THIS WEEK
📖 READ: “Looking for a job when you’re in your 50s is sobering.” How Devo predicted our doom-scroll era. Wendy Williams deserves her flowers — even if you don’t like her. Steffi Graf is the “introvert’s introvert.” Why DeLisa Chinn-Tyler, the Black actress who threw the baseball back in A League of Their Own, didn’t want to meet Madonna.
👀 LOOK: This hyperrealistic painting of Harriet Tubman. Next time you go to Dollywood, you could stay in Dolly Parton’s tour bus. Photos from San Francisco's ’90s lesbian scene. A photographer took photos of all 12,795 items in her house.
🎧 LISTEN: Blondie released a never-heard-before demo. New music from Jawbox, The Cult, and even a-ha. Singer-songwriter Margaret Glaspy's "My Body, My Choice.”
🤣 LOL: My life’s accomplishments and their ideal audiences. Raunchy 80s comedy just wall-to-wall sex crimes. Potsie from Happy Days is running for mayor of Ojai, CA. Pete Davidson’s promo ad for Manscaped.
🛒 ADD TO CART: The best shampoos for gray hair. TueNighter Carmen Rita Wong’s new memoir, Why Didn't You Tell Me?, about her mother’s powerful secret (here’s an excerpt), and TueNighter Liz Alterman’s new novel, The Perfect Neighborhood, about the dark side of suburbia. And finally, the book Tanqueray fans have been waiting for.
📺 WATCH
Now: HALLELUJAH: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song. (Theaters)
Thursday: Victoria's Secret: Angels and Demons, a documentary about the brand’s very dark side. And Phoebe Robinson stars in Everything's Trash, based on her book Everything’s Trash but It’s Okay. (Both on Hulu)
Friday: Lesley Manville stars in the very fun-looking Mrs. Harris Goes To Paris (to get a Dior gown) (Theaters); Dakota Johnson stars in a Fleabaggy version of Jane Austen’s Persuasion. (Netflix)
Sunday: John Cho stars in father-daughter move Don't Make Me Go. (Prime)
OBSESSED: My Enduring Love of Pavement
By Marcelle Karp
Music is like love: it captivates, and if it fits just right, that love lasts for a lifetime. Pavement has been imprinted on my music fan heart since 1992, when the band released Slanted and Enchanted and Watery, Domestic, and when I first heard singer and guitarist Stephen Malkmus tell me the secrets of artsy boys.
During the ‘90s, I stood in packed music halls, at secret shows, and at outdoor venues with my fellow Pavement fans, strangers mostly, all of us enthralled, singing along to every lyric as if it were our own.
Oh the lore of this band, edgy in that way that a middle finger has a weight to it. There were whispers of Malkmus doing the New York Times crossword puzzle in ink, that the bassist, Mark Ibold, was a waiter at Café Orlin, and that Spiral Stairs, also the guitarist and singer, was a pseudonym.
But to love Pavement is to love the music, and not the players per se. To know vague details about band members, but not to trespass beyond. To fan, but not to fawn. Because it is the music that matters, those dips and valleys of yearning, and belated lust, and good old generational discontent.
My enduring love of Pavement means I have strong opinions about their best albums (I’m going with Slanted, Enchanted but oh how I do admire the epicness of Wowee Zowee); their five best songs (tough, and it shuffles, much like a playlist does: Box Elder, “Here,” “Flux = Rad,” “Grave Architecture,” “Shoot The Singer,” and this is where I get tripped up, because how can I not include “Summer Babe”?); and lyrics you can’t shake out of your head: “I’ve got styles, for miles and miles, so much style that it’s wasted.”
It’s not just that the music is fueled with a natural nostalgia and takes me back to a specific era of my younger years. Decades later, the songs still hold up. I can still enjoy a simple phrase like “Someone took in these pants,” and understand, in my bones, the frustration of it.
STORY: Prince Taught Me My Dirty Mind Was Just Fine
By Carolyn Edgar
I studied the pages of my brothers’ Hustler and Penthouse magazines as if cramming for a test, fascinated by both the pictures and the articles. I read their dirty books – The Happy Hooker and Secretaries’ Panties – and supplemented them with all the Harold Robbins, Sidney Sheldon and Jackie Collins novels I could afford. A neighbor’s generous donation of two shopping bags full of romance novels – plus the occasional Planned Parenthood pamphlet my mother would hand me in lieu of actually answering questions about sex – rounded out my education. I was fascinated by sex, and the more I read, the more I wanted to know. But I didn’t realize until I first heard Prince that there was a much-needed perspective missing from the magazines, the books and even the sex-ed literature: the woman’s perspective.
Prince changed all that.
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