famous sixty-six year-old comedian and banjo player writes books for and about depressive WASPy young women? Perhaps it’s for dating purposes. But writing a series of well-received novels seems like a lot of trouble to go to to get a young woman into bed. That being said, I’m definitely intrigued.
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A friend of mine went on a date with a former work colleague this week. She was excited to finally explore her crush. The evening was enhanced by some specialty cocktails (the guy is typical Brooklyn and owns a bitters company). It started off well and ended with him insisting that she take one of his shirts to wear to work the next morning.
Unfortunately, he said to her regarding his shirt, “Keep it.” But it was not like “Keep this shirt as a memento of our first night of intimacy together.” It was more “Keep it so that we don’t ever have to see each other again, even if it’s just to return this ugly shirt that I’ve been trying to get rid of anyway.”
Do some men have a special closet filled with ugly shirts they no longer want and are hoping to unload on innocent one-night stands? My friend thinks that he doesn’t want to sleep with her again because she’s sexually intimidating to men in their twenties. I think there is a good word for these ugly-shirt-closet guys and that word is wanker.
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Subway etiquette in New York City is abominable. This week I encountered a girl (with a dreadful spray tan that gave her an orange glow) who had positioned a small box on the subway seat in front of her. I asked her if she could move the box so that I could sit down. She said, “It’s a really heavy box.” I reassured her that it would be fine on the ground, as seats are for people, not boxes. She responded in a bitchy tone, “You can just imagine that I’m sitting there instead of the box!”
Five minutes later an attractive man boarded the subway car and asked if the girl could move her box. She smiled at him and immediately repositioned the box so that he could sit down. I exclaimed to her, “Are you kidding me? Are you some sort of reverse sexist with a super heavy and important box?” The handsome man interjected, “I asked her if I could sit down.” I replied, “So did I. She must have a big crush on you or something, so you should start flirting with her.” The girl was humiliated, and when she finally exited the subway, the man chased after her. I guess he figured that since she was so eager to move her box for him, she would be an easy lay.
Share on FacebookOccupy the Screens
“The world has gotten so boring. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not looking for a disaster—I’ve had enough of those since 9/11… But Everyone’s just looking at their screens all day and no one has an original fucking thought. It’s all shopping, looking at pictures–it might as well be porn. Why doesn’t everyone just turn off their screens and meditate until they have an original idea?” A woman in my office said these insightful words to me this week. Ever since I have been questioning my computer.
Admittedly, due to boredom at work, I had become obsessed with looking at handbags online (mostly because I can’t believe that they’re all so heinous and overpriced). But it’s definitely an addiction that is making me brain-dead, like The Facebook.
There should be a new movement: Occupy the Screens. They could make it into an international holiday each year when all screens, large and small, are turned off. When was the last time you spent more than two hours without looking at a screen?
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It’s almost a New Year, and you know what that means? There are finally some decent movies in theaters! My personal favorite right now is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo starring Daniel Craig, Rooney Mara, Christopher Plummer (who looks just like my Bavarian great uncle), etc.
It has everything a person could want out of a thriller: elegant Swedish settings, family history fraught with incest, sex between a young goth girl and Daniel Craig, the best revenge scene of all time involving a home tattoo kit, and a fabulous glass house on a hill. It’s Hitchcock meets James Bond meets Chaos (a feminist French film that I’m sure none of you have seen).
Share on FacebookLeaving The Facebook behind
I recently deleted my Facebook account. I realized that people use Facebook as a way of feeling like they are staying connected to their friends and family when they really aren’t. It’s disgusting. By reading your friend’s status updates, you get a false impression that you are interacting with them. Facebook has done an incredible thing: it has rendered physical contact between friends and acquaintances obsolete.
In an attempt to get back in touch with my friends, I quit Facebook.
Share on FacebookFOMO vs. FOJI
FOMO stands for “Fear Of Missing Out.” I think it’s a thing for your college years and early twenties. It’s when you hear about a party in some kid’s dorm room, or when some Manhattan party promoter texts you that Kanye West will be appearing at X Nightclub and you HAVE to come, and you feel completely obligated to attend. You feel a compulsive need to avoid missing out, because you are convinced that this opportunity/party/concert/blind date will change your life forever.
And then you hit twenty-five, or for some people it’s thirty (and for others, this shift never occurs), and you suffer from FOJI instead of FOMO. That is to say, “Fear Of Joining In.” All Facebook events start to lose their luster, and you simply don’t want to leave your cat home alone. While FOMO is the curse of youth, FOJI is the curse of old. Eventually, the wise ones realize that they should only be afraid of missing out on the really good parties where there is free alcohol of exceptional quality.
Share on FacebookGay bars & bad boys
Last weekend my sister and I hosted a Christmas party. It was a very subdued, almost funereal affair, in spite of the copious amounts of honey vodka and wine. Luckily, our downstairs neighbors were hosting a different genre of holiday part that involved festive green Jello shots and Texans.
We ended the evening by dancing in a gay bar in Hell’s Kitchen. We were the only women there, but it felt strange, and almost off-putting, to dance in a crowded space filled with sweaty men and dry ice, and feel like there was no chance of romance. On the way home we shared a cab with a fabulous gay forty-something who looked thirty. He told us about his struggles in dating. As he exited the taxi, he wished me congratulations on my engagement, and he gave my sister (who, like him, is addicted to “bad guys”) a look of empathic despair.
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I’m sure you’ve all heard about this gorgeous must-see Lars Von Trier film starring Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg as rich people coping with the end of the world. Everyone seems to have a love or hate opinion about Melancholia, and my verdict is: A+
Justine (Dunst) is a gorgeous young bride with a successful career in advertising. Her parents are dysfunctional and divorced, and her older sister, Claire (Gainsbourg), is married to a man who is filthy rich. Luckily for Justine, Claire decides to throw her a lavish wedding at her stately home (which is actually a castle in Sweden).
Claire suffers from melancholia, or “major depression” as we would normally call it, so the whole wedding thing doesn’t really cut it for her. Meanwhile, a formerly undiscovered planet (“Melancholia”) is fast approaching earth and just might crash into it, obliterating all human life. But as Claire so astutely comments: life on earth is terrible, so it’s not worth grieving the end of it … sounds like the ponderous thoughts of a reformed advertising exec if I ever heard them.
See Melancholia on the big screen, because it’s not meant to be viewed on an iPhone. It’s worth $13 if only for the exquisite lawn furniture and shots of Kirsten Dunst’s surprisingly large breasts.
Share on FacebookA man named Jindrich
My sister celebrated her birthday last week at the Colonial Inn in Concord, Massachusetts. Yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like: a historic New England inn located in the quaint town in which we grew up. It turns out that the saloon there is a great place to meet sexy European men.
A tall handsome man named Jindrich, who has his own start-up, flirted the night away with my sister and even gave her his card. He seemed like a smart Czech guy who had escaped a communist regime to enjoy the tech community and the great skiing in the northeast. What a catch!
But looks can be deceptive. My sister sent him a harmless text inviting him for coffee. He responded a day later with the following message: “I’m sorry, I can’t make a commitment. I am married with children.” After a quick Google search, we discovered that he is also forty-six years old. I take it back, never go to the Colonial Inn to meet hot guys on your twenty-seventh birthday. The real question is: what was poor old Jindrich doing alone at the bar at the Colonial Inn on a Friday night? Meeting a Match.com mistress perhaps…
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