Fire on ice
Like Mike and Anna, I love to watch ice-skating. I could barely contain myself on Wednesday night when the contestants on my favorite reality show, Project Runway, were assigned the challenge of creating a costume for Sasha Cohen. Whereas America's Next Top Model is addictive because it's such a train wreck, Project Runway is classy and interesting. My mom calls me after every episode (Wednesdays at 10 EST on Bravo, but re-run all the time) to debrief the night's events. At the grocery store yesterday evening, I got into an intense conversation about the show with women I didn't even know. Tim Gunn's commentary about each contestant's work is indispensible for any fan of the show.
Highlights from the latest challenge, which Chloe deserved to win over Zulema:
"It was like International Male gone g-g-g-g-gay."
--Nick re: Emmett's assigned costume.
"Kara's design was basic. Not in a Calvin Klein way, in a J.C. Penney way."
--the adorable Daniel V.
When I was 13 years old, I was obsessed with the Nancy Kerrigan-Tonya Harding fiasco. Somewhere, I own copies of Fire on Ice: The Exclusive Inside Story of Tonya Harding (bought at the grocery store, now available for one cent on Amazon.com; not very oddly enough, Sasha Cohen's biography is also titled Fire on Ice, as was Santino's disastrous design last night on Project Runway, Women on Ice: Feminist Responses to the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan Spectacle (statistically improbable phrases include voyeuristic camera and fetishistic scopophilia), and Little Girls in Pretty Boxes: Making and Breaking of Elite Gymnasts and Figure Skaters. One of the points of comparison between the two came down to their costume design: Nancy had costumes designed by Vera Wang, while Tonya's were cheap and sometimes tawdry. Thus it was easy to cast them into the virgin-whore dichotomy, which made it even easier to deconstruct that dichotomy.
My obsession knew no bounds. The Tonya-Nancy spectacle broke weeks after The Pelican Brief was released in movie theaters, and I was convinced that if I followed Julia Roberts' investigative methods, I'd discover the real culprit responsible for the assault. This delusion seems impossibly weird now, but I really did spend hours at the library poring through articles about the seamy underbelly of the ice-skating world on a pre-Windows version of ProQuest. I'm not sure how sorting through old issues of People magazine was going to help me--or Tonya, whom I believed to be innocent for longer than I should have. My deluded sleuthing was based in a popular myth that the act of reading a text holds as its main goal the discovery of secret information--a fine myth that's productive of all sorts of literature from detective fiction to adventure movies. Of course law students discover corporate cover-ups in their case studies; computer programmers discover secret plots to take down national and global information systems; archaeologists decipher secret maps to find the fountain of youth; English graduate students find secret correspondence that will make for the best dissertation ever and fall in love ; and symbologists ... don't exist.
Highlights from the latest challenge, which Chloe deserved to win over Zulema:
"It was like International Male gone g-g-g-g-gay."
--Nick re: Emmett's assigned costume.
"Kara's design was basic. Not in a Calvin Klein way, in a J.C. Penney way."
--the adorable Daniel V.
When I was 13 years old, I was obsessed with the Nancy Kerrigan-Tonya Harding fiasco. Somewhere, I own copies of Fire on Ice: The Exclusive Inside Story of Tonya Harding (bought at the grocery store, now available for one cent on Amazon.com; not very oddly enough, Sasha Cohen's biography is also titled Fire on Ice, as was Santino's disastrous design last night on Project Runway, Women on Ice: Feminist Responses to the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan Spectacle (statistically improbable phrases include voyeuristic camera and fetishistic scopophilia), and Little Girls in Pretty Boxes: Making and Breaking of Elite Gymnasts and Figure Skaters. One of the points of comparison between the two came down to their costume design: Nancy had costumes designed by Vera Wang, while Tonya's were cheap and sometimes tawdry. Thus it was easy to cast them into the virgin-whore dichotomy, which made it even easier to deconstruct that dichotomy.
My obsession knew no bounds. The Tonya-Nancy spectacle broke weeks after The Pelican Brief was released in movie theaters, and I was convinced that if I followed Julia Roberts' investigative methods, I'd discover the real culprit responsible for the assault. This delusion seems impossibly weird now, but I really did spend hours at the library poring through articles about the seamy underbelly of the ice-skating world on a pre-Windows version of ProQuest. I'm not sure how sorting through old issues of People magazine was going to help me--or Tonya, whom I believed to be innocent for longer than I should have. My deluded sleuthing was based in a popular myth that the act of reading a text holds as its main goal the discovery of secret information--a fine myth that's productive of all sorts of literature from detective fiction to adventure movies. Of course law students discover corporate cover-ups in their case studies; computer programmers discover secret plots to take down national and global information systems; archaeologists decipher secret maps to find the fountain of youth; English graduate students find secret correspondence that will make for the best dissertation ever and fall in love ; and symbologists ... don't exist.
Jenny D on Sat Jan 21, 01:33:00 PM:
k8 on Thu Jan 26, 09:50:00 PM: