By emily

Grade: C

Let’s face it: there is absolutely no reason to have Cable anymore. Every single good show on it has jumped, Evel Knievel-style, over a pool of a thousand sharks. Dave Chapelle and Sascha Baron Cohen and Jon Stewart are still funny, but not $100/month worth of funny. Adriana is dead. And I don’t even want to talk about Six Feet Under. Besides, as the number of people who have TiVo increases, we Cable subscribers are quickly starting to feel like the one person on the subway car who has a discman instead of an iPod. (What is up with the rAndOm capitalization in these technical innovations, anyway? Are they trying to be like a DuMb abbreviation for an NYC neighborhood?) Anyway, I am going to start weaning myself off of the dark box asap. I realized this last night while watching Duplex, which is a wacky caper film in which Ben Stiller and Drew Barrymore try to kill an old lady.

There is no excuse for this sort of behavior (watching Duplex, not killing an old lady, although of course that is also bad). Except I guess being on an airplane. Duplex, though it sometimes seems like it’s going to, does not quite go so far past bad that it completes the 360 back to good. It’s just really, really bad and kind of fascinatingly ill-conceived: can you imagine people sitting in a boardroom somewhere saying: let’s make a fun comedy in which Drew Barrymore and Ben Stiller keep trying to kill an old lady but their efforts are always thwarted by a sinister black cop? Henry really enjoyed it, but that’s just because he likes watching people push old ladies down stairs. I felt dirty afterwards. Damn your molesting ways, Cable!

There are plenty of other good reasons not to have Cable, besides its way of being expensive and forcing you to watch bad movies:

the number one reason is: if you live in New York, you have to have Time Warner Cable, and though I enjoy their Columbus Center Mall (in spite of its being cursed), I really hate Time Warner. They use their cable monopoly to get away with ridiculously shitty service, chronic service outages, unreliable installers and repairmen, and general weirdnesses. For example, we used to have Showtime and then one day, it wasn’t there! Maybe they somehow found out how much we were making fun of the L word. I know that the normal thing to do in this circumstance is call and complain, but of course that will get you nowhere with these people. We are talking about the same people who make you haul your cable boxes into Manhattan, haul them back to Brooklyn because their office is closed on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, haul them back into Manahttan the next day and wait on line for an hour and a half JUST TO CHANGE THE NAME ON THE ACCOUNT.

I am starting to think that it isn’t enough just to give up Cable, because that might mean that I would just end up watching all the things I used to watch before I had Cable, such as Elimidate. I might have to give up TV entirely. Maybe this will usher in a new period of asceticism in my life. I have already given up coffee and being a huge bitch for no reason. I think I’m on my way to becoming some sort of holy person.

By Emily
Grade F

If you are going to be homeless, smelly, old, and drunk all the time, why hide your light under a bushel? Obviously the correct thing to do is get together with a pack of like-minded smelly alcoholics, find a likely spot of concrete with as much pedestrian traffic as possible, and set up a perpetual party there. You should also make sure to get into shouted, slurred arguments with fellow members of your bum-pack as often as possible, especially ones that involve staggering around the sidewalk while spouting incomprehensible gibberish and occasionally crying. And when your bloated liver has finally managed to transport some of your booze-only diet into your bladder, there’s no point in walking all the way to the McDonald’s across the street in order to use the facilities. In fact, don’t even bother facing away from the Sunday afternoon crowd of moms and babies and churchgoing old ladies. Just whip out your mottled, chicken-sausage looking weenie and let it rip wherever you happen to be standing.

It’s also probably a good idea to add new members to your bum party family when you can, just to keep the passerby from getting bored. It’s like when a flailing sitcom gets a new cute kid character: that new bum lady with the scary bruised face who likes to hang out in the deli and beg for juice is totally your Raven-Symone!

Okay, I know it’s kind of mean and wrong to, uh, mock the homeless. But these people aren’t your ordinary quietly miserable types who make cardboard posters and ask for change and seem legitimately disappointed in the hand they’ve been dealt. The Greenpoint Ave. Bums seem to really enjoy being homeless. Sometimes on my way to work I see them, already (or, more probably, still) stumbling and swigging from bags, as if they are in some sort of Broadway musical about being homeless, and I am seized with a pang of – oh god, is it jealousy? Wow, I must really hate my life.

By B

Grade:B

Starting Over, in case you didn’t know, is the most revolutionary television program of all times. This brilliant soap-opera-meets-reality-show-meets-Dr. Phil is taking the tired “seven strangers picked to live in an apartment” formula to thrilling new heights of banality, by being on Every Fucking Day. And I am not talking a measly thirty minutes here. No, you can spend five whole hours per week following the life struggles of this constantly rotating armada of completely hopeless women. While Survivor, much as I love it, never seems to linger long enough on the castaways’ petty bickering over rice and coconuts, Starting Over has all the time in the world to devote to the most prosaic of conflicts, such as, Is Josie a Bad Mother For Letting Baby Chloe Chew on a Biscuit and Will or Will Not Deborah (pronounced, duh-BORE-uh) Eat With the Group? In comparison to MTV’s venerable THE REAL WORLD, which is also produced by the reality pioneers of Bunim/Murray, and which is forced to edit five months of exploits into a few barely-there SweeTarts of catfighting and navel-gazing, Starting Over is downright epic. I swear it is Mary-Ellis (RIP) and John’s Iliad, or their Gravity’s Rainbow, or their Remembrance of Things Past. And believe me, I would not put it past them to spend a whole episode on the topic of Precisely How Delicious and Delicate is Towanda’s Little French Cookie?

Here is the concept behind the program: They take a bunch of middle-aged ladies, each dysfunctional in her own way, and come up with a diagnosis for each one. For instance: Maureen smelled bad and smoked too much. Nyanza was your token lunatic black lady, though she later ceded that mantle to Kimberlyn and, now, Deborah. (See pronunciation key above.) Christine 1 was extremely fat. Cassie was a total idiot. Et cetera. After each woman’s problem is pinpointed, it is reworded into a euphemistic goal, appropriately cloaked in jargonistic therapy-speak. In this way, Christine 1’s goal became, RECLAIM MY WOMANHOOD. (Note: ew ew ew!) Maureen’s became, BECOME A STAND-UP COMIC.

Finally, they place the women in an over-the-top REAL WORLD STYLE MANSION, except with a twist of lady and another twist of inspirational. Think lots of paintings of leaping, stylized rainbow ladies, all bosomy and uplifting. YES! Then they bicker a lot, hug, menstruate incessantly, and, receive therapy from celebrity “Life Coach” IYANLA VANZANT. This is the kind of therapy that is mostly concerned with humiliating stunts and camera-ready activities, such as forcing the women to take embarrassing, nude, boudoir photos, so that they can “love their bodies” or to don skimpy teddies and purple feather boas to dance around on the countertops and “celebrate sexuality.” When the producers are sick of them, they are deemed "cured" and graduate. It all culminates in receiving The Most Precious Gift, which is usually a make-over and a trip to the spa.

The first season of Starting Over was a fabulously unpredictable car-wreck—no one seemed to know what was going on—especially the producers— which made for a refreshing change of pace from the usual, predigested reality crap, even if sometimes it seemed like there was no story at all. The new series has been airing for a few weeks now, but it seems a little… professional for my taste. Frankly, these women are just not as wretched as they were before. JOSIE looks almost (almost) pretty, now that she has popped out that enormous, bald child, and TONI BRAXTON’S PRACTICALLY-AS-BEAUTIFUL SISTER is trying to “learn to forgive.” Two of the new women, Jennifer and Kim, do not seem to have any discernible problems besides looking like newscasters. But I do not watch Starting Over to see halfway attractive people. I watch it to see the miserable, the destitute, and the terminally hideous. Please, give me back THERESA, with her disfigured face and her boyfriend-stealing ways. Give me the fat Mormon PJ, and her constantly swollen glands. And Josie, could you please do us all a favor and get knocked up again by one of a possible three or four trailer-dwelling suitors? I miss the old Starting Over. Deborah was the last beacon of utter disaster, and she stalked off in an inexplicable huff on today’s episode, presumably never to return.

In the spirit of being helpful, I would like to nominate my eleventh grade history teacher, Miss A Taylor as a prime candidate to rehabilitate the show’s hopelessness quotient. Trust me, Bunim/Murray-- with her gimlet eyes and quadruple boob syndrome, her irrational confusion over the most elementary of geographical facts (east versus west, north versus south, and so on) and her tendency toward hysterical, inscrutable crying jags, this woman would put even the most hardcore of the Starting Over HARD LUCK CASES to shame. I smell a ratings bonanza!

Unfortunately, the sheer volume of Starting Over-age makes the program a little daunting to keep up with, especially for people who are not able, for whatever reason, to be parked in front of the television every weekday at noon. That is a fine hour for the show’s target demographic of sad, unemployed, vacuuming wenches, but we bon vivants and gentlemen of leisure need our beauty sleep. I simply cannot be up that early, at least not more than once a week. And it is important to keep up, because as each rehabilitated lady graduates the program, she is replaced by another who is equally pathetic—but in a different way. Yes, it is heartening to know that there is an unending supply of desperate housewives eager to have their weight problems, vaginal maladies, and emotional hangups laid bare in front of the camera, but you have to be careful, because if you miss a week of programming, you will turn on the television to find all your favorite characters replaced by unfamiliar doppelgangers. Imagine my horror on the terrible day when I tuned in to discover that NYANZA AND MAUREEN had disappeared, never—okay, rarely—to be seen again. (The one exception is gorgon-faced “style expert” ANDIE, who never misses an opportunity to make a reappearance.) The solution to the problem, of course, is to use your boyfriend’s TiVo to stay current, but BEWARE-- he will get very mad at you if you cause his precious Olympics to be erased by clogging the memory up with your ladyish nonsense.

But those are quibbles anyway. The genius behind Starting Over that it combines the addictive relentlessness of a daytime soap opera, the sexy, hothouse atmosphere of THE REAL WORLD and the borderline pornographic sob-story luridness of Queen For a Day. I am confident that with a few minor adjustments, it will be right back up to the high standard set by season 1. A little less polish and a little more NYANZA, please!!!

By emily

Grade: B-

Oh, you poor poor children of the 90s. Not only do you have to get over being named, like, Jack and Seamus and Emaleigh and Skyden, you have to be entertained with such bland, stupid, third rate pop culture. What will you do if you don’t think Anne Hathaway and Jennifer Garner are adorable? What if the filmic oeuvre of Hillary Duff and Chad Michael Murray leaves you cold? What possible alternative do you have to Everwood and 7th Heaven and the Uncle Jesse’s Wife Beach house Show?

Well, you kind of have the N, but even it is not all that. It is mainly notable for the program ‘Degrassi: The Next Generation,’ which is superior to the major networks’ Millenials-themed offerings for a number of reasons. In keeping with the tradition of journalistic excellence that we strive to uphold here at the Universal Review, I have only ever seen about half of an episode of this show. But I did an extensive interview with my cousins (ages 7-14) about it. They appreciate the fact that the show doesn’t shy away from real-life issues, such as abortion, parental gayness, and dressing goth. The only problem is that even though the show is stuck in perpetual Very Special Episode-mode, you can’t take anything too seriously because the characters all have silly Canadian accents. Degrassi, like You Can’t Do That On Television, never overtly mentions its Northern provenance, but if you were to play a drinking came where you drank every time a character said ‘soorry’ or ‘aboot,’ you would get hammered. (Let’s!)

Another reason Degrassi is better than The OC is that the teenagers on it are played by actual teenagers and they lack that Aryan Nation symmetrical-faced blandness (translation: they are dogs, especially the main character girl). This is a step in the right direction. I for one am sick of everyone on tv having the vapid, Midwestern-pretty aspect of those models you see lost on the subway sometimes, clutching their model books and staring vacantly at their reflections in the windows. I feel that having ugly Canadians on tv is better for young people's self-confidence. Maybe I will watch an entire episode of Degrassi sometime.

By B

Grade: A+

How can anyone not love HEART? What is up with all the haters? Even Henry would like them, I bet, because they are kind of like heavy metal. But he probably does not realize this. Henry aside, the reason you should all love HEART is because they satisfy very many thirsts. If you are in the mood for a heart-wrenching power ballad, lucky for you, because they have THESE DREAMS and WHAT ABOUT LOVE. If you are in the mood to hear some ladies really go insane, you are even luckier, because they have MAGIC MAN, BARRACUDA, and, of course, CRAZY ON YOU, which is one of the classic spaz-themed songs of all time. If you are in the mood for a skinny lady, well Heart certainly has one of those. And if you are up for a fat lady hiding behind an ivy-covered Grecian column, well, I’m not saying anything, but you might find that you enjoy Heart as well!!!

We went to see Heart at the Beacon Theater on Tuesday. Fuck, those ladies are amazing. There is nothing quite like watching a lady as old as my mom doing scissor kicks and throwing her hair around while playing the electric guitar! Cameron Crowe is a lucky man. Ann Wilson looked way skinnier than usual, but she shouldn’t have been wearing that weird flowy slip. It was obviously meant to conceal, but I think she would have looked better without it. Anyway, I’m not really into doing concert reviews. I think it is enough to say: You missed it! Better luck next time. I heart Heart.

By emily

GRADE: A/F

Back in college (or ‘discussion hour’ as I am coming to think of it), one of my least favorite topics was always ‘the world is nothing more or less than our perception of it,’ which some Matrix-loving asshole would always find a way to drag into the conversation. (Also bad: ‘What is art?’).

However, it has recently come to my attention that, um, the world is . . . nothing more or less than our perception of it. For real! I found this out when finally, after maybe three or four years of procrastinating, I went ahead and saw an eye doctor.

It turns out that it is not normal to only have a vague idea of what you’re ordering (“Uh, I’ll have the . . . . #4?” ) when selecting from the lighted signboard at It’s A Wrap. It turns out that it is a huge miracle that I haven’t been hit by a bus. Yes, I once was lost, etc, etc, was blind, but now I see. And omigod, look at all this stuff! Since when have there been people on that roof across the street from my office building, sunning themselves in deck chairs in the middle of the day? Also, since when has everyone had such bad skin? I was really giving you all the benefit of the doubt, it seems.

Being able to see fucking rocks. It is so awesome. It’s changing my whole worldview, for lack of a less dumb way of putting it.

The price of this exquisite privilege, however, is big-time inconvenience. That ad featuring a member of the supposed band Lillix makes getting contacts seem really liberating and fun; I assure you that it is not. There’s really no getting around the grossness and creepiness of having a little sliver of plastic stuck to your eyeball. The other option of course is glasses. I kind of like the idea of glasses, and of being a glasses-wearing girl, but you have to admit that there’s a little bit of a stigma there. I don’t care so much about the men not making passes, but I do care about being perceived as even more of a dork than I already am. Or as even more of a young professional. But I think I am going to have to start wearing the glasses anyway, because the other day I was trying to get one of the contacts out and I had a terror-fraught twenty minutes of being almost sure that the slippery little varmint had somehow gotten lost on the wrong side of my eye socket, and that I was destined to go down in urban legend as the girl who was blinded and killed by an errant contact lens in the brain. (Please don’t write and tell me that there’s no way this can happen. I know that. I may be blind, but I’m not retarded.)

Sigh. Glasses. I am trying to think of a glamorous glasses-wearing celebrity and the best I can come up with is Lisa Loeb. You said that I was naïve, oh, but I thought that I was strong . . .

By emily

GRADE: B+

I would have preferred to see Vanity Fair, but some people will only go to see movies that feature drugs , the drug trade , drug research gone awry leading to someone turning into an ape-beast , Satanists , giving birth to the son of Satan , being possessed by Satan , werewolves , psychics , gangsters , psychic gangsters , or heists. It worked out okay in the end because Maria is such a good flick. It is about a 17 year old pregnant Colombian rose dethorner who, understandably, hates the inescapable boredom and poverty of her life. She yearns for something more, but unfortunately that something can only come in the form of being a drug mule. She is promised five thousand dollars if she can successfully carry 62 kumquat-sized heroin jujubes in her stomach all the way to New Jersey (“a small town near New York,” according to the sleazy dude who recruits her). If she fails, she and her entire family will be killed. If one of the pellets breaks inside her, she’ll die of an overdose. She and her fat best friend are joined on their incredibly tense journey by an older wenchie who looks kind of like the lady at the reception desk of the Y, as well as a sad-eyed lady named Lucy who has made the trip twice before with the intention of visiting her sister (both times failing because of the shame of being a drug mule). Pop quiz: which one of them is going to die?

What I liked about this movie, besides the seamless, documentary-esque realism that Sundance gave it awards for, was its depiction of what it’s like to come to New York. If you came to New York at some point, take a moment to reflect on your experience. Now imagine what that experience would have been like if you knew absolutely no English, had no friends or family to help you out, and were terribly frightened of being killed by drug dealers. Can you imagine still wanting to stay? Watching this movie, I sort of could. Weird.

Normandy and I had the idea a while ago for a new kind of psychotherapy called Putting it in Perspective Therapy. The idea is that you go in, whine about your poor self-image and how your parents just don’t understand your artistic ambitions for a while, and then eventually the therapist is like “That’s nothing. One of my other patients has no arms or legs and is blind, so he couldn’t see what was happening when his house caught fire, and now he is burned beyond recognition.” This movie is kind of like P.P.T. Now whenever I am unhappy with any aspect of my life I can thank my lucky stars that I’m only filled with uncertainty, and not heroin pellets and uncertainty.

By B

ALTERNATE GRADE: F

here at the universal review, we do not always agree on everything. bjork and her new record are a perfect example. (less perfect examples include the question of "is B a good or bad person, generally speaking?") we'll stick to bjork for now.

for reasons best not to get into, i have been subjected to more "a capella" "music" than any sane person should be. my hatred of the "form" is well documented, even if i have been known to do a good job of smiling wanly and pretending to like it. and guess what!? i also loathe and despise bj'o'rk. yes, i did have a brief flirtation with the sugarcubes in high school, but we can forget that. i certainly have-- the cd is scratched beyond recognition.

anyway, i became bored with the sugarcubes and then i was just lukewarm on the bjork question. then i saw dancer in the dark. jason rosen was heaving with sobs in the seat next to me throughout the film, but that did not prevent me from hearing the music. it did not sound good. bjork's problem is that she seems to be making the songs up as she goes along. her music reminds me of 11th grade history class where, in one ridiculous group project, we had to perform a semi-impromptu "opera" about the ottoman empire for teacher and prime Starting Over candidate, Miss A Taylor. We had, i think, one night to write it. i played a sultan, katie was a harem girl, and jamie was the rollerskating personification of the garden of allah. if it sounds like it was in poor taste, you're on the right track. anyway, the preparation comprised about five minutes of scribbling out notes, four hours putting costumes together, and a full evening of eating popsicles while rollerskating around my basement. the result was, i imagine, not that different from what Medulla sounds like. i don't know because i haven't heard it. But it was not that different from Dancer in the Dark. It might even have been better-- i wish i had a tape to compare.

We got a B- from Miss Anne Taylor, but our costumes were a lot better than Bjork's, even if jamie was embarassed to discover, post-performance, that he had a large hole in the seat of his floral stretch pants.

F for Bjork-a-pella.

By emily
GRADE: A

Bjork has always had a special place in my heart, ever since the time in 9th grade when I plagiarized one of her songs (Hyperballad, in case you care) in a short story and it won a prize. Also in 9th grade, I think, I choreographed a very floor-writhing-intensive dance to Isobel which won absolutely no prizes whatsoever. Then I stopped liking her as much circa Homogenic, and, later, I did not really understand what the deal was re: people liking or being moved by Dancer in the Dark.

Then last week I read the long New Yorker article about the making of Bjork’s new album, and my interest in her was resparked, for two reasons: 1. There is always something really fascinating to me about (seemingly) happy artist couples. My old fondness for Claire Fisher resurfaced momentarily when she described her crush as follows: “He’s, like, the Matthew Barney of LAC Arts . . . and I am SO not the Bjork of LAC Arts.” Imagining BG and MB’s domestic bliss is very intriguing. Like, what does their furniture look like? Is any of it covered with a thin film of Vaseline?

2. Speaking of artist couples . . . ha ha . . . um, my boyfriend is an ‘experimental noise musician,’ which means that most of the music he listens to or creates is kind of hard to take. Like, if our respective CD collections ever came to life, Fantasia-style, his CDs would tease and beat up my CDs, which would cower in the corner, moping. Recently I mentioned to him that we don’t have much in common, shared-interest-wise. He did not respond by reminding me that we both like Breakfast at Tiffany’s, because neither of us has ever seen it. Sorry if that song is stuck in your head now. Anyway, we resolved to find a mutual hobby or interest (besides, you know, the obvious things). I wondered if, by some miracle, we would both like Bjork’s new album.

I don’t know yet whether or not Henry likes Medulla. My guess is that he won’t, despite a track featuring Robert Wyatt sounding very Soft Machineish. Other than that, the album is not really loud or crazy enough for his tastes. But guess what: I like it.

On first listen, the lack of instrumentation was really noticeable, and I was reminded vaguely the a capella stylings of the Kenyon Kokosingers (I know, right?). Luckily there is no “bob sh’bop” or “mowmowmow” on this album. Bjork’s voice, as always, is crystalline and belty and growly, old-ladyish and little-girlish somehow at the same time. And the songs are more than just elegant settings for it – more than before, they’re meticulously realized soundscapes, layered and precise. I especially like the less noodly, more poppy ones, like Where is the Line. My favorite track is The Pleasure is All Mine with its slow, eerie, hypnotically lulling chorus of oooooooooooohs. It’s like stumbling through a creepy mansion that is haunted by the ghosts of a choir.

Uh, maybe you should just listen to it yourself. Anyway, way to go, Bjork. I like you again! Keep up the good work, and don’t tell Matthew that last year at the Guggenheim I used some of his art as lip balm.