Merry Christmas, NCIS!

Jane: And...we're back!  And since we saw you last, we've learned that there are people out there who love NCIS even more than we do.  They're in the know, and they will have this under their tree this year (I don't qualify as a superfan - I saw it at Barnes & Noble while shopping for actual books).  Anyway.  We left you hanging a bit after "Enemies Domestic" aired, mostly because the entire thing was a maze of flashbacks and it was really annoying.  Blah, blah, Eli-and-Vance-cakes.  Long story short: the ultimate villain (and possible contributor to Jenny's death!) is none other than Ron Butterfield (sad!).  He tries to kill Vance in the hospital, Vance stabs him and Gibbs saves Vance from Ron's attempted morphine overdose.  Eli tries to mend his relationship with Ziva by leaving a miniature Israeli flag in her pencil cup, and since it was still there in this week's episode, it just might work. 

And now for Our Very Own Christmas Episode, In Which Abby Does the Turkey Trot and Ducky Joins Facebook!

RIP Norris Church Mailer

Novelist, memoirist, model, actress, mother, famous spouse, expat Southerner.  It seems unfair that we're starting to lose a generation of Inimitable Southern Ladies before their time (oh Dixie Carter).  I wanted to read Church Mailer's memoir, A Ticket to the Circus, earlier this year (casualty of dissertation prospectus).  Guess I'll have to now.  I used to feel guilty about remembering to read memoirs by famous people only after their deaths, but all the folks on the subway reading Katharine Graham's bravura Personal History in 2001 convinced me that doing so didn't inherently make me a bad person.

Somehow, I have the impression that Norris would have appreciated that an anecdote included in her obituary sealed the deal for her memoir to become essential reading.  From the New York Times:

Before she met Mr. Mailer, she claimed, she had a fling with the then-unmarried Bill Clinton. In her memoir she told the story with characteristic wit. A friend who was in politics told her when Clinton was president, “I guess he slept with every woman in Arkansas except you.”
“Sorry,” she replied. “I’m afraid he got us all.”

Giving Thanks

Today at the gym, for no particular reason, I made a mental list of things I am thankful for (excluding the obvious - health, family, friends, Mr. TGreenie):

1. Books like Kate Walbert's A Short History of Women, which I finished last night.  It gives me hope that language can be spare and unpredictable and still arrestingly beautiful.  Also further proof that lyric and narrative can sleep comfortably side by side.

2.  Getting to blog NCIS, my favorite TV show, with my best friend.  And other writing adventures.

Pause for Photo: In the Footprint

I saw The Civilians' production of In the Footprint: The Battle Over Atlantic Yards tonight.  Review forthcoming, but seeing it prompted me to walk home via the Atlantic Yards site, instead of taking the subway.  This shot is the external scaffolding and walkway beside it.  It's like a concrete lightbox next to a black hole.

MF Says: Go See Emergency Used Candles

Since this one-woman show is only playing through Nov. 20 at the Cherry Lane Theatre, this isn't so much a review of Chiara Montalto's Emergency Used Candles as a shameless plug.  I saw it last night.  If you can make it, go see it now.

Read more here.

"Don't Abandon the Book": Patti Smith Rocks All Over Again

As a former denizen of the publishing world, I remain a lurker in their Twitterverse.  So of course last night was filled with tweets sent live from the National Book Awards ceremony, which ranged from the eye-rolling snark at the Lifetime Award Winner, Tom Wolfe ("Tom Wolfe just sang the first few lines of The Girl From Ipanema...Oh the looks on the faces of the guests near the press corps.  They ALL want Tom Wolfe to STFU") to my former boss's catalogue of bitchery about the food (Drunk broad at table next to me: "Where's the fucking steak?").

Leave it to Patti Smith, winner in the Nonfiction category for Just Kids, to expose all those cynical publishing tweeps as secret romantics.

Pelosi 150, Shuler 43

According to Deadspin, Heath Shuler ranks #42 on the list of Worst Players in NFL History, one fewer than the number of votes he got from the House Democratic Caucus today in his loss to Nancy Pelosi.  As my Redskins-watching friends from D.C. tend to wail when his name comes up, "He once threw FIVE interceptions in one game against Arizona!"  Yeah, and then he tried to play for the Saints, so we're even, y'all.  But anyway.  Does it mean anthing that he's closer to being a winner in politics than he was on the football field?  It's not an exact comparison, but Shuler managed to garner nearly one-third of the House Democratic Caucus in his bid for minority leader while managing only 15 touchdowns in his entire footbal career.  What lies ahead for us if the new minority leader can't beat down her competition as effectively as the Arizona Cardinals did?  Maybe Pelosi is the House's Norris Weese, #67 on Deadspin's list, who can use his post-NFL-debacle CPA skills to take a whack at the deficit? Oh, forget it.  The only thing worse than struggling to make metaphors between sports and politics is...well, sports figures in politics.

Blogging NCIS: Daddy Issues Remix

Jane: My goal for this week's NCIS-blogging was to start off with a brief plot recap, but since this week's episode was the beginning of a two-parter, that's a tricky proposition. But I'll try...To start with, the title of the episode is "Enemies Foreign," which makes the unspoken "and Domestic" an unsubtle clue that some big-time bad news is about to go down on American soil. We open with some random shoplifter who plays deus-ex-machina before the opening credits (which now include the Field of Dreams shot of Gibbs "having a catch" with Ziva, keeping the "real America" meme alive) to reveal Ziva's ex-Mossad-teammate Malachi and Ziva's replacement, Killer Hot Chick, in the U.S. illegally to as a protection detail for...Ziva's father, Mossad Director Eli David, who has secretly come to D.C. with Palestinian terrorist-assassins on his tail. When we last saw Eli, he was guilt-tripping Ziva into pursuing another terrorist in Africa and leaving her there, presumed dead until Tony, McGee and Gibbs rescued her in last season's opening episode, "Truth or Consequences." Now NCIS and Mossad have to work together to prevent Eli's assassination (and we're left hanging at the end as to whether they've been successful, though it's heavily implied they haven't). RIP, Eli?

MF Reviews: Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen at MoMA

After finishing a big project on suffrage cookbooks, I was delighted to be invited along on a friend’s recent visit to this exhibition. Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen, organized by Juliet Kinchin and Aidan O’Connor and drawn entirely from MoMA’s own holdings, is up now and runs through March 14th of next year. If you’re at all interested in domesticity or design...run, don’t walk. Counter Space is so worth your time and money.

I Hereby Renounce Excessive Capitalization

So instead of following up on yesterday's teaser with witty responses to the hilarious and heartfelt performances from the Mark Twain Awards Ceremony (which I finally recorded at 2 am today), I now have to eat my words. Apparently, PBS has shown a gaping lack of balls and, by an act of creative editing, made it impossible for us to, as I claimed yesterday, "Unabashedly Support Public Broadcasting On This Blog." While we tirelessly affirm the cultural value of public broadcasting, I must say BOOOOOO, PBS. I suppose that's what I get for engaging in what a former professor might have called Excessive Majusculation.

PBS's decision to curtail Fey's remarks -- especially her radical suggestion that the advancement of one woman does not indicate advancement for all women -- is particularly maddening because she brings up a crucial point at this transitional moment in our country’s political life. While I think today's feminist vanguard has done a bang-up job debunking the "Palin is good for feminism" argument, too many people still do think "feminism's succeeded (and thus obsolete)" when they see a woman in power, regardless of her attitudes toward other women who don't share her background or experience. What are we supposed to do with younger women like Karin Agness, founder of the Network of enlightened Women (NeW) and Allison Kasic, senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) both featured in the MORE Magazine’s recent “What the New Feminists Look Like.” Organizations like NeW and IWF are, to my mind, all the more dangerous because unlike Palin and her gang, the women who support them aren’t afraid of being (and sounding) educated. Most irksome of all is what a big setback these groups are in the struggle to make feminism less of a game played by privileged white women. Which, of course, Tina Fey is well aware of, given her self-deprecating joke about being a “diversity candidate.” So congratulations, Tina Fey. Just because I have to eat my words about PBS doesn't mean we can't still be friends.

Sometimes It Skips a Generation

Quoting a line from Teen Wolf as the title of a post about Sassy founding editor Jane Pratt's adventures is admittedly mixing my 80s metaphors a bit. But nonetheless, I feel a little wistful at the news this week that Pratt is teaming up with Tavi Gevinson, teen fashion blogger, to create a new magazine. Though I always wanted to love Jane, Pratt’s eponymous follow-up, it was Sassy that always had me at hello (at the bookstore, at friends' houses for sleepovers, even - gasp - at the library). And somehow, though news reports document Sassy’s lifespan as 1988-1996, it always felt like I came of age just a few years too late to really get it, because I never had a subscription. Though technically I graduated from high school just as Sassy closed its doors, its heyday was exactly that moment of my girlhood when I simply lusted for a publication that spoke to my budding feminism and femininity, my intellect as well as my age-appropriate instinct for celebrity worship. Not that I’m knocking what I did have – Highlights and Weekly Reader and romance novels pilfered from my grandmother's shelves (I’ll still remember you all fondly) – but what I really always wanted was Sassy, a magazine deemed “too grown up” for my pre-teen/young teen self. And while I'm a wee bit jealous, I’m glad that a younger generation might have something like it. I’m particularly thrilled to see this inter-generational partnership getting so much media play, since many magazines can’t help invoking mommy-killing melodrama between generations whenever they talk about feminism these days. I wish lots of luck and a big fist-pumping whoop of sisterhood to Pratt and Gevinson in their new endeavor. And since it’s holiday season, I’ll just motivate my thirty-something self to pick up a copy of How Sassy Changed My Life.

MF Teaser: Tina Fey's Twain Award

As you may have read, Tina Fey was awarded the Mark Twain Prize for Humor from the Kennedy Center in a ceremony on November 9. Because we Unabashedly Support Public Broadcasting On This Blog, and because I can't resist a line-up that promises me Steve Martin, Jon Hamm, Steve Carell, and Betty White in one sitting, I was waiting with bated breath to watch the telecast of the awards ceremony on PBS last night. However, in the name of Marital Compromise, I instead watched David Beckham getting a yellow card [see gratuitous photo for fun] in his LA Galaxy's 3-0 loss to FC Dallas in the MLS Cup Semi-Final. So I'll be waiting till Tuesday night's rebroadcast to give the full scoop on the Twain Awards (be on the lookout, readers - NCIS blogging and Betty White on the same night? Be still your beating hearts).

Anyway, some teasers in advance:

• Fey is the youngest recipient and only the third woman. While graciously acknowledging the talents of her foremamas (let's face it, could Lily Tomlin BE more awesome?)Fey nailed the backwardness of gender disparity in the comedic arts: "I'm so glad to be the first woman head writer of SNL, the second woman to be pregnant on the air on SNL, and the third woman to receive the Mark Twain Prize. I'd love to be the fourth woman to do something, but I just don't see myself married to Lorne Michaels." As a follow-up: "You know something's wrong when the white girl from the suburbs qualifies as a diversity candidate."
• My favorite line, possibly ever: "I'm not going to get emotional and all, because really, I'm a stone cold bitch."

More to come...in the meantime, feel free to share thoughts on Fey's award or leave messages of adoration for Lily Tomlin in the comments.

TV Review: Sherlock (2010)

I went through an Arthur Conan Doyle phase in my twenties when I read a lot of his short stories, and while I enjoyed them, I think I need to start off my review by admitting that I'm not a devotee. The stories are almost impossibly spare—cerebral, factual, prone to weird plot digressions (the Mormons did it!), with none of Agatha Christie's affection for human nature or Dorothy L. Sayers' interest in the final flowering of the British toff-ish culture entre les deux guerres, before it was beheaded by inheritance taxes and incorporated into the larger celebrity madness post-Diana.

I mention this only because a true devotee of Conan Doyle's Holmes might have legitimate beef with Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss' freestyle adaptation of the work into Sherlock (2010), currently enjoying its American television premiere on Masterpiece Mystery.