Good. Background reading. Also, spend some time with #APHeadlines in the wake of this:
Did you see our job posting announcement yesterday? We have edited it to close applications SOONER than August 15th (Mallory will tell you when), because Mallory had 254 applications by yesterday at 10pm EST.
Two things you can read about Nina Simone today.
Rainbow Rowell and I made up over our mutual love of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and here is a great interview with her:
The first time Rowell wrote about the struggles of her childhood was in her column for the Omaha World Herald. Her voice lowers a bit, serious but without shame. “I was living in rural areas often without power or a phone or a car. Our water came from a well and a pump. My dad was not around and when he was around, he was not good. There was a lot of alcohol abuse and drug abuse. I feel like I need to say that I’m probably sane and alive because I had a really great mom. Eventually, when we moved to the city and we were on welfare, it was a step up. Being poor in the city was easier than being poor in the country.”
Despite their living conditions, Rowell remembers a home where her father read her The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. Books were her safe haven. “My mother was very strict, there was very little on television that we were allowed to watch, there were very few movies that we were allowed to watch. But she’d let me read anything.”
bitches gotta eat went to the wilderness and back:
1 search for a cellular signal. first thing i asked: IS THERE A TELEVISION!? nate looked at me as if i’d said, “would you sample this vomit and tell me if it’s warm enough?” i checked my phone to see if anyone missed me on facebook yet only to find there were, like, negative four bars. is this the motherfucking hunger games? WHAT IF I MISS SOME GOOD GOSSIP!? i’m not kidding when i tell you i spent 2% of my time working on a new book and 98% of the time wandering around with my arm outstretched trying to get my texts to go through. man, fuck nature.
2 look for african-american hair products in the local shops. i’m 100% sure that every general store within a 20 mile radius would have had at least 637 types of handcrafted artisanal peach thyme marmalade on the shelves, but would i be able to find a single bottle of luster’s pink lotion!? um, nawl.
3 wondering what everyone else is doing. okay fine. for five or six minutes, i could probably meditate. if you understand “meditate” to mean “dream up new flavors of ice cream.” after that six minutes? WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING ON TWITTER.
A brief history of the soul patch:
It found one in Luke Perry, thanks to Perry’s role in 1992′s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Ironically, the soul patch was actually fake (co-star Kristy Swanson’s cat once licked it off and ate it), but the lack of authenticity didn’t hurt the soul patch’s popularity. Perry’s soul patch in Buffy gave a major platform to the bourgeoning facial hair style, and as a reaction to goatee wearers and clean-shaven men, it caught on.
I just re-watched Starship Troopers and god DAMN that is a fine film. It works if you oppose fascism and I bet it’s just as much fun if you love fascism and are bad at sensing irony.
The panel for this post-Lean In discussion is pretty cool. This Kickstarter is also cool.
We all need a hobby, man.
THIS BEETLE CABINET, THO:
wow a lot of people want to work for you.
Does that make you feel good?
Seriously, 254 is a giant number. GOOD LUCK, LADIES. (And men, I guess. Maybe. A little.)
I am only surprised it is under 10,000. Because doesn’t everyone want this job? I am only held back from applying by my life long feelings of inadequacy.
I applied, even though I am in the UK and doing the work may require me to stay up till like 1 am.
it makes me feel great about us and SAD about the job market
Next Friday is August 15th…
Oh thank god I thought I was going crazy when I read that.
Oh thank god, I was almost convinced the dates would be different in Europe except of course they wouldn’t.
So it’s a trick?
I thought it was a trick to throw literal minded men off the track
WHERE IS OUR BERT?
Bert is there just waiting to be found! I’m seriously so excited for you, and for all the upcoming Nicole Cliffe posts that, pray, have a horse story or two among them. (Sorry, not sorry, I just love your horse-themed posts!).
And if I had the slightest experience with WordPress, I’d happily be your Bert because typos and jangled writing make me physically wince.
This is the kind of radical thinking we are looking for!
I read the New Yorker piece on Nina Simone on the train yesterday and I cried, ooh I get the shivers thinking about it, thinking about Nina. “I’m not nonviolent!” “not to worry, sister.” What a woman.
If there was any justice in the world, 100% of the discussions people have at bars and cafés would be “man, Nina Simone: great or the greatest?” “the greatest
BOW DOWN only applies to Nina Simone.
I’d be afraid that cabinet would come alive in the middle of the night and try to eat me.
Yeah, that’s just begging to be featured as some alien advance soldier shit in Doctor Who.
NO to the cabinet – it gives me the creeps
I think the Other Mother had a set of those cabinets in Coraline.
“Come on you apes! You want to live forever?”
The Other Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
A cool fact about the Star Ship Troopers film is that if you bring it up in the context of “movie adaptations that are better than the source material,” it actually makes a certain type of earnest dude with Libertarian leanings explode!
Has there been a better example of a movie adaptation that openly mocks its source material? I feel like satirical takes on terrible old books would be a cottage industry by now. Also, Neil Patrick Harris goose-stepping around in a trench coat basically playing Dr. Strangelove brings me great joy.
Let’s have the Heinlein debate, everybody!!!! It is a ritual that is very comforting to me. Here it go:
I don’t think the source material is terrible, nor fascist. As a text on its own, I can’t say I “agree” with it any more than I’m required to agree with most fiction, but when I read it, I care about poor dumb Jonnie Rico in the same way that I care about every stupid Boy Scout that Heinlein put on Venus.
I always get the shakes before a drop.
The book is pedantic and flawed in some very RAH ways, but I love it to pieces anyway (literally; my copy is wrapped with strata of scotch tape to keep the pages together). Keep Stranger in a Strange Land, you damn hippies; I want to kill bugs.
I’ve read both Stranger and Starship Troopers many times, but I find Starship Troopers to be more easily re-readable as a non-teen. Both are flawed, but Starship Troopers is more compact and comes off less like somebody tugging on my sleeve and asking, “…So did I just blow your mind, or what?”
I haven’t read it, so I am speaking entirely from ignorance (as was Verhoeven, who couldn’t get through the book). My understanding of Heinlein was that Starship Troopers was an outlier to the the left-libertarian themes in his other books, which is why it’s so perplexing. Kind of like Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron, which seems so Ayn Randy compared to the rest of his work.
But hey, the original novel gave us space marines and battlesuits, so it’s responsible for all that time I wasted trying to learn how to play Warhammer. Can’t be all bad.
Holy shit, Kurt Vonnegut wrote Harrison Bergeron???? Whoa.
TANSTAAFL ain’t left-libertarian, dude’s general outlook was like Hemingway and Rand had a baby and it decided it liked to fuck
which is, y’know, fine, especially when you’re writing Zap Laserton Conquers Mars in the astounding science fiction shorts and not profound social analysis, but the attempts by fans to revise Heinlein to not be a kind of goofy dude despite his every word demanding you recognize the goofy are sort of sad
I’ve read that he started out liberal and steadily drifted right, but I haven’t read his earlier stuff, so I don’t know how true that is.
I think 60s and 70s fringe politics just don’t map all that cleanly to 2010s fringe politics. Like he’s very very up on sex drugs and rock and roll, also on square-jawed military men slash survivalists killing the parasites and the jewy one-world-government man. It’s part of the same package as, like, people believing that peyote opens the human mind to the inner truths of the universe and also in eugenics, or the outspoken kamikaze heroes of civil rights and economic justice seeing women as currency
This is a very good description of The Problems with Heinlein’s Politics.
I just assume that Kilgore Trout wrote Harrison Bergeron to troll everyone.
I don’t think the source material is *definitively* fascist, but for as much as Heinlein was avowedly anti-fascist, he sure did fetishize militarism and the hard paternalism of the Roman republic.
Also was racist, though I don’t remember whether or not that comes up in Starship Troopers.
One thing I enjoy so much about the movie is that every criticism it levels against the book and all the books/culture of that era is righteous and well-deserved. I don’t want to be the “you guys don’t GET it” butthead! Like 90 currently-being-deleted comments are probably covering that ground really thoroughly right now.
That’s also why I like to watch a certain type of person be like “What what whaaaaa!” if I do mention the movie as an adaptation that surpasses its source. I think anyone who does enjoy literature or para-literature from another era who is also a remotely thoughtful person has got to be like, “Guilty, dude!” instead of digging in their heels and defending 100% of every word.
I also don’t fault anybody who chooses not to expose themselves to flawed works from another time because of the flaws. There are things I know it’s a privilege on my own part to “read around,” whether it’s Starship Troopers or Huckleberry Finn.
Yeah, this is mostly how I feel about Lovecraft. I like Lovecraft, but his absolutely toxic bigotry is pretty integral to his fiction, and I am deifnitely 100% sympathetic to anyone who can’t be bothered with it.
“Guys, you get that the terrifying monsters in this village are literally Pacific Islanders, right? Like, that’s a thing that we can all agree on, yes? Guys?”
On racism & Starship Troopers: The characters were pretty racially diverse, especially the background characters, given the time it was published. The language used to portray that diversity was definitely dated. I don’t remember much beyond that, though.
Basically, I think it’s probably better than a fair bit of stuff being published now, but that’s a depressingly low bar to clear.
I can’t do Heinlein’s adult fiction, for the most part (excepting “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”); I care so much about his dumb wholesome super self-sufficient YA protags, I really do.
I don’t remember it that clearly, but at the time I enjoyed reading it and I don’t recall feeling self-righteous while doing so, so fascism must not have occurred to me. So um. There’s a vague vote in your column!
Okay, vaguely Off Topic, but when the hell do I get my film adaptation of ‘The Forever War’?
As an alternative, I will accept $20M in cash to make the film myself.
THE FOREVER WAR. MY HEART. JOE HALDEMAN.
yes! such a good book.
Yessssss although I am a bit worried about how one of the future time periods would play in the wrong director’s hands.
WHICH ONE! I mean I can guess but I want to know what you’re thinking!
(don’t worry about the $20M you are certain to be sending me momentarily, I am the RIGHT director)
The “everyone is gay future.” I can easily envision someone using camp or extreme stereotypes to shorthand that section instead of actually delving into it.
Yes, I think Mandella’s alienation would have to be portrayed sympathetically but not as something to identify with precisely.
It…it’s got to be the one where everyone’s gay, right?
SOUL PATCH NOTWITHSTANDING, I loved that Luke Perry was basically a textbook damsel in distress in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (film). He fainted a lot and was frequently rescued! I think this was the first movie I saw that subverted that whole thing and it was great.
Also to this day I will tell people to “get out of my facial”.
The beetle cabinet looks like a pregnant woman’s torso. There, I said it. Happy Friday, everyone.
I want it like burning. The similarity to a pregnant belly is a bonus. METAPHORICAL FECUNDITY AND BOUNTY FOR ALL.
But…I don’t want to blame Joss Whedon for soul patches. Say it ain’t so, Toast!
You don’t have to. Whedon wrote the movie but he didn’t direct it, so we can easily attribute the patch to someone else.
It’s ok, the studio took control of the movie and I think he disavowed it, then made the tv show to redeem himself and get it right. ITS OK.
Kristy Swanson’s cat once licked it off and ate it
Kristy Swanson’s cat is wanted to deal with the rest of the soul patches out there.
a) JAZZ DAB
b) who else wants to see a crime procedural show about Cmdr Pizutti and her Dragon Queens? http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/08/new-…
“if you understand “meditate” to mean “dream up new flavors of ice cream.”
That is what “meditate” means, yes.
Horsefolk, if you aren’t following the 2014 Mongol Derby, haste to the Facebooks and the Twitters and the race website. It’s a bonkers extravaganza: There’s no mapped route for the 1000-ish kilometer course, the horses are only kinda sorta willing to cooperate with riders, vet checks can knock you out of a winning position, and oh yeah, medical support is limited by the fact that Mongolia is big and not very developed. I am rooting for the Household Cavalry riders to get pasted by some underweight jockey girl or maybe the guy whose employment is listed as “valet.” Everyone who does the race is crazy (cf. the guy whose horse bolted while he stopped for a pee break; dude hoiked up his backpack and ran 6 km to catch up with it), but historically women have done better than men in the race, because misandry.
This looks like great fun. And I thought the three-mile unmapped race we do in the New Forest point to point every boxing day was hardcore!
If someone would hook me up with bionic ankles, I would apply, but alas.
In the 2011 or 2012 race, three riders dropped the first day, one with a fractured pelvis and punctured lung after her horse stepped in a marmot hole and rolled onto her. Last year, half the riders got whammied with a nasty GI flu; the first woman across the finish line was DQ’d because her horse’s heart rate didn’t come down in time; and one young man had to drop out because he’d decided, fueled by adrenaline and vodka and probably ignorance, to participate in a Mongolian wrestling match the night before the starting gun and had separated his shoulder (he still rode at least two days, if memory serves). The BAMF/crazy intersect on the rider pool is around 90 percent.
That said, if you want to fly me over for the PTP…
bless you for this
Tangentially relevant: I once tutored the son of some Mongolian bigwig. Apparently his family owned like half the horses in Mongolia. It was a pretty good gig, because he would frequently call me, drunk, at three in the morning to cancel, and I would charge him anyway because it was less than 24 hours before our scheduled session and clearly not an emergency.
For some reason I follow him on Twitter and he seems to have cleaned up his act now.
I once taught English to a Mongolian guy who is now apparently a member of the Parliament/Communist Party over there. Must find a way to use this connection…
I taught English in Mongolia, and damn those kids could ride horses before they could talk. Also, did you know that you can get bubonic plague from eating marmots out of season?
THIS IS THE BEST THING I HAVE EVER SEEN
This makes me want to become one of the Horsefolk.
Given that this is the land of eagle-sporting 13 year old girls, I am not surprised.
OMG, there goes my day.
Have you read the website’s disclaimer? Kind-of off putting!
WARNING
You may have guessed, but these are genuinely dangerous things to do.
The website is written in a light-hearted fashion but you cannot overestimate the risks involved in taking part in these adventures.
Your chances of being seriously injured or dying as a result of taking part are high. Individuals who have taken part in the past have been permanently disfigured, seriously disabled or lost their life.
These are not holidays. These are adventures and so by their very nature extremely risky.
You really are putting both your health and life at risk.
That’s the whole point.
It weeds out the people who absolutely shouldn’t do it, which is most of us. I like the T&C for the 2015 application:
Here’s some things you need to agree to before applying for the Mongol Derby:
I agree not to be sneaky, stretch the truth, exaggerate my riding skills or lie about my weight when filling out this application form.
I understand that applying via this form doesn’t guarantee a place on the Mongol Derby and that if any of the information in the application is later found out to be untrue my place could be revoked by the organisers.
I understand that if I’m successful and offered a place on the Mongol Derby that agreement to a further set of terms and conditions is necessary.
I understand what the Mongol Derby is all about and have decided I am made of stern enough stuff to take it on.
It’s the kind of thing I’d absolutely love to do, but then I’m becoming more and more of an adrenalin junkie riding-wise as I get older.
Likewise, but I’m also losing elasticity and need a lot more recovery time. That said, I would go back to Mongolia in a heartbeat–for a more relaxed ride, though! The horses have tiny backs, jackhammer trots, and minds very much of their own, but there is nowhere else on earth quite like it.
Stepperiders does a great job of arranging tours and guides, if you ever decide you’d like to visit. Playing horseback tag at a gallop with one of the guides is a favorite memory; I’ve never laughed so much while nearly (but not quite!) falling out of a saddle as a horse spun under me.
I can’t tell from the photos, but the saddles I rode on in Mongolia were made of a few pieces of wood with light padding. Even short rides (I’m not a rider, so) caused major saddle-soreness (I would do it again a million times, though, I loved it so much). This website shows what they look like: http://salmonnomad.blogspot.com/2010/06/entry-6-u…
Stepperiders use Russian cavalry or modified Western endurance-style tack. Still more functional than cozy, but much less difficult to get used to than a Mongolian saddle.
Thanks for that link – a group of friends and I went to Spain on a riding holiday this spring, and we’re looking at making it an annual thing and going to a different place each year, so I’ll present Mongolia for their consideration!
I love this idea! I wish I had rider friends. Y’all should go to Vieques, Puerto Rico and ride the Paso Fino ponies.
but — how many of the horses can even read, though?? Some help that disclaimer will be to them.
OMG OMG OMG OMG. Just checking out the riders. I KNOW ONE OF THEM. Roisín McCourt. It totally fits, the mad horsey sporty posh set. URGH.
I WANT TO DO THIS RIGHT NOOOWWWW. Thanks for sharing!!!
NEW LIFE GOAL
This is SO COOL, haven’t linked yet, but trust me, I’m gonna link so hard when I do. Thanks for bringing it to my fevered, “I wanna be a gritty cowgirl but C’MON, not gonna happen” attention.
(Although on Wednesday we did go for an hour group ride up the mountain and pulled some Man From Snowy River shit, so there’s that.)
Um, did anyone check out the rider (American, can’t remember her name…Sam something?) who has the blog “twisted lamb”? Yes, I understand she’s a fashionista/artist/designer but in the wake of “white women wearing native headdresses=total fail”, I’m torn over her attempts at making a fashion statement. Beautiful photoshoot, yes. Kinda exploit-y, yes to that, too.
Reading fail – I read APHeadlines as AHPHeadlines, and thought Anne Helen Petersen was now doing newsey stuff.
I mean, not that she isn’t, but not that kind of news.
Me too!! I was like, “How did I not know about this??” AHP forever and ever amen.
YES, that cabinet, so many tiny drawers within drawers.
I was very confused about Luke Perry and soul patches in Buffy until I Googled it and realized he was in the movie, which I have never seen.
Oh man, I loved the movie when I was a kid. Loved it beyond reason. Used to type the hog cheerleaders’ cheer into Eliza on my Apple IIe for fun:
Kids are weird. I wonder if the movie would hold up now, twenty-odd years later.
WAIT, WHAT???
My friends and I used to do that chant all the time when we were 10-ish. I never knew it came from that movie – I’ve never seen the Buffy movie. Pop culture trickle-down is weird.
Oh god I was gonna apply for that job (I am super qualified) but I dunno if I can compete against 300 people. 🙁
Apply!! <3
Oh, I *know* I can’t compete, because I am definitely not super qualified, and the time difference makes it really awkward, but you should definitely give it a go! Someone has to get it, and it could be YOU.
Apply! Apply!
Or, do what I do when a bunch of other similarly-qualified people apply for a job I want. Put up a fake ad listing your exact qualifications. Offer a competative salary. Invite the applicants to interview in an abandoned warehouse. MURDER.
This was a chapter in Lean In, right?
The eponymous chapter no less! Few realize the full title is “Lean In (So Your Neck Is Exposed and I Can Decapitate You with Battle Axe): Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (Rivals into Elaborate Death Traps)”
I’m now having a lot of fun imagining corporate offices designed by a murderous version of Rube Goldberg.
It has to be someone–why not you? Apply! 😀
It fills me with terror. Especially since I applied after 10pm too. Lucky #255??
But, hey. You should apply. You’re guaranteed to not get it if you don’t apply. Worst case scenario if you do, you continue to not have the job you already don’t have, you know?
Apply to everything! No application is wasted, least of all this one, which will be a labor of enthusiasm and love, thus even if it doesn’t get you this job, it may be practice for an application that will get you another job.
Thanks for the support, everyone! I sucked it up and did it.
Good luck!
Look, the worst thing that will happen is that you’ll get a for-real rejection letter from Mallory, which is better than you get from 95% of hiring managers out there.
Baby Steve Buscemi is the most precious thing I’ve ever seen: http://www.vulture.com/2014/08/see-steve-buscemis…
OMG. He looks just like you’d expect tiny Steve Buscemi to look!
Also, linked off that page, Chris Pratt also was exactly what you’d expect in high school: http://www.vulture.com/2014/08/behold-chris-pratt….
OH MY GOD. I LOVE THIS.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
Steve Buscemi’s face is so much more unsettling on a 7-year old! But still adorable.
ALSO ABOUT STARSHIP TROOPERS: How timely for Americans given that our democratically-elected government has just decided that, despite seeing no return for our efforts, 23 years of war in the same place is NOT ENOUGH!
SERVICE GUARANTEES CITIZENSHIP! (Which is also something I enjoy yelling at bus ads for the National Guard.)
*sad trombone noise at the news of all those applications*
On the plus side, I am listening to Maria Bamford as I work, so I can’t be TOO sad.
STAR TREK IV IS THE BEST
It is probably too late if you already have 300+ applications but application management software is your friend.
Just wanted to say thanks for linking Samatha’s newest post; I have her site bookmarked but sometimes forget to check in. God, I love her; if I ever find myself in Chicago (that’s where she is, right?) I’m buying her brunch.
Aww, the beetle cabinet makes me miss Jane’s Bargain Bin posts at the Hairpin! Would that I could be the patron sponsor of bringing that over to the Toast!
Luke Perry in Buffy the Vampire Slayer was fucking HOT and the subject of a lot of my adolescent fantasies after that movie came out.
I just realized that I’m still mad that Dylan ended up with Kelly in 90210.
My husband had a soul patch when we met. He shaved it off accidentally. I would like an Oscar for my sincerely phrased “Oh. That sucks.”
I will never lust after a piece of furniture the way I lust after this chair, but the beetle wardrobe is pretty good, I guess.
This chair belongs in the universe of Edward Gorey’s The Curious Sofa.
I feel like this is maybe what happened to Ursula after the end of The Little Mermaid.
And I've noticed that death of the artist/the artist is not their work seems to apply only to revered male authors; as soon as mention is made of a woman in the media (actress/writer/public speaker/politician) they dislike, the shitlords start in on long screeds about how they just can't stand her books/movies/public addresses/proposed legislation because god, what a raging c*nt.