Author: matt

Well-Rounded: Potrait of the Artist as a Tit Man
Tomorrow’s Valentine’s Day. (What, you forgot? You must be that insensitive clod dating Bridget Harrison. There’s always Duane Reade…)
Anyway, if you’re a straight fella living in New York and you find yourself in that awkward first few weeks of a relationship and you’re concerned about the significance of this Halmarkiest of holidays you’ve got some options. Here’s one you probably hadn’t considered: check out the John Currin exhibition at the Whitney, which is in its last two weeks. (The museum’s open from 11-6 on Saturdays.)
If you’re dating one of those high strung liberal arts college types, she’ll have a ball with Currin’s voluptuous grotesques (or are they grotesque voluptuaries? I never can tell): she’ll also have fun seeing all the other women in the gallery slumping forward slightly, de-emphasizing their busts and shrinking from the male gaze. (If she’s gettin’ up there in the years, she’ll also love his depiction of the elderly.) You’ll have a great time staring at Currin’s painstakingly-realized pin-ups and feeling the awkward sensation of seeing your basest male fantasies writ embarrassingly large. (If you prefer your base male fantasies writ smaller, check out the much less respectable Art Frahm collection over at Lileks.)
The nice thing is that entire show comes pre-ironized for everyone’s protection. How can you take the images to heart when they’re presented as retro-jokes, replete with descriptions that evoke naughty jokes in old issues of Playboy? Take the card next to Girl on a Hill (1995): “[Currin] longs for the golden-hewed grassy hilltops of Northern California.” Now laugh together at the fact that everywhere you look are golden-hewed hills. Then you can laugh at the fact that a good portion of the pieces are held in private collections in Beverly Hills and in the WASP ghettos of Connecticut. (And if you’re extra lucky, maybe you’ll see a woman with crutches staring balefully at this image, like I did last month.)
This is fun! Mounds of it.
Of course, if your special lady is one of those uptight “feminists” who can’t take a joke, well, you’re in the wrong place, pal. You can expect to go home alone tonight, and—how can we put this delicately?—play air guitar to your Strokes CD. (The John Currin catalog only costs $50, but a copy of Juggs will run you, like, $7.) Happy Valentine’s Day.
Sidebar: Speak Mammaries. Tits are big right now. Huge! First came Currin. Then Mary Louise Parker and the other stacked starlets at the Golden Globes, followed closely by Janet Jackson‘s tempest in a C-cup at the Super Bowl. Then there’s the back-channel chatter among bloggers about one of our own that’s crossed the line from ignorable to Orange-alert levels. (Guys, do we need to discuss the difference between fetishizing mostly-underage celebrities who are hidden behind publicists, handlers, and bodyguards and fetishizing a real live person who might find your repeated, and entirely unfunny references to her ‘rack’ off-putting and even frightening? A little respect and we won’t have to resort to Antioch-like rules, okay?) Up next, A Dirty Shame, John Waters‘ next film starring Selma Blair as Caprice Stickles, a head-injury victim endowed with breasts the size of watermelons. It’s only February and it’s the best year Russ Meyer‘s had in a decade.

If you thought Seattle was full of flannel-clad aging grunge rockers and the sexiest person there is Michael Kinsley dressed as Gorton’s fisherman (left), swing on by The Stranger‘s Web site for their annual Valentine’s Day Seattle’s Sex Bombs spread.
As expected in a city where coffee runs hot and cold out of the faucets, there’s Sexiest Baristas (four of ’em), but there’s also a Sexiest Republican who makes Ann Coulter look (even more) like a she-beast. (Equal Time Regulations stipulate that The Stranger show a Sexy Deniac, too.) Then there are the Sexiest Movie Theater Employees, who look like the girls from t.A.T.u., only they weren’t cooked up in a post-Soviet lesbi-teen lab in Siberia. Sexiest Waiter? Someone out there wrote, “I’d like to lick Alfredo sauce off his ass-crack.” Like ’em smart? Check out Sexiest Physics Majors. Sexiest Retail Clerk? Babe check, aisle nine!
You get the idea. Go check ’em all out for yourself. Flights to Seattle can be booked through your travel agent or online.

From The Onion A.V. Club interview with Joe Eszterhas by Nathan Rabin:

From today’s Page Six:
“Heeb, the hip [sic.] quarterly dubbed ‘The New Jew Review,’ had used [publicist Susan] Blond to promote its launch in 2002. The magazine’s new cover announces ‘Back Off Braveheart’ to tout a photo feature inside called ‘Crimes of Passion.’ Editor-in-chief Josh Neuman wasn’t very forthcoming in describing the offensive photos: ‘It’s our interpretation of Jesus’ final hours. It’s what you’d expect from Heeb magazine.”

With tomorrow’s release of Fifty First Dates, the Pseudo Imaginary Trend of fictional characters named after fiction writers finally comes into its own.
Since we here at low culture consider ourselves pseudo imaginary experts on the Pseudo Imaginary Trends (up your nose with a rubber hose, Entertainment Weekly—or Entertainment Weakly as we like to call it when we’re feeling nasty!), we took it upon ourselves to point out the obligatory three recent(-ish) instances that form any Pseudo Imaginary Trend. Even one this pseudo and imaginary.

Fifty First Dates‘ Henry Roth and Henry Roth

Torque‘s Henry James and Henry James

Sex and the City‘s Richard Wright and Richard Wright
Start with a ponderous “academic”-sounding quote from Harold Bloom and close with a tepid kicker (“What’s next, Ashton Kutcher as ‘John Updike’?”) and send me my check, Rick.
It’s tenuously hilarious! Except that it’s not.

Disney Deaths.
Please refrain.

This month’s NYP: Tempo‘s Enrique Iglesias spread. Very spread.
Um, when something isn’t quite subliminal, what do you call it? Liminal? Really, really obvious? Gross?
Related: Fromunda.