By emily

GRADE: F

Most accents are so excellent. For example, Southern Belle. Also, British. Every time I speak to a British person on the phone I immediately want to give her everything she asks for (“Excuse me, please, I simply wondered if I might have a couple of your internal organs?” ) just because she sounds so smart and cultured and polite. Other good accents: Russian, French, Spanish, Irish, Scottish . . . all European accents, basically, even German. I also like Sassy Carribean Lady, Minnesota, New England, Japanese . . . the list goes on and on. But it does not include: Long Island accent.

Here is an example: say you are lying on the beach, trying to enjoy one of the most beautiful summer days ever. Twenty feet away from you there is this guy. You can tell he is a guy because EVERY DETAIL of his . . . maleness . . . is disclosed by his belted (BELTED!) Pucci-print speedo. He is shouting into his cel phone. Even though you can hear every word clearly, as if he was speaking directly into your ear, it is still hard to tell exactly what he is talking about because of his Long Island accent. Something about the stock market, or about reading an MRI. Is this man a doctor? You shudder, imagining yourself paper-robed and vulnerable in the office of this shrieking moron. Then he reaches the crescendo of his rant:

“I mean, this place could be the next Fiah Island if it werant foah the shitty suhvice! I can’t get a cocktail on this beach! I have to bring my own cocktails in a thuhmos! They have just terrible suhvice. And you know me . . . I am a stickla for suhvice.”

It is all you can do to keep yourself from sprinting across the sand and strangling this man with his own banana-slingshot. But in your heart you know that this would be futile. He is like a roach, or a poisonous mushroom: if you destroy him, twelve other speedo-wearing, saddle-leather tanned Doctors (maybe he is a gynecologist! Aiee!) will just spring up in his place, because this is Long Island.

And Long Island has much more to offer us, besides assholes and its signature Iced Tea beverage. My very own grandparents happen to live in Long Island, in fact. I love them dearly, in spite of the fact that the only conversational topics they enjoy are:
1. Golf
2. How is Business
3. Art films, especially the ones they show at the Malvern theater which is a godsend because we don’t get into the city very often
4. Cats
5. How skinny your father was as a child
6. Find yourself a rich man and marry him

Ah, yes. Long Island. Home of the original planned suburb development, Levittown.

Home to a ton of nose-jobbed wenchies in Elsa Perretti ‘heart’ necklaces and those stupid ponchos, who come to NYU to major in Puking In A Trash Can.

Long Island. Home of Northern State.

I don’t think any place has ever deserved an F more.

By emily

GRADE: D-

Mister, I am sorry if I’m shattering your dreams of rockstardom here, but you fucking suck. Even if you had some modicum of talent, being forced to listen to your loud singing and strumming before 9 am would still be very annoying, especially to those of us whose Mommies and Daddies haven’t gotten around to buying us an ipod. But you don’t have any talent. In fact, you always sing off-key. You can't even remember the words to the songs, even though you sing the same songs every day! And speaking of which, why must you sing the same songs every day? My life feels Groundhog-Dayish enough without having to listen to your shitty rendition of ‘Creep’ at the same time every morning. You also do a lousy ‘Losing My Religion’ on a regular basis, and then you close out your set with a craptastic “There is A Light That Never Goes Out” that never fails to make me wish that a double-decker bus would just go ahead and crash into you. And today you were singing – I hesitate to call it that, since you were basically just reciting the lyrics in an atonal drone because you couldn’t hit the high notes -- ‘In Your Eyes.’ Your version of the chorus was like “All my instincts . . . they return . . . the ground feels hard . . . Sassoon will burn . . .” Why not attempt something an easier song, something that would be a better fit with your skill set. Maybe something by John Cage, hahahaha. I would totally flip you a quarter for that.

By B
Grade: A

You may be wondering why the NBC network has been playing the terrifying fantasy film of WILLOW so constantly for the past few days. Well you have been confused. I know it is easy to get mixed up, but the springy little creatures you have been seeing on your television screen have nothing to do with Willow at all! Pay attention to details, readers. They are the Women's Olympic Gymnastics Team! With a little observation, you would have been tipped off by the generous amounts of sparkle eyeshadow and sparkle hair gel that the little gnomes wear. In my memory, Willow did not wear any sparkles at all. For this year’s American Lady Gymnast team, on the other hand, the glitter on the competitors’ faces is almost as blinding as the spangles on their tacky leotards. (Although in the Olympics of gaudy lavendar dazzle, no one can compete with the Eastern Europeans!)

You can’t blame our gals for slathering on the glitter products. Um, maybe it is like war paint or something to frighten the enemy? It certainly makes me frightened… and fascinated. Maybe, as James has suggested, this year’s twirlers are just trying to make up for the fact that they don’t have the magical more-than-skin-deep sparkle of DOMINIQUE DAWES, LITTLE KERRY STRUG, and the rest of the 1996 MAG SEVEN.

In the end, though, I think that the real reason for the glitter is that we are dealing with teenage girls here. I mean, I guess they are teenagers. They are, right? But are they twelve? Or are they nineteen? Who knows! They all look like unholy crosses between toddlers and old ladies, but with glitter! That is where the real fascination with gymnastics lies. Yes, the cartwheels and pirouettes are pretty awesome, but what I really enjoy about the spectacle is the opportunity to watch some of the world’s most freakish people trot around like show ponies. They are funny little Peter Pan-ettes and that is great. Their life seems so cozy. Don’t you kind of wish you were one of them? How nice it would be, after you fell off the parallel bars onto your head, to hear seven little chipmunk voices cheering you on despite your humiliating failure! GOOD JOB COURTNEY M! YOU GAVE IT YOUR BEST! And then everyone would go back to the dorm and have a pajama party and apply more glitter and do handsprings. It sounds better than my life, that’s for sure. (The only thing is I bet that when they mess up on the balance beam et cetera, their mothers won’t let them eat for a week. And if you are a Chinese gymnast you get sent to Chinese prison and are never heard from again.)

In conclusion: Gymnasts get an A for being weird, for doing it on TV, and for doing it for the personal entertainment of regular folks like you and me. Also because I can’t resist shiny things. I am like a magpie.

By emily
GRADE: A

What an excellent book. There is probably nothing original left to be said about this Classic of Western Literature, so I’m not even going to try to literary-criticize it or say that it’s ‘about’ class warfare or feminism or, you know, blah blah. I will leave that stuff to people like the previous owner of my copy, whose marginal notes indicate a less-than-rigorous engagement with whatever class he read it for, as well as a deep-seated confusion about how to spell the word “bourgeois.” I didn’t read this for school, so my viewpoint is more on the level of: ‘Madame Bovary: better than Us Weekly if you’re looking to raise yourself in the esteem of your fellow subway riders.’

And of course, I do care whether my L-train buddies think I’m a brainless twerp who is fascinated by blueprints of the Olsens’ penthouse megadorm. I care because I’m shallow and obsessed with what the world thinks of me. I’m also materialistic and gluttonously demanding of creature comforts. Oh, and I often fantasize that I am the main character in a novel about my life. I love to live at emotional extremes – perfect misery or perfect happiness, with no allowance made for mediocrity, which I tend to see as failure. Historically, I’ve been irresistibly attracted to guys who are not merely wrong for me but are, in their own petty way, evil – and then I’ve become so involved with the passion and drama of being In Love that I’ve neglected to notice the evilness of the love-object. I’m also extremely self-centered (you can tell from the number of sentences I start with “I”). In short, Emma Bovary, c’est moi (and probably toi, aussi).

In modern-day publishing-industry parlance, she’s the most profoundly ‘relatable’ protagonist I’ve ever come across.

Everyone, including Flaubert, empathizes completely with this character. So the weird, fascinating thing about the book is how much pleasure he seems to take in describing Emma’s descent into ruin and (spoiler alert) death. His tone relentlessly mocks and condemns her, but then he turns around and lavishly praises her mass of dark hair, her pale skin, her dark eyes, her endlessly rustling dresses, her dainty footwear. So . . .WTF? (I’m basically quoting Harold Bloom here, I realize.) Is this about misogyny or self-hatred? About disguising the book as a moralistic tale? If anyone did learn this stuff in college, please share it with me, because I am too lazy to make up my own mind.

By emily
GRADE: wait for it

In the new movie Garden State (bonus capsule review: A- funny, well-written, despite disintegration into standard rom-com cliché at the end), the plot hinges on the fact that the protagonist’s psychiatrist dad has crippled his ability to feel by prescribing him various mood stabilizers since he was ten. He decides to go off the drugs and within four days he has cried his first tear in years, fallen in love, and had a variety of suburban-pastoral adventures with the Shins and Simon and Garfunkel chiming away in the background. The message is clear: psychopharmaceuticals are evil, feelings are good.

I used to feel the same way. But lately, I’ve been feeling . . . wait, sorry, what was I talking about? I keep losing my train of thought. This is one of the creepier side effects of the brain drugs. I started taking them (for the first time ever) about six weeks ago, for a variety of extremely good reasons that are none of your business. I didn’t notice anything for a couple of weeks except queasiness, and then suddenly one day I woke up and realized that I was not dreading every moment of consciousness anymore. Woo hoo! So that’s the first mark in the ‘pro’ column: the drugs do work.

But then there is the ‘con.’ As a big paranoiac, I have been supersensitive to any possible signs that the drugs have had an effect on my affect. The things I’m supposed to be watching out for are: emotional numbness, lack of creativity, change in appetite, and the dreaded ‘sexual side effects.’ My friend Katie also told me that when she was on the drugs she couldn’t dwell on her problems. “Something bad would happen, and instead of crying all night about it, I would cry for a few minutes and then start doing my homework,” she said, in a tone that indicated that she would have preferred to cry all night. Well, yeah, I would too. I don’t want my brain to lie to me about how I am feeling. Trusting your own brain is sort of the last frontier of trust.

But the amount of quotidian misery I’m still experiencing is enough to convince me that I haven’t gone completely numb. And I clearly haven’t lost my creative drive – look at me typing these words right now! As for the sexual side effects, that is also none of your business but I haven’t noticed any. That much. I think. I am a bit spacier and more forgetful, but that’s probably just because my brain is not yammering at me about all the shit I have to do anymore. And the losing focus thing . . . well, that could be for any number of reasons. Maybe I have Alzheimer’s. Maybe I’m just ditzy! America loves ditzes.

I am still opposed to the idea of taking the brain drugs, but you know what? Anyone who drinks, smokes pot, smokes cigarettes, drinks caffeinated beverages, or eats sweets is on drugs. Adjusting one’s own brain chemistry is scary, but since we do it all the time anyway, we might as well do it in convenient little doses that are covered by our insurance. Sorry, hippies, but I am going to give this shit a solid ‘B.’

Hmmm, I sure have been giving good grades lately . . .

By emily
GRADE: A

On a movie poster in the Greenpoint Avenue station of the G train, a heated, quasi-illiterate debate rages.

Black sharpie:“White people deserve what Bush is given you. Blacks and Hispanics have been get screwed over for years. Now you are being (illegible) by one of your own people.”

(in slightly different handwriting): “Bush is not “my people,” you racist fuck. We must all rise up together to get Bush out. Bush lies, we die!”

(in red marker)“Hispanic are kept alive by WIC checks. And their culturel values leave alot to be disired.”

(college-student handwriting) “It’s not about black, white, and Hispanic. It’s about Green!$$$”

Isn’t that awesome? My favorite part is the commentator who weighed in on the sub-standard “culturel values” of Hispanic people. Dude, you are scribbling a racist slur on a movie poster in the subway! What kind of cultural values do you have? Ha ha!

Clearly, I am a big fan of graffiti rants, the crazier and stupider the better. People love to talk about the fancy graffiti that is done with spray cans and how cool it is. My general feeling is, eh. Though I love to look out the window while traveling into D.C. from Silver Spring on the Metro and see all the places where “Cool” Disco Dan has left his mark, I would still rather read the many, many emendations to the “How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb” joke in the bathroom of Sophie’s. I’m glad I’m much more sophisticated than these people who are so desperate to have a forum to express their viewpoint that they will scribble it in any public venue . . .
Oh wait. I just realized that the internet = a defaced poster for Little Black Book, basically.

By emily

GRADE: A

Clothing ads almost always feature hot, seminude models who look as if they have just finished or are just about to start having sex. But usually it’s super-obvious that a huge team of stylists, makeup artists, and photographers with silly names like “Rolf” and “LeToi” worked very hard all day and went through like 200 aerosol cans of Evian and a metric ton of expertly smudged black eyeliner to nail that freshly-fucked look. Not so the ads for American Apparel. In these, it looks like the photographer had sex with the model, waited a sec for her to throw her skimpy cotton undergarments back on, and then took the pictures. This may actually be the case, judging from the recent wacky Jane expose of priapic company founder Dov Charney, who says he personally knows (“knows”?) all the American Apparel models. Well, I’m not sure whether or not I want to expose myself to the lusts of the muttonchopped Mr. Charney, but I would like to be an American Apparel model. I’m just putting it out there. I would like to be the new face (or, more realistically, the new ass) of American Apparel. In this spokesmodel position, my sole responsibility would be to wear an all-AA wardrobe and occasionally be photographed in it. I would be happy forever.

On to the review: if you enjoy wearing thin, comfortable cotton garments in a wide array of flattering shapes and colors, and you’re not a fan of sweatshops or that weird Gap smell, you will like this store. We here at the Universal Review are a veritable fashion show of American ensembles. B's healthy sunburnt glow is accentuated by their men’s polo in a delicate shade of pink. I enjoy sporting their booty shorts in my fourth-grade favorite colors, hot pink and black, and their racerback tank top in light blue. If you, like us, are lucky enough to live in the big terrorism bullseye that is NYC, you can go to one of four American Apparel retail outlets. The salespeople are solicitous, stoned-seeming, and super foxy. Maybe if you’re really nice they’ll follow you into the dressing room and take some snapshots. What could be more American?