The Bushnell Administration
This morning we were sent a tip outlining
six things that might appear in the forthcoming YA novels that
Sex and the City writer Candace Bushnell has agreed to pen for HarperCollins. According to reports, the series, titled
The Carrie Diaries,
will chronicle the high school years of
Sex and the City heroine Carrie Bradshaw and, if it remains consistent with the show, may include Carrie's loss-of-virginity to someone named Seth Bateman, her absent father, many 80s references, and the absence of anyone named Charlotte, Samantha or Miranda. Lucky for us, earlier today Gawker Media's
crack team of 90s-style hackers* broke into Bushnell's Yahoo account for us and provided us with a page from
The Carrie Diaries that Candace sent to her editor earlier this week.
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scary sad libs
As anyone who saw the brilliant (if heavy-handed)
Marxist satire Sex & The City: The Movie can attest, Modern Love knows no more determined foe than excessive product placement. But some women were too busy planning extravagant destination weddings for 250 to go see the movie with their 10 bridesmaids in time to save their unions from consumerist soul murder, a Catch (the bouquet, ha ha!) 22 exposed yesterday in a poignant
Page Six Magazine piece detailing the nuptial miss of Brazilian model Ana Maria Macedo, whose own Mr. Big, a Swedish financier,
called off their wedding via a [popular video-enabled instant message program.] What to do? Instead of stopping off at [iconic luxury jewelry chain] to pick up the wedding jewels, she called her (gay) friend Sam and demanded he accompany her to the movie he had definitely already seen. "I watched it and cried. I started to see myself in what Carrie had done. I thought, 'Oh, no.'" Where exactly had she gone wrong? Well, scribe Rachel Syme can't exactly write "seriously New Yorkers, stop dropping names and buying shit already," so she couches the fable in distracting little asides such as how she has lots of plastic surgery, brought up marriage on their first date and went as a bride for
Halloween. But let's get to the point! Employing the technique of this
Orwell scholar I know I decoded the story's subversive message simply by removing the following words:
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cover lies
Well look who's still going and going and going and going!!! (On the UK edition too. Moe checked!) Anyhow this month
Marie Claire did something truly innovative and wrote out the word "and" in lieu of the customary ampersand. Just kidding, silly! The
actually innovative thing the magazine's editors did was print issues of the magazine with four different covers. Funnily enough, the only one we saw had Sarah Jessica Parker! I wonder how they figured out how many copies of the each issue to print. Don't you wish you could be the proverbial fly on the whiteboard at
that meeting? ("
Let's see, 80,000 Sarah Jessicas will cover the nation's airports and convenience stores, 10,000 Kim Catralls strategically distributed to all zip codes known to contain sex shops and or gyms with an 80% or higher male clientele, 20,000 Kristen Davises for the Wal-Mart account and...think 79 Cynthia Nixons would be enough to cover the trekkie collector community?") Seriously though, no we don't really want to be at that meeting. Because then we would have to think of cover lines like "The Gossip! The Glamour! The Truth!" And the truth is they don't pay us the big bucks for a reason here! The truth about "How losing weight lost me friends" and so much more, after the jump.
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the bushnell administration
How do transplanted Chinese in Manhattan feel about
Sex & The City? What with the media's acknowledged reluctance to cover anything related
Sex & The City, it's little wonder they hadn't gotten around to approaching it from this fascinating angle. Until now! Bilingual
Wall Street Journal contributor Li Yuan, whose column "Beautiful Country" chronicles her life as a Chinese expat in New York for audiences in the US and Asia,
attacks this subject in today's column, which she reported the way Carrie would: by asking her friends! "The show didn't mention how the characters became successful and rich," points out a 24-year-old banker. "I'm sure they worked very hard when they were my age." A 28-year-old trader has a more jaundiced view. "I find some of its content pretty disgusting," he said. "To me, New York turned out to be more like the city in
Friends.
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mag hag
More
Sex? Really? Oh, I
know. But I also know you all are suckers for a hack photoshop job, which I'll share with you after the jump, and while I'm at it I'm just going to share what I learned from reading the accompanying piece, which I did. So: we learn Sarah Jessica Parker never liked the "Berger storyline," even as she realized it was "necessary" — like the Iraq war? — and that the idea behind the Berger romance is "what happens when it's the right guy at the wrong time," which should not be confused with the Big storyline, which was "The wrong guy at a succession of wrong times who mysteriously, through some combination of resignation and/or impotence, transforms himself into the
right guy, because that is a message we should really be sending to modern women; this love stuff, it is a WAR OF ATTRITION YOU KNOW." Oh, and remember the scene where Charlotte meets Harry and he sweats on her paper?
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hell's bells
Miscellaneous observations noted the day after seeing Sex & The City: The Movie and reading about YouTube divorcee Tricia Walsh-Smith in 'New York' magazine and the anxieties of the newly-slightly-less-rich in the 'New York Times', vaguely petitioning the godless void to find someone to marry me before I look like this.
•Divorce is the new Death. No one wants it, really, but for some reason everyone assumes its inevitability. But when it comes, what happens? Who's the greater fool? This can be prepared for, like the Afterlife. Contracts can be drawn, assets accumulated and shifted. Carrie says she came to New York in search of the two "Ls" — "love" and "labels." Of course, "marriage" is just another variation on "label," worn like an LV to designate oneself as superior, uncommon, discriminating somehow, dignified. Whatever that means.
•Tricia Walsh-Smith is the worst-case matrimonial scenario. If you don't get married, or if you botch your prenuptial agreement, or if he leaves you at the altar (a.k.a. Big) or sleeps with a random stranger (a.k.a. Miranda), you lose all dignity; all of it, gone. And without that dignity, what is left? Shoes. The end.
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film schooled
Sex And The City was
number one at the box office this weekend, in case you've been living under a rock. The flick made $55.7 million, which "exceeded expectations." How come people had such low expectations, anyway? Matt Lauer was on the
Today show this morning saying something like it must have made so much because
couples went to see it together. In other words, surely women couldn't make box office history without men! But no: Women made it number one; the audience was
85% female. On one hand, there's some pride in the fact that dollars-obsessed Hollywood has proof that women will go to the movies if you give them what they want. On the other hand, it's a little tragic that there's so much hoopla surrounding
Sex And The City. Because the movie was terrible.
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drunk email from my little sister
Last midnight my sister somehow saw the
Sex & The City movie and furiously wrote me a review that made me wonder, could this be the movie that
finally shakes my faith in the virtues of market capitalism? Seriously, ever since she took this Marxism seminar my sister has hated her fellow man too much to want to extend him the benefit of any sort of social safety net, but this movie seemed to force her to reconsider. Is
Sex & The City just a movie cashing in on a cash cow, or a tool of dialectical materialists designed to incite class struggle? Does this movie have a "message" other than"feel free to wear absurd outfits to work"? Yeah, probably not, but check the amusing email — and, uh, note the time stamp — after the Leap.
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Jezebel
Candace Bushnell talking about her TV series Lipstick Jungle on the View this morning: "At the end of every episode, I cry." So do we, Candace. So do we.
