This New York Times article from the other day about important gay movies–and specifically the gay movies deemed important by celebrated gay New Yorkers–got me wondering which gay movie has been the most important to me, and I’m slightly at a loss. As a teenager I watched basically every movie released on VHS, and some of them were pretty gay. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert was a lot of fun, and Priest was pretty sad, and the Isaac Mizrahi documentary Unzipped was my favorite movie of 1996, according to a hand-written list that I found a few months ago. I’ve mentioned here before my love for Robert Altman’s Prêt-a-Porter, and Bound is just generally a really awesome movie, complete with Jennifer Tilly’s voice and lesbian sex scenes choreographed by Susie Bright.

But how important are these films, in the grand scheme of what it means to be gay and what it means for me personally to be a gay movie-lover?

Whenever any kind of [adjective]-est [form of media] ever list comes along I tend to jump back a half-century, to see what was going on then and see if there have been any particular leaps and bounds since then. Fifty-one years ago there was Victim, a melodramatic but ultimately rather lovable British film about the suicide of a young gay man and its implications on an upstanding lawyer. It’s rather preachy but actually very good, as are a bunch of other British movies from over the years, like Entertaining Mr. Sloane and The Killing of Sister George and My Beautiful Laundrette and Beautiful Thing, to name a few of the more obvious examples .

Other important old gay movies that stand out to me are Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers On A Train and Purple Noon, the original (French) adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley. Both of these were based on novels by Patricia Highsmith, but both, because of cinematic conventions of the time, avoid going into any kind of depth with their gay characters. So maybe we need to jump ahead a little bit, to when gay directors started making their own gay features.

Maybe Swoon?

Swoon is a 1992 retelling of the story of Leopold and Loeb, two teenaged homosexual geniuses in the 1920s who decided to kidnap and murder a younger neighbor as a means of getting away with the perfect crime. They failed.

Alfred Hitchcock adapted the story of fussy gay criminal masterminds committing murder for murder’s sake in Rope, which I think is one of his more tedious movies. But in 1992 director Tom Kalin reinvented the story, focusing more on the gay relationship and less on the drama surrounding the crime itself. I first learned about Swoon on PBS, when it got a mention in the ten-part American Cinema series from 1995. A while later, I watched it on late-night TV, possibly also on PBS. It was, I think, the first movie about gay characters that I had seen where the story wasn’t preachy, where the homoerotic was actually normalized, and where I felt like I had seen a queer movie that wasn’t intended for a general audience. It was intended for me.

I’ve actually only seen three of the sixteen films mentioned on the Times list*, since for all these years I’ve somehow avoided seeing Parting Glances and The Boys In The Band and Cruising and My Own Private Idaho. This is always on my imaginary to-do list of things to rectify; knowing the accepted canon of queer cinema–or at least mainstream movies with not-straight characters–seems like it might be important one day.

[*Taxi zum klo is fascinating and wonderful; Tongues Untied is flawed but important; Beautiful Thing is ridiculous but lovely.]

My Twitter feed and Tumblr stream have been totally agog lately with grown adults who are horrified–horrified!–that Bully, the simply-titled documentary about bullying, got an R Rating from the MPAA. There fully-grown adult people whose opinions I normally find reasonable all seem to want everyone to sign a petition asking the MPAA to change the rating to a PG-13, so that this documentary can be shown in public schools across America, where bullying is apparently a rampant disease that can be easily cured by the consumption of Hollywood-financed documentaries.

The producers argue, not incorrectly, that the MPAA is overly rigid when it comes to the portrayal of teenagers and sex and swearing and drugs, while it is extremely lax with similarly-if-not-more jarring portrayals of violence. That is not news to anyone, particularly to the Weinstein Company, who is distributing this film, and that is why plenty of documentaries about touchy subjects are released without ratings from the MPAA.

But rather than doing that, the Weinsteins put this movie up for approval by the MPAA, knowing full well the board’s policy of giving R ratings to any movie that has the word “fuck” in it more than once. And now the Weinsteins–that marketing-savvy duo who released, among other things, the last two Best Picture Oscar winners–is turning this into an Issue That We Should Care About. Which strikes me as an extremely insincere marketing tactic. It’s working, of course; who would have ever heard of this movie, which isn’t even due in theaters for another month, if it weren’t for the fact that people all up and down the internet–including influential JC Penney spokesperson Ellen DeGeneres–believe that it is Important to take a Stand about this movie that they haven’t actually even seen.*

I just find it intensely frustrating when marketers take a trendy issue–even one as vague and odd as bullying–and try to convince people that signing an online petition is somehow going to make things better for suicidal high schoolers. A petition which, again, is being promoted by a company worth millions upon millions of dollars who stands to make even more money if this project is successful. Bully might be the most important movie ever made, for all I know. But maybe we should wait before getting bunching our panties about it.

[*Maybe Ellen's seen it, I don't know.]

Shame was basically made for me. It’s intensely slow-moving, there’s full-frontal male nudity within the first two minutes, there aren’t very many characters, and more attention is made to arty cinematography than to keeping the audience happy. I like all of those things. We also get to watch the man who played both Magneto and Mr. Rochester this year fucks a bunch of people, which is not a small thing, either. As with the Marvel antagonist and the Bronte character, we are attracted to his charms even though we’re constantly reminded that he’s kind of a dickbag.

Or is he?

The beautiful Michael Fassbender plays Brandon, a successful New York businessman. Society and economics and Michael Douglas movies have all trained me to understand that New York businessmen are all kind of jerks. But Brandon’s not a bad guy, or at least he’s better than his young boss, a married lecher who wears expensive hoodies under his sportcoats and hits on women like a tenth-grader would. Just because Brandon has a fancy apartment and a delightfully long penis and a suave ability to nail roughly 50% of the women he sets his eyes on doesn’t make him evil, or even particularly troubled. He’s single, happy that way, and consensually doing what he wants to do with women who also seem to like what he’s doing.

But actually that isn’t even what the movie is about. Early reviews of Shame suggested a twenty-first century version of Mike Leigh’s Life Is Sweet, an unsexy drama about people have on-screen sex so troubling to look at that it takes years after viewing to look at a jar of peanut butter without squirming. Entering the cinema I expected a bleak drama about addiction.

But it’s not, really, despite what the press kit might say. Shame is about the relationship between Brandon and his troubled sister Cissy, played admirably by Carey Muligan. If anything, it’s a bleak drama about families and, more generally, about wider gender disparities in America. Because Brandon and Cissy are presented as two sides to the same person. Except that he’s smart, successful, and able to get laid without much effort, while she’s sexually confused and barely employed, a victim of some unspoken past that we as an audience never really fully understand. From their first interaction, when he stumbles upon her naked in the shower and she makes no effort to cover herself, we are uncomfortable with their own physical comfort with one another, even though emotionally there’s obviously a lot of fucked up history between them.

And that’s where Shame goes where I wish it hadn’t.

I had a conversation about sex addiction with a friend a few months ago, and how what’s pathologized in straight men (and women) is basically what a lot our gay friends consider routine behavior. Yes, promiscuous fucking can have consequences sometimes, and those deserve to be addressed. But the idea that a fondness for sex is necessarily rooted in some kind of fucked-up upbringing is just dumb. Have you ever had casual sex? It’s fun!

I hope that’s not what Shame is doing, although I’m still undecided. Are Brandon’s urges to pick up married women on the subway the same as Cissy’s urges to constantly leave needy answering machine messages. (Relatedly: do real New York businessmen even have landlines in 2011?)

The vagueness works pretty well, though. Details aren’t explained any more than they need to be, and I like that. Brandon says that he was born in Ireland and moved to the US as a teenager, while Cissy describes herself to Brandon’s boss as a Jersey girl. Is he really that much older than she is? Is one of them lying? Does it even matter? At least once, during a failed hookup, there’s even some intentional confusion about what’s happening.

I do like the movie, though, for its atmosphere and, let’s be honest, for the movie’s treatment of Fassbender’s body. His sex face is 99% less silly to look at than most porn performers’, and also I like how the movie gets all the dick shots out of the way at the beginning. We don’t need to fantasize, because we see it right away. And it is magnificent, especially during a gratuitious(ly awesome) rear-view pissing sequence.  The only flaw, visually, is a really brief scene where we’re introduced to Brandon’s porn collection.  It’s jarring and unnecessary.  But it’s also about ten seconds in a hundred-minute movie.

Fassbender’s suave performance is really good, actually, as is Mulligan’s in what is probably the tougher role. She’s troubled and needy without being condescending or trite. The music is all spot-on, the editing works well, including the lengthy scenes of Fassbender running and of Mulligan singing a rendition of “New York New York” so slow that even Cat Power would be embarrassed.

If you get a chance to see it, go. I had to drive to Boston, because Providence is a backwater sometimes and also one of our only two art-house screens has been showing My Week With Marilyn for two fucking months now.  It was worth the drive, though.

Last night Wes Anderson reunited with (some of) the cast of The Royal Tenenbaums, to mark the tenth anniversary of its 2001 premiere at the New York Film Festival.

For me, The Royal Tenenbaums is probably the most important movie of the past ten years.  I could go back and forth about whether it’s actually the best movie, but tempting though it may be it’s probably counterproductive to spend the rest of my day debating the pros and cons of whether it’s a “better” movie than, say, Morvern Callar.

What makes certain movies really great, I think, is their ability to elicit different emotions at different times.  I first saw The Royal Tenenbaums in a movie theater with a good friend, and we both laughed a lot.  The second time, I watched it at home with my mother; she fell asleep after five minutes and I cried for an hour and a half.

It’s certainly a downer, albeit a very funny and fantastic-looking downer.  It’s also a movie that’s come up a lot in my personal life, probably more than any other.  When I met my boyfriend it was the only DVD he owned, and for a while we listened to the soundtrack pretty often.  In 2007 a writer for Stylus–upon that publication’s closing–called it his favorite movie of the millennium:

Probably very few of us have ever been suicidally in love with our adopted sisters, but Luke Wilson and Gwyneth Paltrow’s relationship still seems to say everything that could ever be said about love—except, of course, for what we see in Danny Glover and Anjelica Huston’s love. And when Anjelica Huston smiles, her smile contains all of human happiness. You can tell watching it that the actors felt this, too, as each member of the huge cast gives the best performance of their career.

It’s true that Anderson pulled very specific performances out of actors (ahem, Owen Wilson) that aren’t normally very endearing.  And I’m no fan of Gene Hackman, either, but that doesn’t matter here.

Ensemble films are always interesting to look at years later, because the career trajectories of the casts are usually so all over the place:  Ben Stiller, who made Tenenbaums immediately after Zoolander, was slowly beginning his decline from 90′s indie comedy guy to Little Fockers At The Museum guy.  All the Gwyneth Paltrow haters didn’t have blogs yet to express their constant dismay about her existence.  And Bill Murray was just ascending into his mysterious renaissance of possibly-ironic popularity.

(And it’s not just the cast, but the music that dates in unexpected ways:  Remember that Elliott Smith was still alive when the suicidal Richie Tenenbaum shaved his trademark facial hair off to the tune of “Needle In The Hay.”  And Luke Wilson, Richie himself, attempted suicide on film in a New York bathroom a whole six years before his co-star brother tried to kill himself, in real life, in Mary Kate Olsen’s apartment.)

I haven’t seen The Royal Tenenbaums in a couple of years, and I’m not actually sure that I could comfortably watch it now, as this might be the wrong moment in my own life to sit down with a movie about gifted children who grow up to be complete fuck-ups.  Instead, maybe, I’ll just listen to the soundtrack, which, while rather melancholy, is also endlessly charming.

I first encountered the melody to “Never On Sunday,” without realizing it, as the base for late-nineties cheesefest “No Tengo Dinero,” a tinny sort of mariachi-inspired Shaggy-lite number that hit pop radio around my junior year of high school.  Years later, I’d encounter the song again as the lead track on Petula Clark’s truly fabulous 1965 album The World’s Greatest International Hits!  In the song, Clark tells a man how he can kiss her on any day of the week except Sunday, because by that point of the week she’s worn out from all the kissing.

I didn’t realize until much, much later that the song (which was originally performed in Greek with completely different lyrics) was the theme to Never On Sunday, an Oscar-nominated film from 1960 that’s part light-hearted Mediterranean comedy and part social drama about a prostitutes’ rebellion in Greece’s largest port city.

Never On Sunday was directed by Jules Dassin, the celebrated noir director who was blacklisted from Hollywood and who in 1955 made the tedious (though highly-regarded) French thriller Rififi.  Five years later, Dassin cast his real-life love Melina Mercouri to play the lead in the surprisingly cosmopolitan Never On Sunday.  With far too many Greek subtitles for an American film from 1960, there’s also far too much emphasis on the American character Homer (played by Dassin himself) for a film that sought only a Continental audience.

Never On Sunday centers around Ilya (or Elia, in the subtitled version I saw), a fun-loving prostitute who makes her living off the many sailors in Piraeus, Greece’s largest port city.  She works for herself, sets her own hours and her own rates, and in return the whole city looks after her.  The very hunky working men of Piraeus line up, without any hostility toward her or toward one another, to attend the weekly parties she throws each Sunday.

Mercouri (who in the eighties would go on to become the Greek minister of culture) is delightful as Ilya, the rare cinematic hooker with brains to match her charm.  When the other prostitutes of Piraeus are squeezed for money by their anonymous money-hungry landlord, only the independent Ilya can step in to save them.

Ilya’s relationship with her clients is perhaps a little unrealistic; in an early scene she taunts them, calling them slaves as she encourages them to ditch work and jump into the ocean with her.  (They do.)  In a classic Hollywood movie Ilya wouldn’t stand a chance against the American who shows up looking to save her soul.  But Never On Sunday isn’t a classic Hollywood movie, and the ending is actually handled quite well.

A friend and I were discussing the movie the other night and he mentioned his opinion that the film maybe goes a little out of its way to exoticize Greece, in a “that could never happen HERE” sort of way.  I can’t quite figure out whether I agree or not, though the film’s four Oscar nominations and the Best Actress award given to Mercouri at Cannes maybe suggest that the movie’s slightly less transgressive than I’m making it out to be.

In any event, though, there’s a lot going on underneath this movie’s sunny exterior.  Homer, the American, tries his best to squeeze Ilya into his romantic definitions of how modern Greeks should reflect the culture and philosophy of ancient Greek culture.  And Ilya’s justifications for ignoring this–she dislikes Aristotle because he didn’t have nice things to say about women, and she views classic the child-killer Madea as a comedic heroine–while seemingly flighty, are actually a pretty well-considered look at the mentality of modern Greece, at America’s desire to culturally colonize postwar Europe, and (very distinctly) about the rights of prostitutes to carry on without any outside meddling.

Never On Sunday is currently streaming on Netflix, if you’re interested.  Here’s one final version of the film’s theme, this time in Cantonese.  I have no idea what is happening here:

In one early episode of the unappreciated 1968 season of The Avengers, Steed and Tara King (the oft-forgotten Mrs. Peel replacement) stumble upon a nefarious gang of window-washers who freeze time and brainwash an entire office.  It’s a really good episode, and one I saw very recently.  Probably why I kept thinking about it during The Adjustment Bureau, the movie in which Matt Damon stumbles upon a group of well-dressed indivuduals who are, uh, freezing time and brainwashing his office.

I like this movie.  I like it because it’s pretty stylish, and because it’s going in about fifty different directions at any given moment.  If you’ve seen the trailers, some of which emphasize the love story and some of which emphasize that it’s a thriller about a gang of old men in hats, then maybe you get the idea.

What is this movie?  A dystopian sci-fi fable about free will and mind control?  A really long commercial presented by the New York Visitors Bureau?  A Christian epic about how the Holy Spirit is everywhere?  A Muppet Babies-inspired romantic comedy about magical hats?  A giant ad for Sam Adams?

It’s actually all of those things and more, although ultimately if you try to decipher it it’s kind of a lot less.

The main thing is that it’s a very good-looking movie.  Emily Blunt is very pretty and New York looks very pretty and all the men look like they stepped straight off a Birra Moretti bottle.  Even the thugs’ helmets match their suits, which was my favorite visual touch.  Well, that and that the interior of the Adjustment Bureau itself is actually the not-at-all disguised New York Public Library, which is one of my favorite buildings ever.

The story, about a mysterious group of well-groomed men whose job it is to ensure that “the plan” goes right, is not really important.  Probably it matters in the Philip K Dick story on which this was based, but probably that story is also a lot smarter and bleaker than this film, which casts Matt Damon as a Senatorial candidate who loses the big race after a picture of his ass ends up in the Post.

The business about love conquering all is a little heavy-handed at times, and the narrated ending is a little… much.  But overall, I was won over by the library scenes and the suits.

Way back in early 2009, it seemed like every single person on the internet was talking about The Girlfriend Experience, porn star Sasha Grey’s entry into the world of mainstream film.  The movie had a really great poster, and it was made by popular director Steven Soderbergh, but it didn’t get a whole lot of distribution and disappeared rather quickly, earning (according to iMDB) less than a million dollars total.

Yesterday, lazing my way through a combination sick day/snow day, I finally saw the film, which is currently streaming on Netflix.  It’s interesting, for a Hollywood movie about prostitution.  But also it’s pretty frustrating, particularly if you like movies where anything actually happens.

Grey plays Chelsea, a Manhattan call girl whose clients are mainly sad-sack hotshots who spend most of their sessions dispensing unasked for financial advice.  (Invest in gold.  Vote for McCain.  Invest in gold.)  Meanwhile, Chelsea’s also talking to a reporter who wants to profile her, chronicling her day-to-day life (and wardrobe) in a diary, and trying to update her website.  She agrees to meet a man who runs an escort review site when she knows full well that he’s probably full of shit.  She is mostly if not all business.

Her boyfriend Chris is a personal trainer, and the parallels are… there.  They both make their money living off other people’s conceptions of beauty, they both pretend to be interested in wealthy clients that aren’t actually interesting, and they both lie a lot to make people feel better.  And–this is where the film’s very, very minimal plot kicks in–they both get offers to go on weekend trips with clients.

The film is tedious, and that’s kind of the point.  Chelsea makes her money by pretending to be interested in very boring things, and Soderbergh clearly enjoys implicating the audience in that.  When Chris takes off on a private jet to Vegas with a bunch of scummy douchebags, we are right there with them, talking about John McCain and making bad “stimulus package” jokes.

While Soderbergh could have taken the trashy route, he doesn’t.  Grey never takes her clothes off and we never see any fake sex.  That is good.  But although the film is intentionally boring for the sake of being boring, The Girlfriend Experience is still, well, boring.  (I paused it no less than three times to see how much time was left, and the whole movie is only 77 minutes long.  It ends mid-scene, which I was fully expecting since there’s not actually any plot to resolve, but knowing that just makes it seem even longer.)

The very meta use of distance doesn’t help.  Most scenes are shot quite a few feet away from the actors, which is an interesting trick but also kind of annoying after a while.  And Grey, though on-screen for most of the film, is almost always buried in murky shadows.  Her diary-style narration disappears for no real reason, and we have no idea why she’s writing any of this down, anyway.

Ten years ago, Soderbergh directed Full Frontal, an equally meta but slightly more plot-driven film that was critically loathed at the time, but which I loved thanks largely to the performances of Catherine Keener and David Hyde Pierce.  Unfortunately, The Girlfriend Experience has no great performances.  Grey doesn’t have enough to do, and when she does–in conversation with the boyfriend, say–she doesn’t sound especially convincing.  His acting is fine enough, I guess, but the real stars of the movie are the many, many anonymous johns, who are all pretty unterchangeable.

For its treatment of call girls as rather ordinary people who have to do very boring things, The Girlfriend Experience is great.  But unless you’re really into hastily assembled think-pieces, you probably don’t need to actually see it anytime soon.

Yesterday morning I finally watched The Cry Of The Owl, the film adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s wonderful, wonderful thriller, which I read back in January and which ended up being my favorite thing I read all year.  As I feared, the movie’s pretty terrible; it remains pretty faithful to the plot of the novel, but goes out of its way to confuse every character’s motivations, and not in a good way.  Also,  Julia Stiles portrays the depressed, romantic Jenny with such vocal and facial blankness that the viewer need never wonder what it would be like to see Taylor Swift cast as the Log Lady.  It’s impossible for the audience to believe that peeping tom Robert Forrester–played by Paddy Considine as some sort of B-grade Steve Carrell character–would ever be attracted to Jenny’s happy smile; that would require her to actually move her facial muscles.

The film also has some pacing issues.  When the Highsmith reader meets Forrester, he’s turning down a dinner offer from a possibly swinger-y co-worker to spy on a girl living alone in a secluded house in the woods.  While the readers sympathies eventually align Robert, it’s not at all taken for granted that he’s not a total creep.  In the movie, the first scene is the same.  The co-worker is inexplicably a lot more annoying–jokingly telling Robert he wants to fuck him (but not in a gay way!) for no reason related to the rest of the film–but Forrester’s creepy shenanigans are presented as a pretty run-of-the-mill quirk, like it’s not really that unusual for a grown man to hide in the woods watching a vacantly pretty blonde do dishes.
Admittedly, the film gets a little better in the second half, once the body count starts mounting, but not enough to get over the poorly miscast actors.

And really it’s the character of Nicklie (Caroline Dhavernas), Forrester’s ex-wife, where it’s most evident that the film is a failure.  In the book she’s mostly unseen, mainly experienced by the reader through a drunken series of phone calls.  But in the movie we don’t really get the impression that she’s a drinker.  She lives in a fancy apartment in the city, sure, but so do a lot of people.  That could be fine; maybe Forrester’s lying when he tells people about her drinking problem.  But the trouble is that the film doesn’t really know what to do with her character, and neither does the actress playing the role.  One moment she’s campy, the next she’s extremely earnest.  Why?

The film also diverts from the book, this time rather forgivably, in terms of paranoia.  In the novel, Robert’s haunted by nagging phone calls from his drunk ex-wife and later terrorized by nosy, vindictive neighbors.  That the film basically drops both of these points probably says more about the world of personal communication in the roughly fifty years since the book was first published.

The Cry of the Owl is actually a pretty cinematic novel, full of creeps and darkness and sudden, violent murders.  But this version–the second adaptation, following Claude Chabrol’s French-language adaptation from 1987–is a total stinker.

I don’t normally care much for action movies, but I’ve always had a soft spot for Bruce Willis, going all the way back to the first Die Hard.  He’s got charisma, he’s got nice arms, he can actually act, and I can take him seriously.

He’s also really hot.  Actually, he looks a lot better now than he did a quarter-century ago, when he first appeared on Moonlighting, the mystery-comedy series he starred in opposite Cybill Shepard.  Maybe it’s just because I’ve got an autoboner for baldness-disguising head shaving; I don’t know.  Peter Keough, writing for the Boston Phoenix, made it a point in his review of new action comedy Red to accuse the actor of looking more like Mr. Clean with each passing film.  Whatever, dude.
I actually saw Red the other day.  It’s good–better than I expected, actually.  The concept is surprisingly subversive: it’s a Bruce Willis action comedy where the United States is the enemy.  Helen Mirren is fabulous, of course, and Morgan Freeman is only mildly annoying.  John Malkovich is the comic relief character who’s fully of wisecracky non sequiturs, sort of, until you learn that his wackiness stems from the fact that the CIA secretly fed him LSD every day for eleven years.

Willis is really good as the retired killer, but also he looks really good, swapping tight t-shirts and debonair suits for military uniforms and firefighter outfits.  It’s actually a little distracting, particularly in the earlier scenes before Mirren shows up to out-act everyone.

Back when I was twelve and easily impressionable, Willis appeared fully nude in a tawdry thriller called Color Of Night.  The film itself was almost immediately forgotten, bar on the celebrity male nude websites that would start appearing a few years later.

But the nude scene that really drove me nuts was the one in Pulp Fiction; that is, possibly, his hottest role.  As boxer Butch Coolidge, Willis has sex with Maria de Medeiros, gets wrapped up in a weird bondage scenario, and, most thrillingly, takes a shower.  We see him stepping out of the shower, immediately wrapping a towel around himself, but the choreography of the scene is such that I was convinced there just had to be a flash of dick.  As a horny teen in the VHS era, I’d rewind and fast-forward those few seconds over and over again, sure I’d be able to see something.  (And I guess I wasn’t the only one.)

He’s not always hot; The Fifth Element, while a great movie in a lot of ways, is a total boner-killer.  And I’m not so enamored that I’d ever want to sit through The Whole Nine Yards or anything.  But as far as action heroes go, Bruce will always be my Last Boy Scout.

It’s been a while since I’ve done a link roundup, but here are some of the many, many, many, many Firefox tabs I currently have open:

There’s been some pretty serious news in Ontario, where sex work is inching closer to decriminalization and where sex workers just got a big boost to their rights.

Congressional candidate Krystal Ball is hopping mad about perceived slut-shaming with regard to photos of her Yuletide cheer at a Christmas party six years ago.  Her response, that society needs to get over women who have sex if they ever want to elect someone of her generation, is pretty excellent.

On a completely unrelated note, let’s move on to the Smiths, and also to this one lady that’s determined to cover every single Smiths song by the end of the year.

From the Department of Pointless Listmaking, Morrissey recently released his own personal list of the thirteen best singles ever.   I only recognize about half of them, but Shocking Blue is always a good choice, and “Groovin’ With Mr. Bloe” is of course quite excellent.

KEXP counted down listeners’ favorite artists of all time as part of their fall pledge drive.  It’s very predictable, unfortunately; Neko Case is the highest-ranking solo female artist (#32) and the highest-ranking female-fronted band is the Yeah Yeah Yeahs at, um, #58.  PJ Harvey, Bjork, Ella Fitzgerald (!) and Nina Simone all made the top 100, as did Sonic Youth and X.  But besides that it’s just a big sausage party.

But don’t fret, girl enthusiasts, there’s new Corin Tucker!  The Sleater-Kinney singer is actually coming to Providence with her new band, though I was a little surprised to see their name listed second on the poster…

Oh, and speaking of voices that saved my life in high school, Jarvis Cocker’s singing on the new tune by Discodeine.

And a Magnetic Fields documentary!  Hopeully I’ll get a chance to see it at the Film Forum next time I’m in New York…

Patti Smith, who also was big to me-in-high-school, albeit for one of her less well-regarded singles, got nominated for a National Book Award.  And, for the first time, 13 out of 20 nominees are ladies.

I don’t know when this blog turned into a women’s studies project, but to keep on the same tip here’s the rather intense Female Character Flowchart.

Finally, the Better Book Titles Tumblr has been quite popular, I guess, although I didn’t hear about it until this week.  Here’s their take on my all-time favorite novel for younger readers.