Hackers Take A Page From Candace Bushnell's New YA Novel, The Carrie Diaries

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. More »

The Secret Message Of Page Six Magazine's "Real Life Carrie Bradshaw" Story

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: More »

Marie Claire Celebrates Saturation & The City!

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. More »

When Did Divorce Become The New Death?

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.

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I Like Sex, I Like This City. I Hated Sex And The City

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. More »

36 Straight Hours Of Sex (And The City): The First Two Seasons

It's around 9pm on Tuesday night. I'm midway though the second season of Sex and the City right now. I mean, right now right now, like, as I type this, Big just held up a piece of veal and asked Carrie, "Is this a piece of veal or is this a piece of veal" and then she invited him to have dinner with all her friends for the first time on Saturday night at a hot new restaurant called Denial ("Apparently, everyone in Manhattan wanted to be in Denial." Ha ha.) I'm in kind of a weird headspace. More »

36 Straight Hours Of Sex (And The City)

Editor's note: Remember how I said I was going to watch every episode of 'Sex and the City' between April 1 and the May 23 premiere of the film? Well, for reasons of time, energy, and impending marriage, I didn't do it. What I did do, however, is pawn the task off on someone else: Emily Gould, Jezebel contributor and coiner of my favorite 'SATC'-related phrase, "Scary Sadshaws". Between today and Thursday, Emily will be watching all 94 episodes of the HBO series — that's 36 hours' worth! — and report back with her findings. A stunt? Yes. Insane? Probably. Wish her luck.

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New Sex And The City Clips Leaked

Some new clips from the Sex and the City movie have leaked and — surprise! — Carrie cares way too much about money, material things and what other people think! (But we already knew that.) There aren't any real spoilers here that we didn't already know (Carrie and Big are engaged; they're moving in together; Jennifer Hudson can't act her way out of a Birkin bag), although Samantha is curiously absent from all the scenes. What we do learn from these clips is just how much Carrie makes us cringe — from clits to toes — and how we still can't wait to see this stupid fucking movie. More »

Sarah Jessica Parker Doesn't Care About Money, Except When She Does

I predict that a lot of people are going to pillory Sarah Jessica Parker for her comments in this week's New York magazine cover story, "Sarah Jessica Parker Would Like a Few Words With Carrie Bradshaw." The crux of the piece is Parker's apparent life of contradictions: she hates things that are "vulgar" and yet she spent years playing a freewheeling sex columnist (albeit one who never took her bra off); she helped usher in a Cosmo-drinking Manolo-clad, expensive-cupcake-eating era in New York, but laments the loss of the gritty, unsanitized Manhattan that existed when she moved here in 1976. Writer Emily Nussbaum paints these contradictions as intrinsic to Parker's charming personality, though I think it will be easy for others to see the internal conflicts as hypocrisy. Thing of it is that Parker is just like every other urban bobo, who partially misses the creative poverty of her youth but mostly likes the arugula at the now-conveniently located Whole Foods. And I don't fault her for it. More »

In Defense Of Sex And The City

Michael Patrick King, the author and producer of myriad Sex and the City episodes and the writer and director of the forthcoming SatC movie, was interviewed in the April issue of W. The article begins thusly: "It's been said that New York was so essential to Sex and the City that it functioned as the HBO megahit's fifth lead character." And particularly in show's first season, Carrie, Miranda Samantha and Charlotte had the patina of real New Yorkers: Carrie was constantly broke; Miranda ate lunch from dubious-looking deli salad bars and bought cereal at the bodega; Samantha had serious roots and a cheesy haircut; Charlotte went to low-rent fortune tellers in the Bronx. Superficially, they had the trappings of actual people who live in actual New York, but over the years, the glamorous Manolos-and-Cosmo elements took precedence. Which is precisely the problem with the current stable of SatC wannabes, Lipstick Jungle and Cashmere Mafia; the lack of depth in the appearance and activities of their characters reveals the lack of depth in their construction. More »

Could Lipstick Jungle Be A Show You Actually Watch?

f you're reading this site you probably don't think Sex & The City needs a sequel. You likely think it needs to be banished from the universe and purged from the popular lexicon. Because you have a vagina and a masochistic streak, you'll see the movie, of course. But you probably aren't one of the five million or so viewers of Cashmere Mafia, the new Lucy Liu vehicle out from Sex & The City executive producer Darren Star, precisely because you know what will happen when you see it: you'll find yourself actually missing Sex & The City, the show, because for all the mindless consumerism it wrought, for the way it seemed to dangerously channel the ambitions of so many young women towards the pointless pursuit of pretty things and glamourous jobs, for the way it ruined New York...it wasn't actually that bad a show; it's the onslaught of tertiary Sex & The City propelled products — like Cashmere Mafia — that are so fucking offensive. More »

Bea Arthur Does Carrie Bradshaw In Old Lady Version Of Sex And The City

You know how the ladies of Sex and the City are getting kinda up there in years? Well, if they go ahead with the rumored sequel to the movie, then it probably won't be that unlike this parody of SATC, starring Sally Struthers as Samantha, Charlotte Rae as Charlotte, Katherine Helmond as Miranda and Bea Arthur as Carrie. (It's about damn time someone did this.) More »

How Women's Television Is Just Like Sex And The City

Slate's TV columnist Troy Patterson parses the programming on the three women's television networks today, and, reading Patterson's descriptions of each lady network, I had to wonder: could the networks be categorized using the ultimate post-modern archetypes, Sex and the City characters? It is the Most Important Show of Our Time, after all. The answer I came up with?:Of course they can. More »

Sex & The City: The Column That First Revealed Candace Bushnell's Plan To Conquer Universe, Evict The Smarts

Love it or hate it as they say, Sex & The City wasn't just a television show. It was a lifestyle. It was a movement. It was a vodka-fueled engine of demand for name necklaces, absurd stilettos, brightly-colored baubles and other accessories that theretofore might have been considered too frivolous/tacky/infantile to ever comprise a serious industry, nevertheless an economic wave, an entire worldview, which is what it has now, according to a new theory called the New Girl Order, which apparently arose from the "Bridget Jones Economy" and yesterday made its way to the wonky quarters of the Nation magazine. Which is interesting because, before all this, Sex & The City was, of course, just a curious little weekly newspaper column full of retardedly-written exchanges between inane made-up people doing blah blah blah Hamptons, that we revisit once a week because the New York Observer reprints it for some reason, I think it may be "to torment us with its crapness." But yesterday's column was different. It was actually about the sort of people who write for The Nation. And it was not very nice. More »

Revisiting 'Sex': How Do You Hold On To The Nasty Old Dude Using You For Sex?

Every week a new story seems to come over the ticker about how groundbreakingly post-post-feminist "Sex & the City was and how influential it was on culture at large. And every week the 'New York Observer' prints one of the original Candace Bushnell columns on which the show was based to remind us that this is why people now watch 'The Hills."'

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Revisiting Sex & The City: In Which "We" Read The Column Aloud To A "Friend"

"This week's rehashed Sex & The City column is all about this woman who has no money but puts up with really bad sex to sleep at someone's fancy place in the Hamptons," said Miriam to her friend Hillary, as the two sat on her Lower East Side apartment setee gazing idly at a rerun of The Bernie Mac show on her Philips Magnavox cathode ray screen. "I can't remember the time was the last time I fucked someone just to have a place to stay. The only time that stands out it was college, and that was date rape, so it's not like I voluntarily had sex just to stay at his place. Have you done that recently?" Hillary watched Miriam squeeze a stubborn inflamed pore and answered. "I don't really have sex," she said. "Oh wait, I did last week, but it was Keith." "Ah, Keith," sighed Miriam. Keith was a rapper from Philadelphia who was Miriam's ex-boyfriend. He had played a show in Greenpoint Miriam and Hillary had attended, and slept over at Hillary's house. "So it's really the opposite phenomenon that occurs today. More »

Revisiting "Sex & The City": Mr. Big Appears.... And This Time, Things Will Be Different i.e. The Same

This week's regurgitated Sex & The City column, dated April 1996 (ooooh, theme song: Lush, "Ladykiller") takes place in Aspen. Which is sort of like, if Candace's usual uberrich, retardedly-named cast of characters is orange juice, Aspen would be the pungent canned Minute Maid version of that — concentrate, frozen. (Hah! Frozen for ski season. So Samantha, that joke!) Speaking of which: Samantha shows up in this column, as does Mr. Big, and you know what? Big and Carrie kinda dig one another. But they can't commit! But they also can't stop all those constant unceasing neverending pangs of jealousy they feel whenever a terribly complex and finely-drawn supporting character enters stage right.... Lessee, this week's supporting characters are named: Stanford Blatch (who also goes by Hercules), some guy who only goes by Prometheus, Suzannah Martin, Tyler Kydd, Bob Milo, some slut named Ray, Rock Gibralter. Key accessories: white boots, mink coat, Lear Jets, cigars. More »

Revisiting 'Sex & The City': What Do These People Deserve More Than Each Other? Hint: It's Not "Your Attention"

One of the most confusing things about the old Sex & The City columns is that Candace Bushnell actually found so many thoroughly hateful people — In real life? In her ass? Unclear! — in the pre-Rachel Zoe era. Today's oldie from the NY Observer comes from 1996, the year I went to college and listened to a lot of Luscious Jackson, which brings me to the column itself: "It Takes A Shit Man To Stand By Two Shit Women He Used To Fuck And Pretend Not To Know Them; Eat Shit All Of You." It is about two 25-year-old girls who become best friends when they discover they both had the same shitty taste in 42-year-old man. One is pretty and confident but semi-fat, wheras the other is pretty and thin but semi-unconfident, and the 40-year-old denies fucking the semi-fat one and then tells her he only dated her because they would get their pictures taken all the time because she had some connection to gossip columns or something, which is when the semi-fat one moves in with him; etc. etc. and there's hitting and tantrum-throwing and we get it, Hell Is Other People Who Live In New York. More »