In Which If Tuesday Links Can’t Find A Way To Help Her They Can Go To Hell

Go Go Iranian Students Plus Links

by Alex Carnevale

Penelope Cruz (or Pe, as her friends call her) in Vogue entertains us:

When Penélope reappears, her top half barely covered by two tiny triangles of electric-blue Lycra, it seems questionable whether such minuscule bits of fabric could really do much for your figure unless you had a natural asset or two. I can’t help thinking that the scene must be the ultimate male fantasy.

Penélope turns to me and purses her lips with indecision: “Do you think I should get a bigger size?”

We first meet just after she has wrapped the new Woody Allen film in Barcelona; she left the director swooning and minus a pair of glasses. “Penélope is every director’s dream to work with,” Allen tells me later. “And obviously it’s fun to be around her on the set because she’s one of the most beautiful and sexiest women in the world. I don’t think I’ve oversold her.” At the end of the shoot, he took his glasses off and gave them to her. Penélope’s vision doesn’t actually need to be corrected, but that’s a minor detail: She plans to change the prescription to plain glass.

“Of course Woody was just so unbelievably enamored of her,” Penélope’s costar Scarlett Johansson fondly remembers. “He’d be like, ‘Uh-uh-uh…P-Penélope, P-Penélope…?’ You’d think, You are such a stuttering fool, man; just get your stuff together! But what can you do—he’s an appreciator of fine things, and Penélope is quite fine.”

The night of our dinner, she is wearing a floaty white dress (the result of a raid on her sister’s wardrobe) and looking remarkably refreshed for someone who has shot a movie, celebrated with Javier Bardem—her frequent costar and most recent rumored lover—at a weekend of rock concerts in London, been out all night clubbing with the artist now known yet again as Prince, and returned to Madrid in time for dinner. The restaurant is almost empty when we arrive—it’s only 9:30, which in Madrid is practically lunchtime (it starts to fill up when we leave, just before 1:00 a.m.). “When I have children,” says Penélope—or Pe, as her friends call her—”they’ll have to be night owls.”

[snip]

“Penélope is such a goofball,” Scarlett Johansson tells me later. “It’s hilarious because here’s this beautiful creature who is so serious about her acting and about her humanitarian work. And then she plays air drums, and you’re like, Oh, my God, you’re just like that nerd at summer camp!”

Covert Curiosity on white denim.

Eva Mendes in the Big Apple.

Giant rats come to New Jersey.

This picture scares the shit out of me.

David Denby on the soon-to-be PT Anderson classic, There Will Be Blood.

Fark tries to copyright NSFW. That is sad.

Stefan Beck on Diana West’s new book.

Mark Hemingway makes a good point about what Rudy and Hillary have in common.

Awesome review of a Bic pen.

More on the New Museum.

You should try our tinted moisturizer. (Thomas Beller’s Neighborhood)

The era of videopoetics begins at The Continental Review.

Failbetter’s interview with George Singleton.

How John O’Sullivan got attacked by Yale students.

Our loss is real.

For the love of FedEx. (Paul Phillips)

The Keith Law-Tracy Ringolsby feud. I’ve e-mailed with both during my time at Baseball Prospectus (cheap plug), and while they seemed like nice guys, this feud doesn’t surprise me, but it does fill me with entertainment. More on this from TwinsGeek.

Laurel’s TV Picks is a top site.

Free download from Apes and Androids.

I love Julia’s gift guide. Speaking of Julia, we got the following e-mail about her after Friday’s conversation-piece:

I’ve been thinking about them a lot, as being indicative of a larger cultural situation vis a vis Knocked Up, my inability to form lasting relationships, Dan Murray, etc.

I think what’s so sad/remarkable about the whole thing is that Jakob is clearly such a shitty boyfriend and Julia was like, thrilled to have landed such a catch. Not that Julia is the epitome of a normal single person, but I think her dating columns try to reflect a Sex and the City fantasy about Dating in New York that doesn’t really exist.

This folly just revealed the ugly, passive-aggressive truth about modern gender relations.

I mean, aside from her ex-boyfriend who bought the five dresses from Saks (sounds like a total closet case/American Psycho to me), how could anyone, let alone Lodwick, measure up to the ridiculous princess fantasies America has instilled in this poor young woman. And because of those princess fantasies, she is so desperate to be in love that she is willing to immediately project those illusions onto whomever she’s banging.

Lodwick came off like a douche repeatedly, from the beginning. But he was also always honest about being an emotional fucktard and a rich horndork in the prime of his random pussy-tagging days. Also I mean, he founded College Humor. Why would anyone be surprised that he has ridiculously high and horrible standards for what tang gets to touch his Lod-rod. Trying to hold a wealthy young man accountable for his actions is like trying to trap steam in a butterfly net.

Despite Julia’s repeated insistence on her blog that she was “not one of those needy relationship girls” (which smacked of female self-loathing), she kept demonstrating that she was, in fact, very much a relationship girl. So much so that her efforts to blog-bait Lodwick with stories about her other dates came off as deeply insecure.

The whole experiment was like Tell Me You Love Me, with the Gawker readership playing the role of hot old couples therapist. Every time they fought Julia came online seeking approval that she was right and he was wrong, and even if she was, how could that not alienate Jakob?

Nah, he’s a douche. She was right, and he was deeply wrong.

Zach Schomburg is reading tomorrow in Chicago. Tyler, you should go.

Spielberg expands his East Hampton estate. He’s done at Dreamworks.

Check out the Proteus Gowanus store for all your Christmas gifts.

Harold and Kumar 2 looks sad, Bush getting high jokes are lost on me.

“Robert Pinsky’s poems are so professional, you feel he dresses in a suit and tie before sitting down at his desk,” writes William Logan.

Anthony Daniels on Kahlil Gibran. (The New Criterion)

Al Gore’s Nobel acceptance speech is worth reading, although my personal feeling is that the end of humanity isn’t something I’m interested in fighting guns blazing.

The visual eroticism of mini-marriages.

Scott Keith on things that piss him off about e-mail:

Legalese at the bottom of e-mails. I know I’ve bitched about this one before, but I feel the need to emphasize how much I hate people who e-mail from corporate accounts which are signed with that standard disclaimer about how the information inside is confidential and if I receive it in error I’m obligated to print off a copy and swallow it for legal reasons. Sure, they do it to cover their asses, but it just makes me give a reflex action FUCK OFF and FUCK YOU AND THE HORSE YOU RODE IN ON because I have to deal with enough junk clogging my inbox as it is without having to deal with a guilt trip from a form letter for reading an e-mail that I didn’t want to get in the first place.

Agreed!

Doris Lessing is unsurprisingly a toolbox.

Language fight in Finland.

Malcolm Gladwell’s boring assessment of intelligence quotient.

Black people should look to the example of Israel, says John McWhorter.

Authors of The Israel Lobby hit Princeton.