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#63 – Alabama Football

Sep 1st, 2010 by 300 Reviews

After you move to Tuscaloosa, Alabama you find your first encounters with Alabama Football are more like confrontations. If you are a creative writer from the West Coast, your first encounters with Alabama Football resemble the film ‘Taxi Driver’. You attempt to study at the library on Game Day and find your concentration pummeled by renditions of ‘Sweet Home Alabama‘ emanating from the quad. You are startled by intoxicated young men yelling at you from their balconies at 11 AM, and confused by the content of their effusion, which consists of a word you’ve never heard used as an imperative combined with the noun ‘Tide’. You hate Alabama football. You hate its obnoxious, obsessive, cult-like devotion. You hate how it turns the city into a large, opulent tailgating party. You hate that it is sacred above all things, except small businesses. You hate Bryant-Denny stadium, Alabama Football’s gargantuan monument to excess. But then you start watching the games on television, just to see. As someone scores a touchdown, you hear the concurrent roar from the stadium a mile away, and this phenomenon is very pleasing. Your significant other, also a foe of Alabama Football, begins to make fun of you. You start to defend Alabama Football. It’s not so bad, you say, I kind of see why people get into it, you say. You love Alabama Football. You buy a ‘Bama license plate frame for your Honda, even though it looks stupid. Yet you are confused. You wonder what is the ideological purpose of this quasi-religious phenomenon. Then, you pass one of the many monuments to the confederate dead on the UA campus. You start to wonder if Alabama Football’s storied ‘traditions,’ and ‘legacies’ aren’t substitutes for celebrating the state’s other, more heinous, traditions and legacies. Maybe, you think. Maybe.

-Jim Toweill

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#62 – Hanging Laundry to Dry

Aug 30th, 2010 by 300 Reviews

In a country that is never dry, the air condenses on your always-curly hair. In alternating seasons of monsoons and stickiness, you have learned to hang laundry because dryers are luxurious and electricity is iffy. Locals hang because it has only ever been the final act of washing. Everything clings. The sheets, too, are sweating. Hours later, you return to the balcony and rotate the line. Thin cottons are removed to allow more airflow. Dry. Dry. A meditation on what it means never to be thirsty. A neighbor waves, but you’ve forgotten how to say hello.

〜

Quick, wash everything. After the first frozen jeans, you learn to survey the street for socks on windowsills. There is never enough daylight. You journey through the fabric softener aisle cradling the dictionary. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The neighbors don’t smile on the street because streets are not places for smiling. You learn summer is the season of beating sheets with woven paddles. In the sun, plastic pins will snap if pinched abruptly. Your skin bears the scent of chemical lavender. Nothing pays off. A sweater on the radiator can be worn three days later.

〜

You started to hang when your dryer broke and your wife had read an article: a social experiment to separate yourself from the neighbors. Each day is a cycle of wash, hang, fold: the primary-colored pins moving through your fingers like latticework, or pinching aphids off the hydrangeas. Yes, you have a garden. You are a garden. You tell yourself that you could’ve been a missionary or lived the expatriate dream, but if you believed this you’d already be in Honduras, or Spain. Hanging laundry is your little gift to the world. No, it’s the world’s gift to you.

-Jennifer Gandel Ridgeway


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#61 – Cee-Lo Green’s “Fuck You”

Aug 26th, 2010 by 300 Reviews

The video for Cee-Lo Green’s new single, “Fuck You,” (I’ll pause here so that you can go watch it.  You’re back?  Good.) makes me seriously lament that the last time I saw the girl I Ioved driving ‘round town with somebody else, I was only like, “My heart is broken, but I am sure my trust issues will be resolved in time.”  Apparently a good number of Internet users agree with me.

What’s the recipe for 1.4 million YouTube hits in four days?   I’d say it’s a loose combination of the following: jazzy typography, an infectious Stax sound (see: “WHHHHY LADY?”), notoriety as a prior producer of serious summer jams, promotion on prominent blogs, the dog days of August, a 9.5% national unemployment rate, and the sweet, sweet catharsis of hundreds of thousands of disillusioned young people with Internet connections and Friday afternoons to kill belting out, “Fuck you, and fuck her too,” and meaning not, “I wish misfortune on my former lover and her new paramour,” but rather, “I condemn the greed and moral bankruptcy of previous generations and current corporate America; I despair that my education and talents will ever be valued or that the Great Recession will end; I have no basic life security, no health or dental care or guarantee of a social safety net; I am ridiculed by older workers for wanting to achieve more than fetching coffee, or else I am ‘freelance,’ or else I tell my friends ‘I am freelance,’ but actually I am unemployed; I am saddled with enormous debt for a degree that was supposed to secure my bright future; I doubt my nation’s involvement in overseas conflicts; I feel powerless; I consume too much caffeine/sugar/sodium; and so, in summary: Fuck this.”

Plus, damn.  It’s really catchy.

-Sara Joy Culver

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#60 – Men in Lingerie Stores

Aug 24th, 2010 by 300 Reviews

To begin, two mysteries:  who is she?  What is her secret?

Do you need any help? the women ask, knowing their question will be answered with a tentative yes.  The clerks recognize men in over their heads, overwhelmed by the seven foot tall Mirandas and Alessandras.  The men are there to create their dream women, their dream angels, out of underwires and underwear.  They are lost.  The clerks will gently guide them to the peek-a-boo, to the Sexy Little Things. They will ask them, carefully, do you know the size you need? They will not.

I throw the clerks by knowing what to look for. I know that the Body By Victoria Bra replaced the Ipex Bra this year.  I know that my wife needs a bra (size redacted on her request), but she has no need for pushing up, for added cleavage.  She considers boyshorts and cheeksters a waste of fabric, and I love her for this.  She asks for neutrals to supplement her orange and red bras, but her underwear can be any color or pattern.  She will not use the free panty coupons arriving monthly in our mail; this task, like the laundry and the lawn, falls to me.

In the store, I do not interact with the other men.  They are in their own worlds, their own fantasies.  They are translating, the men, moving the teddies and garters onto their own wives and girlfriends.  I understand this and will not dissuade them of it.  I find my wife her requested bra, nude, (size redacted), choose a few pairs of underwear, underwear that she will coo over and that she will, beloved, wear. I make my purchases and slip back out into the regularity of the retail landscape, pink bag in hand, a mystery unsolved, another resolved.

-Colin Rafferty

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#59 – The “Trash Your Dress” Phenomenon

Aug 19th, 2010 by 300 Reviews

"My Joan of Arc"

"My Joan of Arc" copyright John Michael Cooper 2006

Because a ring and a vow are apparently no longer sufficient, today’s bride must undergo yet another test: if you love him, destroy your dress. And take photographs.

Some photos are playful: brides and grooms splashing through waves with the insouciance of a couple that’s never signed a mortgage and didn’t pay for the $1500[1] gown now soaked in salt water. Others prove more insidious—a smirking, shovel-wielding groom leaning over an open car trunk, eyeing a pair of patent-encased feet amid a flurry of crinoline. (Wedding-night jitters, indeed!) Then there’s John Michael Cooper’s “My Joan of Arc,” in which the smiling bride stands, arms extended, as the dress burns from her body. Perplexing and provocative, these “anti-bridals” purport to be oppositional and transgressive, a subversion of tradition, an expression of agency, a complicated engagement with historical narratives. They’re more germane than they initially appear.

We’re trained to cherish our scraps of satin and lace, to seal them away, unscathed, until we bestow them decades later to the daughters we hold as our biological right. But dresses get stained, and daughters remain unborn. And marriage resembles scaling Everest: the ones who make it say it’s the greatest thing they’ve ever experienced. Yet the trek is challenging, and survival’s uncertain.

So perhaps, within its problematic elements, this movement acknowledges something we try to keep veiled: the fact that to marry is to embrace compromise and acquiescence, to agree to stand naked, shorn, and unarmed before your primary object of affection, to eschew all others. We pretend that ever after is inviolable, but the threats are implicit in the promise: there will be others, and they will spark desires we did not imagine we could ever contain. But we have vowed, and we shall remain immobile as the flames erupt around us.

-Elizabeth Wade

[1] The average cost of a wedding dress in the US, according to the Bridal Association of America.

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#58 – The Gender Binary

Aug 17th, 2010 by 300 Reviews

For those who feel comfortable in one of two available boxes, the gender binary makes life easier. If you know who you are and who lights your fire, then you always know whether the person you’re interacting with at any given moment has firelighting potential. Each role is prescribed, waiting to be enacted again as it has been countless times before. The alternative is a world of constantly figuring people out—of entering situations that could mean anything and determining their meaning from within.

Sadly, the biggest problem with the gender binary is also the most ignored: it doesn’t exist. The notion of a pink/blue dichotomy is just an agreed-upon myth—a convenient fiction. The world is full of people who don’t fit: Women born male. Men born female. Androgynes who feel no allegiance, regardless of physicality. People born with ambiguous bodies, who must decide what role to inhabit. Even these categories are insufficient in the face of the diversity of human experience, which is rendered invisible and unacceptable by the insistence that only two valid roles exist.

The problem’s bigger than that, however. Those people who are comfortable living in one of the boxes? They’re still people living in boxes. They may not feel constrained by the roles they’ve been handed, but what if they hadn’t been handed roles? The unremarkable football player might have excelled at ballet. Your grandmother the quilter could have been an architect. That senator loves his wife, but enjoys being anally penetrated—just every once in a while.

For those of us who don’t fit into the binary, it just makes life harder, while even those who do fit are limited by it. The task of dismantling gender may seem insurmountable, but it’s worth working toward—not just for the misfits, but for everyone.

-Dustin L. Collins

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#57 – Women Who Try to Dissuade Men by Sending Them Pictures of “Cute” Stuff

Aug 13th, 2010 by 300 Reviews

I like you.  No, I really like you.  Here’s how much: I rearrange my strenuous schedule as a part-time summer enrichment teacher so I can spend my entire afternoon, five days a week, logged into an instant messenger application; I want to be able to flirt with you while you’re at work using Revit to label plans for new toilet partitions & to locate grease traps.

Oh & how I flirt.

I average at least three compliments about your smile per afternoon.  Fortnightly, I propose we run away to travel Europe together or teach English as a foreign language in Morocco.  I craft jokes with just the right balance of innuendo so as to let you know I find you desirable but to keep you from thinking I’m a pig.  I use winky emoticons.  Constantly.

So don’t think you can fool me with your coy routine.  If you are tired of being called “adorable,” & “the prettiest Junior Architect ever,” you’re not going to dissuade me with pictures of kitties losing gravity, or slo-mo video of cats jumping out of boxes.  Not even a kitty riding a tortoise will dissuade me.

Instead, the entire contents of cuteoverload.com can only make me adore you more!  Don’t misunderstand, I’m way too manly for this stuff & I totally hate it, but in my hetero-normative worldview, you only become more attractive with every fluffy, furry critter you fire at me.

It’s as if you’re saying: “I like cute stuff so I’ll be a good mommy!” & I’ll be damned if that’s not what I’m secretly looking for, here, in front of my laptop, as I sit alone in my boxer shorts, listening to heavy metal, scratching myself.  A good future mommy.  Who likes cute stuff.   I’d say it’s pretty much my only hope.

-Jeremy Allan Hawkins

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#56 – How To Make Love Like A Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale by Jenna Jameson ghostwritten by Neil Strauss

Aug 11th, 2010 by 300 Reviews

Book IV, like the other chapters of Jenna Jameson’s autobiography, references a Shakespearean sonnet: “An Imperfect Actor on the Stage”. The admission of Jameson’s own shortcomings as an actress seems odd: there is a belief that porn is meant to be the unfurling of a fantasy—a ludicrous situation presenting itself, the fiction trope of a stranger (you!) coming to town, the everyman victorious. In Jenna’s tell-all tale we learn that everything has purpose: the implants were to enhance her film career, the pale lipstick to make her lips look larger, the dark cat-like eyeliner to make her look older—perhaps to remind men of their daughter’s friends and not their daughters.

Jameson also reveals what she believes to be her rationale behind her career path: a long series of traumatic experiences. Jenna describes these moments in vivid first-person detail—stories of unwanted sex, finding friends dead in hotel bathrooms, meth addiction—in order to shock us and in order to let us know of the real Jenna Marie Massoli. These terrible things! we say. Our fantasies are ruined now! we say.

Our fantasies, of course, are not ruined. We are not shocked. Of course! we say. No wonder she turned to porn! we say. The falsehood of pornography is nothing new: like that would ever happen, those can’t be real, she’s totally faking it, that’s what our slumber parties looked like, sure. Knowing the fantasy makes the fantasy. The zipper on the monster suit (or in this case, the areola scar or the exaggerated breathing) is a beautiful reminder of the disingenuous—Prospero asking for our indulgence—false simulating real, a gentle breath from our own sexual utterances in the moments leading up to, during, and after orgasm: our belief that this, God, this is the best thing ever.

-DeDe DiDonato ghostwritten by Brian Oliu

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#55 – Of Moss & Hipsters

Aug 6th, 2010 by 300 Reviews

The problem with the emergence of the 21st century hipster is how to decide what a “hipster” is. The characteristic schisms – my post-punk won’t date your jazz-age – tell us the qualities of hipster, not what makes a hipster. This has led to articles demanding the “death of the hipster” and for good reason, since “hipster” seems to be an all encompassing stereotype. I propose that, aside from a few outposts, the true hipster is the hipster of Portland, Oregon (example: Fothing). This is due to two qualities of Portland that every twenty-something eager to be cool must acclimate themselves to: the jobs and the weather.

Due to its economy, Portland cannot boast real professional mobility, and the hipster deciding to live in Portland resigns herself to service or clerical work without the security of advancement. Art, therefore, becomes the social ladder to climb, not the 200K/year job in finance (I’m looking at you, Williamsburg).

More importantly, it rains in Portland. A lot. If you’re having a good day and it’s been raining for a week, you understand irony. Since toting an umbrella in Portland is universally un-cool, the thrifty hipster must buy clothes with an eye for utility: chic shoes that can muck through a puddle, rain jackets, pants that can take the bike-spray of water and mud. Fashion stays individualized, but practical. The result is a utilitarianism that substitutes for what is most repulsive in a hipster, self-conscious irony.

While ego-centricism still abounds, its snobbery is softened by its honest attention to art and its utilitarian approach to fashion. The exceptions become transparent in light of these qualities, and eventually sink into the bourgeois obscurity of NE 23rd street, never to be seen again, leaving Portland’s non-conformism to those that have respect for, and will continually challenge, what is cool.

-J. Kirk Maynard

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#54 – Watching Deadliest Warrior

Jul 27th, 2010 by 300 Reviews

Every Tuesday night, we gather around the television. It is time for Deadliest Warrior, a show where two historical tough guys are forced into metaphorical battle, a winner determined via weapons tests and computer simulations. Pirate vs. Knight. Samurai vs. Viking. Jesse James vs. Al Capone. It is a show shamelessly targeted at male viewers, aged 18 to 34, especially those of us who want to watch two people fight for no reason, but are unhappy with the lack of time travel in boxing. There are only three kinds of commercials that air during this hour: action movie previews, fast food ads and, of course, diamond commercials.

We laugh at the nonsensical match-ups of the show, at the “scientific” experiments, at the trauma doctor confirming, once again, that decapitation is an insta-kill. But we are made one with the show, we become a part of it. We gnash our teeth like the Zande warrior, we throw pillows as though they are pila, we give victorious cries of “Spetsnaz!”

We ache to see blood spill from ballistics gel torsos.

As the show draws ever closer to determining who is deadliest, we cast sidelong glances at each other, sizing ourselves up. We know that soon, very soon, they will run out of historical warriors, and we will be next. If we perk our ears, we can hear the same thing happening in frat houses and sports bars across the country, we can hear our peers taking up arms. We know will be pitted against one another, using our fists, our sports equipment and our musical instruments, the knowledge we have extracted from action movies. We will be propelled into battle by our desire to impress those loved ones who now wear the diamonds we have bought for them.

-Sam Martone

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