Bust issue 55

FOR WOMEN WITH SOMETHING TO GET OFF THEIR CHESTS

FEB/MAR ’09

cowgirls gone wild tthe he real gals who whho won the West

THE WOMEN OF

MAD MEN death becomes her

the taxidermy art of Sarina Brewer

OMG VAMPIRES!

Charlaine Harris of the Sookie Stackhouse series

amber tamblyn SISTERHOOD’S WHIP-SMART STAR

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FEATURES [FEBRUARY/MARCH ’09]

TOP LEFT: SARAH WILMER, BOTTOM LEFT DANIELLE LEVITT, RIGHT: MICHAEL LAVINE

58

38

54 38 UNUSUAL BEAUTY Amber Tamblyn’s traveling pants take a rest for breakfast. By Lisa Butterworth

44 HOME ON THE RANGE The surprising history of

54 MOSS APPEAL From Mad Men to Speed-the-Plow,

50 BODY OF WORK Part mad scientist, part animal

58 APOCALYPSE NOW Steampunk fashion faves

cowgirls and how their legacy on the trail helped bring justice to all. By Terry Selucky lover, it’s taxidermist Sarina Brewer.

By Christy DeSmith

Elisabeth Moss knows how to put on a show.

By Debbie Stoller

perfect for the end of days. Photos by Sarah Wilmer, styling by Lori Messerschmitt, paintings by Mike Schultz

ON THE COVER: AMBER TAMBLYN PHOTOGRAPHED IN N.Y.C. BY MICHAEL LAVINE; STYLING BY DEBORAH AFSHANI; MAKEUP BY KRISTOFER BUCKLE; HAIR BY MATTHEW MONZON; PROPS BY WIL PIERCE. ON AMBER: PINK FLOWER HEADBAND BY JENNIFER BEHR; DRESS BY PHILOSOPHY; EARRINGS BY RJ GRAZIANO. ON THIS PAGE: ON AMBER: DRESS BY PHILOSOPHY; VEIL BY LEAH C. COUTURE MILLINERY; STOCKINGS BY PRADA; SHOES BY LANVIN; BRACELETS AND EARRINGS

BY RJ GRAZIANO. ON ELISABETH MOSS: DRESS BY JEAN PAUL GAULTIER; BANGLE BY KARA ROSS.

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22

Regulars 6 Editor’s Letter 7 Dear BUST 9

Broadcast Getting to know actress Krysten Ritter better; speaking out against bad Super Bowl ads; appreciation for The Adrienne Shelly Foundation; and more. 10 She-bonics Drew Barrymore, Scarlett Johansson, Danica McKellar, Isla Fisher, and Halle Berry on a chatting spree. By Whitney Dwire 11 Boy du Jour Jamal Woolard plays B.I.G. to a T. By Emily Rems 14 Pop Quiz Insane in the membrane for Shirley MacLaine! By Emily Rems 16 Hot Dates You’ll be glad you went to these bitchin’ events. By Emelyne Smith

19

Real Life Craft a bag all your peeps will want to snag; everything tastes better with homemade butter; a felting kit that’s too legit to quit; and more. 22 Old School Obaachan’s beef and pork gyoza.

By Amy Watanabe 23 Buy or DIY Make or score a new headboard.

By Callie Watts

29

Looks A photographer declares what she loves to wear; if you wanna dress like Joan you’re not alone; customize your clothes from head to toe; and more. 30 Fashionista Giving styles by The Cherry Blossom Girl a whirl. By Tara Marks 32 BUST Test Kitchen Our interns decide if cleansing towelettes, facial scrub, and body wash are worth the cash. 33 Page O’ Shit We can’t keep our hands off these scanty panties. By Callie Watts

79

Sex Files The best sex ed you can get on the Net, and more.

80 Ask Aunt Betty and Cousin Carlin It doesn’t hurt to be ready the next time you get sweaty. By Dr. Betty Dodson and Carlin Ross 82 One-Handed Read Talk Is Cheap. By Letty James

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31

Columns 12 Pop Tart These musicals don’t mean a thing if they ain’t got that swing. By Wendy McClure 13 Museum of Femoribilia Cracking up over the shopping game CutUp. By Lynn Peril 18 News From a Broad Health insurance woes hit hos before bros.

By Laura Krafft 26 Eat Me Red V-Day food to put you in the mood. By Chef Rossi 28 Mother Superior The going gets tough when kids lose their stuff.

By Ayun Halliday 36 Around the World in 80 Girls Plan a getaway to Brighton, U.K.!

By Katie Allen 94 X Games Winter Warm-Ups By Deb Amlen The BUST Guide 67 Music Reviews; plus tribute albums by bands who adore the Cure.

73 Books Reviews; plus Charlaine Harris tells Sookie Stackhouse’s secrets.

77 Movies The Black Balloon dusts off the Cherry Blossoms while doing some Sunshine Cleaning.

88 96

BUSTshop The Last Laugh Tammy and Willis do V-Day their way.

By Esther Pearl Watson

TOP: SARAH ANNE WARD, CENTER: GLYNIS ARBAN, BOTTOM: CHRISTINE BLACKBURNE

CONTENTS

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EDITOR’S LETTER

future shock THERE’S AN ELEMENT of time travel involved in putting out a magazine. For instance, I’m writing this editor’s letter now, in mid-December, but I know that you’re reading it in February or March. A lot has changed since the last editor’s letter I wrote, back in October (but which you read in December). In the intervening months, our country elected Barack Obama to be our next president (yay), and the economy went straight to hell (boo). Back here in December ’08, we’re still happy about Barack but very worried about the economy. And I wonder how things are going for you, people of the future. By now Barack Obama is your acting president (I’m praying the inauguration went smoothly), which is probably pretty cool, but I have a feeling the economy is even worse, which must suck more than it already does.

With large corporations such as Citigroup and the big three auto manufacturers in financial trouble, you better believe that small, independent companies like BUST are feeling the pinch in a big way. Many of our advertisers, from bigger brands to smaller crafty companies, have had to cut their marketing budgets. In fact, all magazines are struggling right now for this same reason, but unlike mainstream women’s mags, we don’t have some corporate sugar daddy to bail us out when times get rough. We’re 100 percent women-owned, women-run, and completely independent, and we’re prepared to do whatever it takes to keep going in even the toughest times. But we need your help. We’re not asking for a handout; instead, what we’re suggesting is a recessionista’s wet dream: a way for you to spend less while helping us more. How’s that, you say? Well, I know many of you feel that you’re supporting BUST when you buy an issue on the newsstand. And trust me—we really appreciate that. But what you might not realize is that out of the $4.99 that you pay for an issue, we only get around $1.99, and we don’t get it until about nine months later. When you subscribe to BUST, however, you cut out the middleman. We get the full amount that you spend, and we can use it toward producing the mag right away.

Buying a year’s worth of BUST on the newsstand costs you $29.94. But subscribing only costs $19.95! You pay almost $10 less—and we get more! It’s one of those win-win sitchy-ayshuns.

What else can you think of that costs less than $20 for a whole year? Your cell phone bill? Your cable bill? Your beer budget? Not even. Plus, if you subscribe online at www.bust.com, you’ll get instant access to BUST’s digital editions, which you can read anywhere (even at work!), download and keep forever, search, and more (current subscribers can gain access by renewing online).

Now, more than ever, we really need you to subscribe. With your help, we’ll make it through this tough year, and we’ll continue to be there for you when you need us.

Speaking of time travel, many of the articles in this issue tie into that theme, coincidentally. Taxidermy artist Sarina Brewer gives animals who have reached the end of their lives a beautiful, if bizarre, future, while “Home on the Range” traces the history of America’s first cowgirls and how they’ve impacted women’s lives today. Our interview with Elisabeth Moss, who plays Mad Men’s Peggy Olson, gives us a chance to look back at the early ’60s with a mixture of horror at its blatant sexism, and longing for its styles. (And if you’re jonesin’ to get Joan’s Mad Men look, turn to page 31, where we’ve tracked down the clothing and accessories that’ll get you all Joaned out.) This issue’s fashion story is an intriguing combo of past and present, where 19th-century-inspired steampunk style meets a futuristic landscape. And we have a great profile of Amber Tamblyn, who’s a lot of fun to hang out with, as our own Lisa Butterworth discovered over brunch with the adorable actor (and long-time BUST subscriber). Expect to see even more of her in the future: she’s the star of a new TV show, The Unusuals, which is set to begin airing on ABC in April.

Plus, we’ve got an interview with the actor set to play Biggie Smalls, Jamal Woolard (he loves it when you call him Big Poppa), V-Day treats from red food to red-hot undies, and creative DIY ideas, including a reusable shopping bag and a headboard made of recycled Styrofoam. And as always, our clever columns, plus more book and music reviews than any other women’s magazine.

Enjoy the issue, and I’ll see you in the future!

Luv,

ISSUE 55, FEB/MAR 2009

FOR WOMEN WITH SOMETHING TO GET OFF THEIR CHESTS

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Debbie Stoller CREATIVE DIRECTOR + FASHION EDITOR Laurie Henzel MANAGING EDITOR Emily Rems SENIOR DESIGNER Tara Marks JUNIOR DESIGNER Erin Wengrovius ASSOCIATE EDITOR Lisa Butterworth CUSTOMER SERVICE + CRAFTY LADY Callie Watts BOOKS + FEATURES EDITOR Priya Jain ASSOCIATE MUSIC EDITOR Sara Graham CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Molly Simms PUBLISHERS Laurie Henzel & Debbie Stoller ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER OF ADVERTISING + MARKETING Maggie Tâm Clark/Peony Media Ink. 212.675.1707 x106, ads@bust.com MARKETING, PROMOTIONS + SALES ASSISTANT Susan Juvet, 212.675.1707 x104, susan@bust.com BOOKKEEPER Amy Moore accounting@bust.com CRAFTACULAR STYLIST’S CLOSET COORDINATORS Mara Cates, Tukie Babumba INTERNS Allie Allen, Lauren Antolino, Antonia Blair, Catherine Weisnewski, Sari Widman, Alma Zeno FOR SUBSCRIPTIONS Please email subscriptions@bust.com or call 866.220.6010 FOR BOOBTIQUE ORDERS Please email orders@bust.com MEMBER OF THE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS OF AMERICA

WWW.BUST.COM ©2009 BUST, Inc. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the permission of the publisher. The articles and advertising appearing within this publication reflect the opinions and attitudes of their respective authors and not necessarily those of the publisher or editors.

Canada Post: Publications Mail Agreement #40612608 Canada returns to be sent to Bleuchip International, P.O. Box 25542, London, ON N6C 6B2

Debbie 006 / BUST // FEB/MAR

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DEAR BUST

Great Hot Date I’ve been an avid reader since I was 18, but this is the first time in those 6 years I’ve felt the need to tell you just how awesome you are!

Because you featured Toujours Rebelles in “Hot Dates” (Oct/ Nov ’09), my BFF and I hauled our buns across the border for what wound up being the most incredible, thought-provoking weekend of our lives, with over 500 other proud, beautiful feminists from all over Canada and the world.

There’s no way I would have heard about the event had I not read BUST. Thank you for always reminding me that political activism is fun, empowering, and most of all, vitally important!

Madeleine Kingston, Burlington, VT

Mental for Metal Metal is my main musical passion, so I was blown away to see a multipage profile on the women who love it (“For Those About to Rock,” Dec/Jan ’09) and are ready to shout it out loud. There are many smart and strong ladies who identify with this extreme music and its culture, so thanks for acknowledging that there’s more to females in the scene than Mötley Crüe groupie gals. Shoshannah Flach, San Francisco, CA Many thanks for including the article on female metalheads. It was about time! As a feminist and a metal fan (it’s really not as paradoxical as it sounds), I was happy to finally see women in your mag who remind me of my girlfriends and myself. Metal is a musical genre very few understand, and contrary to popular belief, there are indeed women (who are not groupies) out there who listen to it with just as much passion as men. Awesome piece! Jen Elcheson, British Columbia, Canada

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CONTRIBUTORS

Diaphragm Be Damned I have to take issue with Betty Dodson’s advice to the woman with bacterial and yeast infections related to her IUD (“Ask Aunt Betty and Cousin Carlin,” Dec/Jan ’09). While it is true that IUD use is linked with increased vaginal infections, the diaphragm is hardly a panacea to those problems. With an 80 – 94 percent success rate, a diaphragm is way less effective than an IUD (which has a 98 – 99.6 percent success rate).

Most IUD users are highly invested in not getting pregnant, so failing to mention the difference in effectiveness is a pretty major omission. Sarah Ferrency, Sitka, AK Dr. Dodson implies that the diaphragm is an appropriate substitute for those who can’t or don’t want to use hormonal birth control. Although I don’t doubt her assertion that the popularity of hormonal birth control benefits the pharmaceutical companies, that type of contraception has a failure rate of less than one percent if used properly, while the diaphragm’s failure rate is much, much higher. Given the diminishing accessibility of abortion in this country, I think recommending a contraceptive method like the diaphragm without mentioning that caveat is nothing short of dangerous! Leanna Trunzo, Madison, WI

Bachelorette BUSTs a Move This photo commemorates our amazing feminist friend April Glenn’s marriage to her longtime partner, Mack Moore. April is a huge fan of BUST and has converted many of us to become subscribers as well, so we decided: what better way to forever remember the occasion than to hold a BUST photo session the night of her bachelorette party? Leigh Manning, Pensacola, FL

Oops, We Did It Again In “Acid Queen” (Dec/Jan ’09), we should have reported that Rilo Kiley has released four full-length albums. And the customized door-knocker earrings featured in “The Right Stuff” (Dec/Jan ’09) are available at www.jewelrybynet.com. We regret these errors.

Get it off your chest! Send feedback to: Letters, BUST Magazine, P.O. Box 1016, Cooper Station, New York, NY 10276. Email: letters@bust.com. Include your name, city, state, and email address. Letters may be edited for length and clarity.

Christy DeSmith, who wrote “Body of Work,” is a freelance writer living in Minneapolis. She used to be an editor at the excellent but, sadly, now-defunct city magazine The Rake. These days, if she’s not thrifting for vintage coats or running around her hometown’s various frozen lakes, she’s probably writing about fashion, design, pop culture, and art for a variety of publications—including Minnesota’s biggest daily newspaper, the Star Tribune.

Danielle Levitt (center), who photographed actress Elisabeth Moss, is the queen of capturing pop culture, especially the world of teens. Her new book, We Are Experienced, features all kinds of adolescents, from prom dates to punks, in a style that captures the candidness of her subjects. The L.A.-born, N.Y.C.-based photographer’s work has been featured in countless publications, including The New York Times Magazine, Details, GQ, New York, and Rolling Stone.

The brother-and-sister team of Mike Schultz and Sarah Wilmer, the Brooklyn-based artists who created the images for our fashion story “Apocalypse Now,” is pretty fun to be around. The life of every party and the makers of every joke, this popular duo brings out the best in everyone. “We’re always impressing people with our confidence and vitality,” says Wilmer, “I guess that’s why folks love to be around us.” When not petting kitties, they divide their time between workaholism and not sleeping.

“It’s been a wild ride,” says Schultz. Go to www.sarahwilmer.com and www.mikeschultzpaintings.com.

When Terry Selucky, who wrote “Home on the Range,” isn’t chasing stories on horseback, she’s in New York City wondering where all the sky went. But she revels in both worlds. Selucky is a journalist who has contributed to Time Out New York, NYmag.com, and the Not for Tourists books. She’s also a playwright/director whose work has been seen in New York City, Chicago, and Portland, OR, via Sansculottes Theatre Company and Serious Theatre Collective. In addition, Selucky is an adventurer, professional emailer, co–development director for Girls Write Now, and of course, a big, longtime BUST fan.

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NEWS+VIEWS

shop girl

STYLIST: JESSIE COHAN; MAKEUP: LORI HICK; HAIR: RYAN TRYGSTAD @ THE WALL GROUP; DRESS AND UMBRELLA: LISA PERRY

PUT YOUR HANDS TOGETHER FOR BREAKOUT ACTRESS KRYSTEN RITTER

PHOTO BY GLYNIS SELINA ARBAN

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KRYSTEN RITTER DOESN’T look like Hollywood’s idea of a funny girl. But the N.Y.C.-based actress and former model, who describes her sense of humor as “raunchy and shocking,” doesn’t buy into stereotypes. “There aren’t supposed to be pretty girls who do comedy,” she says. “I was really gawky growing up, so I had to develop a personality. And I’m not afraid to look ugly. If it’s going to get a laugh, I’ll do it.”

Ritter will surely be getting laughs opposite Isla Fisher in the February film Confessions of a Shopaholic, based on the best-selling chick-lit novel. But the 26-year-old actress has already been quietly building a fan base with sassy roles in comedies like What Happens in Vegas and 27 Dresses, and with parts on girly TV faves Gilmore Girls and Veronica Mars, two shows with fiercely devoted fans who aren’t afraid to make their opinions known. “I said some annoying things on Gilmore Girls, and people would come up to me and be like, ‘I love your character, but you have to start calling your boyfriend a boyfriend,’” says Ritter. “They don’t realize I didn’t write it!”

Despite a stint as a telemarketer and an actor’s requisite foodservice job, Ritter has been in the spotlight for most of her life. The former farm girl from Shickshinny, PA, was discovered at her local mall at 15, and it led to modeling, a career she now describes as “awful.” “I don’t like being encouraged not to speak,” she says.

“You’re a clothing rack. That wasn’t a good job for me.” That hasn’t stopped Ritter, however, from selling a pilot she wrote called Model Camp, based on her experiences in the industry. She’s also writing a female-buddy comedy, a film she hopes will help provide some much-needed edgy comic roles for women. “There aren’t a lot of really funny scripts out there for women that are R-rated,” she says.

“So I wanted to start writing them.”

In addition to writing and acting, Ritter also sings and plays guitar in the Brooklyn band Ex Vivian, whose sound she describes as both cute and dark. Of the clichés that abound about actresses-turned-singers, she says, “It sucks that as an actress you can’t be taken seriously doing other things.” But then, Ritter doesn’t take herself too seriously either, adding, “I’m not trying to prove anything to anyone.”

[EMILY MCCOMBS]

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broadcast

ad busters

ON SUPER BOWL Sunday, our televisions regress into some kind of prefeminist twilight zone, bursting with images of scantily clad women prancing around for the sexual gratification of beer-guzzling cavemen. The

commercials aired during the game are the most-watched spots of the year, but do advertisers really need to stoop to showing Carlos Mencia teaching immigrants how to pick up American chicks just to sell Bud Light?

Intelligent women, take heart. Last year, the National Organization for Women fought back with a watchdog approach. Their ad watchers rated the game’s commercials (which went for $2.7 million per 30-second spot—this year, it’s already up to $3 million) for sexist and racist content, and called out the worst offenders on www.nowfoundation. org for the world to see. These included GoDaddy.com (whose ad featured IndyCar racer Danica Patrick carrying a beaver in a not-so-subtle pantyless–Britney Spears reference) and Planters (mocking a frumpy, unibrowed woman by showing men fawning all over her). “This particular event is very

male-driven,” explains NOW Executive Vice President Olga Vives when asked about the group’s interest in the Super Bowl. “It has a tremendous influence on men’s opinions of the role women play in society.”

This February 1, when Super Bowl XLIII airs from Tampa Bay, FL, you can be a critical viewer too. Get some ladies together, watch the ads yourselves, and report your findings to your local NBC affiliate (find it at www.nbc.com/Local/). Or better yet, contact the companies with the lamest ads directly, and let them know they fumbled. “It’s important for us to point out sexism whenever it happens,” says Vives, “because it does have an impact on raising the sensitivity of these companies.” Plus, it’s a good reminder to speak out against the trash we’re fed all year long, mass pigskin ritual or not.

[JULIE SENSAT WALDREN ]

ILLUSTRATION BY CRAYONLEGS.COM

SPEAK OUT AGAINST SEXISM WHEN THE BIG GAME TURNS LAME

Smart Girls Have More Fun! Amy Poehler fans of all ages have been getting their fix since her departure from SNL with webisodes of her new online show, Smart Girls at the Party. In each segment, she and her BFFs “celebrate girls who are changing the world by being themselves,” and the result is part Charlie Rose and part slumber party. Watch ’em all at www.onnetworks.com/videos/smart-girls-at-the-party/.

she-bonics “I’ve been single for months now, and I’ve turned my attention toward my passions, my friends, and the causes I believe in. It’s been about learning who I am, not through a man but for myself.”

Drew Barrymore in Harper’s Bazaar

OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF BABES

[COMPILED BY WHITNEY DWIRE]

“[If I could tell every girl in the world something], I would say to never limit yourself because you feel like you’re not strong or capable enough or because something is a man’s role. We live in an amazing time for women, especially as Americans. I’ve traveled to countries where women don’t have the right to follow their dreams, to pursue a career, to earn a living. It’s important to utilize our rights.” Scarlett Johansson in the now–defunct CosmoGirl “Here’s an equation: Chances of getting a date with Danica McKellar = 3(integrity) + 2(wit) + 3(passion) ÷ (miles you live from L.A.) + (# of bad habits) + 85.” Danica McKellar in Esquire “So many women are wasted playing the eye roller or the love interest. There are so many funny women—Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Sarah Silverman, Anna Faris—and there’s an audience of women who are desperate to go out and see other women be funny.” Isla Fisher in Elle “Sexy is not about wearing sexy clothes or shaking your booty until you damn near get hip dysplasia; it’s about knowing that sexiness is a state of mind—a comfortable state of being. It’s about loving yourself even in your most unlovable moments. I know a little bit about that.”

Halle Berry in Esquire

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BOY DU JOUR

b.i.g. love

MAKING A FUSS OVER JAMAL WOOLARD’S DEBUT IN NOTORIOUS

WHEN WORD GOT out in 2007 that Fox Searchlight was looking for an unknown actor to star in Notorious—the blockbuster biopic detailing the rise and fall of slain rapper Notorious B.I.G. (aka Christopher Wallace)—it was the casting call heard ‘round the world. For months, the Net buzzed with updates on all the hip-hop hopefuls vying for the role. But when the dust settled, only one contender remained: Brooklyn native Jamal Woolard. As Woolard tells it, charming me via cell phone from a Fox exec’s car, it was the combination of his uncanny resemblance to the film’s subject and his “swagger” that got him an audition. But it was the reaction he elicited from B.I.G.’s mother, Voletta Wallace, who was heavily involved in making the film, that sealed the deal. “As soon as I walked in the room, she was like, ‘That’s my son,’” Wollard recalls of meeting Wallace, a woman he still holds close to his heart. “I’m actually getting ready to go eat some food with her now.”

Before he landed the movie, which opens in January, Woolard, now 27, went by his rap name, Gravy—a moniker he explains with more of that signature swagger. “It’s because PHOTO BY ANGELA BOATWRIGHT

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I stay on top of my game,” he says, “just like gravy’s always on top of everything.” Back then, despite over 10 years in the rap game (with a little drug dealing on the side—something else he has in common with B.I.G. and says he has definitively retired from), fame eluded Woolard except for one dubious distinction. In 2006, he got press for being that rapper who got shot in the butt by an unknown assailant outside of radio station Hot 97 in N.Y.C. where he was about to be interviewed, and insisted on going on the air before getting medical help. “It’s just regular stuff that happens in the hood,” he says of the incident, brushing it off. “It also gave me a cute dimple for the ladies.”

As flirtatious as that sounds, however, these days the ladies in Woolard’s life are his new wife and baby daughter, with whom he lives in New Jersey. “They’re not prepared, but we’re going to get used to it,” he says of his concerns over all the attention his young family will face as his star continues to rise. “There’s going to be a lot of changes after the movie comes out, so we’ll be putting God first, and He’ll make sure everything else goes all right.” [EMILY REMS] // BUST / 011

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broadcast POP TART [BY WENDY MCCLURE]

same old song and dance IT’S NOT THAT I DON’T LOVE MUSICALS; I JUST HATE THESE LOOK, HOLLYWOOD, I know you’re a big business and all, but we have to talk.

It’s not about how much the remake of The Women sucked or how you’re trying to pass off those shitty Dane Cook films as “date movies” (though seriously, what is up with that?). No, we need to talk about the musicals.

his completely amazing bubble butt).

And I get musicals—I’m not one of those joyless shits who can’t get past the suddenly-breaking-into-song-while-waitingin-line-at-the-DMV kind of thing. Because when it comes to movies that aren’t anything like real life, well, after years of being subjected to happy hookers being

It makes me cringe to see a perfectly good ’80s film like Hairspray get passed back and forth from screen to stage to screen again like a wad of gum at a make-out party.

For the past few years, Hollywood, I could swear you’ve been trying to play the moviegoing public’s gay best friend, judging from your snazzy parade of spectaculars like Chicago and Rent and Mamma Mia! and Hairspray and High School Musical 3. They’re all filled with swell singing, impeccable dance sequences, and the most sparkling stars. But the thing is, I’m fucking bored to death.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good movie musical. I grew up watching classics like West Side Story and Singin’ In the Rain (which made me fall deeply in love with Gene Kelly for his dancing and 012 / BUST // FEB/MAR

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rescued by hot millionaires and successful women being happily impregnated by slacker dudes, I’ll take a spontaneous dance number any day.

But lately, something’s missing with these new movies. It’s not that they aren’t nice to look at—I spent a long time admiring Zac Efron’s precision-engineered eyebrows in his various roles, and Mamma Mia! is practically a singing, dancing, Anthropologie catalog. Beyond the eye candy, though, there isn’t much there, because all the material is regurgitated from something else: Broadway, kitschy old movies, classic pop-song repertoires.

Even the High School Musical franchise, by far the freshest of the musical offerings these days, has gone from original creation to sequel rehash in no time.

It’s one thing to stick with the tried and true, especially in this cruddy, blockbuster-desperate economy. But resorting to pop-cultural cannibalism is another thing entirely. It makes me cringe to see a perfectly good ’80s film like Hairspray get passed back and forth from screen to stage to screen again like a wad of gum at a make-out party. And I have a sinking feeling the same thing’s going to happen with Dirty Dancing, which has already been resurrected into a stage production.

I guess my objection to all this comes from my sincere belief that our pop trash shouldn’t be recycled. Instead, I’d rather the original movies and songs be left to rot slowly in the landfill of our memories.

But as these subsequent versions of old stories pile on new soundtracks, the themes (which were never meant to be terribly profound in the first place) get dumber and more self-important as they clamor to be heard over the soaring power ballads. You’d think from watching the 2007 version of Hairspray, for instance, that Nikki Blonsky’s character invented the Civil Rights movement. I’m convinced it’s only a matter of time before Hollywood gives Dirty Dancing a musical makeover and tries to pass off “nobody puts Baby in a corner” as an early feminist mantra. (With all respect to Patrick Swayze, it’s not.)

The best kinds of movie musicals have their own emotional truth: they take you to places in your soul you’d only otherwise visit in dark, weird moments, like when you’re by yourself in the car thinking about how your ex is an unredeemable dick. And even though you can’t bring yourself to cry, you keep replaying “Solitaire” on your Carpenters Gold CD and mumbling along.

Musicals let you believe that mutual understanding is possible. That all you need to do to convince anyone of anything is sing your song while they stand there watching your mouth moving, and it’s not creepy at all, it’s awesome. I want more of that stuff, please, and no more of these cheap quasi-remakes full of painful stunt-casting nightmares, or chaste Disney pukefests made with the crassest intentions. Oh, Hollywood: you think that just because we can sing along to it, we’re gonna love it. And I am telling you, I’m not going for it.

ILLUSTRATION BY OLIMPIA ZAGNOLI

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MUSEUM OF FEMORIBILIA [BY LYNN PERIL]

cut it out

TEACHING GIRLS TO GET HAPPY THROUGH RETAIL THERAPY

PHOTO BY SARAH ANNE WARD

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MYSTERY DATE MAY have been the biggest-selling girls’ game of the 1960s, but it was far from the only one from the era that taught players how to be grownup women. Instead of boys and dating as a precursor to wifehood, Cut-Up, a “Shopping Spree Game,” focused on what was considered another very important feminine role: that of consumer.

A successful wife was “a careful business manager,” according to pop psychologist Clifford R. Adams, whose “Making »

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broadcast Marriage Work” column appeared in Ladies’ Home Journal in the 1940s and ’50s. This meant being a “conscientious and skillful shopper” who knew how to “create a budget and stick to it.” The idea of mom as family shopper trickled down to home-economics classes across the country. According to Family Living, a 1959 junior-high textbook, “The more girls learn about wise spending, the better off they will be when they have to stretch their pennies for their own families later.”

By 1969, the year Cut-Up appeared in toy stores, consumer education was an increasingly important component of home ec; it encouraged students “to be more critical and questioning before opening up their pocketbooks,” according to an article in The New York Times.

Cut-Up, however, was less about wise family budgeting than about the kind of recreational shopping a later

generation came to call retail therapy.

“Imagine!” read the instructions. “You spend all the money you cut out of a money sheet to shop for clothes for your own model.” After setting up the cardboard dress shop and arranging the cute mod paper dresses and accessories on their racks, each player spun a dial to determine how much time she would have to cut out bills and coins from sheets of play money— cash she’d then use to buy and outfit her flat plastic model.

While it’s highly unlikely the designers at Milton Bradley realized it when they blueprinted Cut-Up, the image of scissors-wielding women snipping sheets of paper bills was a historical one. In 1862, U.S. Treasury Department head General Francis Elias Spinner had a staffing problem: the men he would otherwise hire for clerkships instead faced each other on the battlefields surrounding Washington, D.C. So Spin-

ner took a chance; he asked permission to hire women to trim paper money. “A woman can use scissors better than a man,” he told his boss, Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, “and she will do it cheaper.” It was a bold and all but unprecedented move—before 1862, only seven women had ever worked for the federal government.

But these 19th-century working women were the last thing Cut-Up players had on their minds. The aim of this game was to spend, spend, spend. “HURRY, HURRY, TIME IS RUNNING OUT!” read the text on the box, below a picture of pig-tailed preteens frantically snipping sheets of money and ecstatically waving handfuls of bills. The first girl to purchase a complete ensemble of “one dress, one wig, and two hats or accessories” (total cost: $26—about $150 in current dollars) won the game. At least they paid cash.

pop quiz WE’VE GOT SHIRLEY MACLAINE ON THE BRAIN!

[BY EMILY REMS]

THOUGH SHE CLAIMS to believe in past lives, Oscar-winning actress Shirley MacLaine has packed enough living into her 74 years this time around to make her history seem extraneous. A dancer, Broadway star, film icon, author, spiritual advisor, sacred-jewelry designer, Internet radio host, and ultimate iconoclast, she’s as famous for her tart tongue as she is for her talent. Think you know why this UFO-chasing girl is out of this world? Then take the quiz! d. Jack Nicholson

4. A ballerina in her childhood and teens, Shirley famously broke what bone before a performance, went on with the show, and called an ambulance afterward? a. wrist b. collarbone c. ankle d. leg 1. Born in 1934, in Richmond, VA, Shirley was named after what other famous Shirley? a. Shirley Hemphill b. Shirley Bassey c. Shirley Jackson d. Shirley Temple 2. What profession did Shirley’s parents and grandparents all share? a. teacher b. postal carrier c. dancer d. farmer 3. In 1937, Shirley’s younger brother was born and went on to become a famous actor as well. Who is he? a. Richard Gere b. Warren Beatty

5. How many children did Shirley have with businessman Steve Parker, whom she was married to from 1954 to 1982? a. 1 b. 2 c. 3 d. 4 6. What tune became Shirley’s trademark after she starred in the movie musical Sweet Charity in 1969? a. “Sunrise, Sunset” b. “If My Friends Could See Me Now” c. “Memory” d. “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” 7. Shirley has been nominated for an Oscar six

times but won only once. What movie did she win for? a.Terms of Endearment b. The Turning Point c. Irma la Douce d. The Apartment 8. A prolific author of autobiographies spiked with New Age philosophy, Shirley has written that she was who in a past life? a. Charlemagne’s lover b. a Toulouse-Lautrec model c. raised by elephants d. all of the above 9. Shirley and what star celebrate their joint birthdays together every year? a. Julie Christie b. Dolly Parton c. Barbra Streisand d. Bea Arthur 10. Complete the following Shirley quote: “It is useless to hold a person to anything he says while he’s in love, drunk, or ______.” a. an actor b. an alien c. owes you money d. running for office

PHOTOFEST

c. Robert Redford

Answer Key: 1.d, 2.a, 3.b, 4.c, 5.a, 6.b, 7.a, 8.d. 9.c, 10.d 014 / BUST // FEB/MAR

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broadcast

hot dates THINGS TO SEE, PEOPLE TO DO February 14

AUTEURS GET INSPIRATION FROM THE ADRIENNE SHELLY FOUNDATION THE INDIE-FILM community was rocked in 2006 by the news of Adrienne Shelly’s death. A beautiful 40-year-old actress who had been a mainstay in Hal Hartley’s films, Shelly had just finished Waitress—her fifth outing as a writer/ director—when she was killed. Her senseless murder at the hands of a construction worker, who confessed to killing Shelly after she complained about the noise he was making in the apartment below her office, cut short a passionate and ambitious life.

But Andy Ostroy, Shelly’s husband, didn’t want people to remember Shelly because of her tragic death. So with the help of their friends, including Hartley and actors Keri Russell, Paul Rudd, Rosanna Arquette, and Emily Deschanel, The Adrienne Shelly Foundation was born. “I knew that her mission would be to support other women filmmakers,” Ostroy says, “because it had been a struggle for her in many ways.”

With its objective to support “the artistic achievements of female actors, writers, and directors,” the foundation has partnered with some of film’s most respected organizations (including the American Film Institute, Columbia University, and The Sundance Institute), to provide funds for filmmakers at every career level. And though only two years old, the foundation can already claim some serious success. After winning a 2007 Adrienne Shelly Foundation grant, director Cynthia Wade was able to complete her short Freeheld, which went on to win a 2008 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject. “That was pretty darn exciting,” says Ostroy, “to have someone say, ‘Without your funds, I couldn’t have finished my film, which went on to win an Oscar!’”

Shelly’s work hasn’t been forgotten either. A comedy she wrote, Serious Moonlight, will be released in 2009. Ostroy hopes more of her screenplays will eventually be made too, but in the meantime, he finds comfort in the foundation. “It’s my way of doing some good with something horrific,” he says. “So it’s been good for a lot of people, myself included.” For more info, visit the Web site, at www.adrienneshellyfoundation.org. [CRISTIN O’KEEFE APTOWICZ]

Sprechen Sie Deutsch? Then you’re in luck. A new

German-language, feminist pop-culture mag called Missy has just hit the streets of Hamburg, and according to its publishers, Chris Köver, Sonja Eismann, and Stefanie Lohaus, it was inspired by BUST! Way to take the revolution global, ladies!

Check it out in all its glory, at www.missy-magazine.de.

February 14 – 16

AMGEN TOUR OF CALIFORNIA WOMEN’S CYCLING STAGE RACE Beefed up to three days since last year’s one-day event, this bike race presented by USA Cycling will highlight the road skills of America’s best domestic female athletes as they vie for a whopping $25,000 prize. Held in Sacramento in conjunction with the men’s Tour of California, it’s bound to be a huge kickoff for the U.S. cycling season, so pedal over to www.usacycling.org for all the details.

March 5 – 9

TRICKY WOMEN ’09 The only festival in Europe dedicated to animation by women returns this spring to honor the artistic achievements of a new group of talented females. Tricky Women, presented by Culture2Culture in Vienna, Austria, is a competition of animated shorts judged by an international jury that is awarding some serious, career-making prizes. Last year’s festival showed more than 100 films from 30 countries. So head to Vienna to celebrate women working in traditional and digital animation, video, stopmotion, and claymation, or pick up the DVD of winning films when it comes out later this year, at www.trickywomen.at.

March 12

WOMEN OF HIP HOP HONORS Where are all the lady MCs? They’re heading to North Carolina for this series of shows and parties celebrating the women keeping chick rap alive. The Women of Hip Hop Concert, Honors, and Afterparty will be held in downtown Raleigh, giving love and recognition all night to some of entertainment’s most unappreciated performers. To get in on this much-needed, underground tribute, visit www. myspace.com/womenofhiphop.

[COMPILED BY EMELYNE SMITH]

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ADRIENNE SHELLY FOUNDATION

Adrienne Shelly takes a break from rolling tape

pennies from heaven

EROTIC ARTS AND CRAFTS FAIR Canada’s only craft fair devoted to all things sexy will take Toronto by storm this Valentine’s Day, with a crowd more hot and bothered than ever! Goodies will include hand-carved wooden phalli, medieval chastity belts, comfy ‘n’ cool knitted restraints, and more. Sponsored by Come As You Are, a cooperatively run sex shop in Toronto, and held at the Gladstone Hotel, the show’s got all the info you need to join in the fun on their Web site, www.eroticartsandcrafts.com.

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come see amy schiappa katie dolinar jacqueline withers paul pesce brian fisher holly ivey lisa smith sarah hintsgaul

free bang trims between your hair appointments!

248 broome st ny ny 10002 call for an appointment tel. 212.674.8383 www.fringeny.com info@fringeny.com

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broadcast NEWS FROM A BROAD [BY LAURA KRAFFT] lowed to wear religious headscarves.

This may not seem like a major victory to everyone, but for followers of a faith that insists on women remaining modest, it is an extremely important one.

The ruling came after a Muslim woman was arrested for a minor infraction and was forced to take off her hijab in front of the male arresting officer.

Never officially brought up on charges, Jameelah Medina initially resisted filing a complaint but eventually brought in the ACLU, who sued on her behalf.

“One of our country’s core values is the freedom to practice our religion,” says Ariela Midgal, of the ACLU. “That freedom doesn’t go away when we are in jail.” It’s good to see that this right is being protected, unlike what has been known to happen to other basic freedoms promised by our Constitution during the past administration.

big business unfair to your lady business WHY WOMEN PAY MORE FOR HEALTH INSURANCE BUST READERS KNOW it’s great to be a gal, but have you ever looked through a guy’s medicine cabinet and realized how much more expensive it is to be you? Forget the hair products, makeup, birth control, and pink razors—tampons alone are like rolledgauze gold—because the expense dif-

nies claim it’s this cost of upkeep that adds up, what isn’t mentioned is that women are charged for child-bearing costs, despite the fact that most policies tack on actual maternity costs as an extra expense. That’s right: insurance agencies are actuarially charging women for the mere possession

That’s right: insurance agencies are actuarially charging women for the mere possession of reproductive organs. ferential doesn’t stop there. According to The New York Times, “Striking new evidence has emerged of a widespread gap in the cost of health insurance, as women pay much more than men of the same age for individual policies providing identical coverage.”

Apparently, women are more apt to get regular checkups, fill their prescriptions, and are more conscientious about taking care of themselves. Anyone who’s ever spent the night resting her head on a single guy’s twiceannually-cleaned pillowcase could tell you that. But while insurance compa018 / BUST // FEB/MAR

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of reproductive organs. Which is why insurance superintendent Mila Kofman is quoted as saying, “There’s a strong public-policy reason to prohibit gender-based rates. Only women can bear children. But women should not have to bear the entire expense.” Agreed.

Next, let’s figure out a way to reduce the cost of tampons.

HIJAB HOORAY! Muslim Female Prisoners Allowed to Observe Their Faith Female Muslim inmates in California’s San Bernadino County jails are now al-

ENDING A WAR DOESN’T ALWAYS BRING PEACE Women of the Congo Still Used As Battlefields The Democratic Republic of Congo may officially be at peace, but that doesn’t mean the fighting has stopped. A peace treaty put together by the European Union last January came apart immediately, and no one has felt the unraveling more than the region’s women, who are still experiencing the highest incidence of rape in the world.

Medical treatment for rape victims is hard to find, according to Dr. Denis Mukwege, at one time the sole gynecologist in all of Eastern Congo.

In fact, one of the few places where women can receive genital reconstructive surgery is the Panzi Hospital he founded in Bukavu. Soon, however, that resource may be gone. Despite heavy demand, medical supplies are dwindling. One of the people fighting to help keep the hospital open is Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues and founder of V-Day, a global women’s rights group.

Ensler is heading up a fund-raising effort for Panzi Hospital called City of Joy. If you’d like to help, click over to www.vday.org/contents/drcongo. One of the best ways to give victims back their power is by giving them back their bodies.

ILLUSTRATION BY KIM SCAFURO

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CRAFTS+COOKING+HOME+HEALTH

in the bag

THIS DIY SACK IS ALL SORTS OF FANTASTIC WITHOUT THE PLASTIC IT JUST TAKES a little cuttin’, stitchin’, and sewin’ to turn your trash into a treasure like this cute and useful carryall. Crafting up this bright and cheery tote takes the iconic plastic “thank you” bag to a whole new level: no longer disposable, but no less of a workhorse for hauling your necessities. With its snazzy lining and handy-dandy pocket, you’ll want to use this sturdy satchel for much more than just groceries. »

PHOTO BY AMANDA BRUNS

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real life Materials 4 skeins red embroidery floss (DMC #321) Embroidery hoop or stabilizer Transfer paper ¾ yd. white cotton medium-weight fabric (nonstretch, such as twill or sateen) ¾ yd. lining fabric (we used red gingham) 1 plastic grocery bag Sewing supplies: iron, pins, transfer marker/chalk, scissors, matching thread, measuring tape

Instructions To create your pattern, smooth out your plastic grocery bag, cut open the bottom and the tops of the handles, and pull out the sides so it lies completely flat. Iron your fabrics and fold them in half. Lay your grocery bag on top of the folded main fabric, and using chalk or a transfer pen, trace around the bottom and sides of the bag (adding 5⁄8" for seam allowance). To wear the bag over your shoulder, increase the length of the handles at the top by 3" and finish tracing the bag (continuing to add 5⁄8"). Lay your folded main fabric on top of the folded lining fabric. Pin together and cut along your traced line to make the 4 pieces of your bag: 2 lining and 2 outer.

To make the inside pocket, measure the width of your bag, and cut a rectangle of lining fabric 7" by the measured width. Fold top edge over ¼" and then ¼" again. Iron flat. Sew a straight stitch to hem. Lay pocket upside-down on top of one lining piece with right sides together and the hemmed pocket edge aligned 3" below the bottom of the bag. Pin the raw edge to the lining and sew across. Fold pocket up and iron flat. To create sections in your pocket, pin and sew seams from the bottom of the pocket to the top, back-tacking at the beginning and end of your stitching.

To embroider your design, take one outer bag piece and lay it flat. Print out the “thank you” design you can download at www.bust.com/Info/Downloads. html. Center the graphic and pin the corners to the fabric. Slip a sheet of transfer paper underneath.

Trace the design on your printout, using a stylus.

A Check that the whole design has transferred to the fabric, then remove the papers. Stabilize with an embroidery hoop and use satin stitch (with 6 strands of embroidery floss) to fill in the letters and split stitch to create the outlines (see image A).

Now it’s time to sew your bag. Lay lining pieces with right sides together. Pin the tops of the handles and sew together. Iron seams flat. Repeat for outer fabric pieces. Open up the outer bag piece and lining piece and lay both out flat, right sides together. Pin around the inner edge of the handles, matching up seams, and sew (see image B). Clip curves and trim extra fabric from seams.

Fold the outer edges of the top fabric’s handles in 5⁄8" and iron flat, clipping curves where necessary (see image C).

B

D

C

Turn the pieces over and repeat. Turn right side out, with wrong sides facing. Iron inner handle seam. Match up outer edges of handles and topstitch together, as close to the edge as possible. Match outer fabrics right sides together, and pin along side seams (see image D). Match linings right sides together, and pin along side seams, making sure to catch the pocket sides between the lining pieces, and sew. Trim extra fabric and turn right side out.

E

F

G

To finish the handles and create the side gussets, fold each handle in half lengthwise, with the lining on the inside of the fold (see image E). Pin in place. Sew along the top seam of the handle (“stitch in the ditch”) to secure the fold. Continue folding the sides of the bag in, creating a gusset. The side seam should be approximately 3" in from the fold, making a 6" gusset (see image F). Pin to hold the fold in place. Sew a ¼" seam along the bottom of the bag, through all layers. Trim seam allowance to 1⁄8". Turn bag inside out, with right sides facing. Sew a seam 3⁄8" from the folded edge, capturing the raw edge inside the new seam. Turn right side out and press (see image G). [JENNIFER REICHERT]

To create Jennifer’s receipt-inspired change purse to accompany your new grocery bag, go to www.bust.com/Info/ Downloads.html for stepby-step instructions.

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real life OLD SCHOOL

obaachan’s beef and pork gyoza

Wooly Bully Teeny fuzzy animals are ridiculously adorable, and these DIY kits make it easy to needle-felt an owl, sheep, or panda of your own. Each Woolpets pack ($16 – $20, www.woolpets.com) contains all the materials and instructions you need to start your own menagerie!

churn, baby, churn

BUTTER TASTES BETTER WHEN YOU MAKE IT YOURSELF A LITTLE WHIPPING goes a long way—not only is DIY butter fresher and tastier than its store-bought sister, but you can also experiment with different creams from your farmer’s market, add tasty herbs to your heart’s delight, turn leftover cream into something delicious, and say, “I made that!” when you serve bread and butter at your next dinner party.

First, dump 1 – 2 cups of heavy whipping cream into a stainless-steel or stand-mixer bowl. If you like, add one or two pinches of salt. Beat the cream on medium-high with your mixer’s whipping attachment, periodically scraping the sides of the bowl with a spatula.

Continue to whip the cream beyond “soft peaks”—it will begin to resemble mashed potatoes and take on a light yellow hue. After another minute, the cream will get yellow and grainy, and liquid will start to pool in the bowl; slow down the mixing speed to prevent sloshing. As the butter lumps together, buttermilk will continue to pool. Pour it out and reserve it for baking. Place the lump of butter in a clean bowl. Run water over it and knead it for a few minutes, changing out the water until it runs clear. Now roll your butter in wax paper and refrigerate, or chill it in molds to make cute shapes. You can also whip it a little more to create a fluffier texture great for spreading on muffins or bread. Want to get fancy? Stir in dried rosemary or basil. [JENNY ROSE RYAN]

PHOTO [RIGHT]: SARAH ANNE WARD

EATING MY GRANDMA’S gyoza is always excellent, but it’s the big communal affair that goes into making these dumplings that I enjoy the most. As a kid, whenever I visited my extended family in Japan, my grandma would spend the whole day making gyoza. In the evening, we’d all gather in her tiny apartment to eat, after which I’d immediately pass out on her tatami floor. When my mother opened her first restaurant, I’d help her fold dumplings when I got home from school, and we’d talk about our day. When I moved out, I inherited the recipe and got my roommates hooked, too. So grab some friends and make a night of it; your dumplings will totally taste better. This recipe yields about 80 gyoza, but they keep incredibly well and taste even better after a week in the freezer.

In a bowl, mix 1 pound of ground beef and ½ pound of ground pork. Fold in 1 cup of minced napa cabbage, 2 tsp. of grated ginger, and 3 medium chopped garlic cloves. Add 1⁄8 cup each of soy sauce and rice vinegar, 1½ Tbsp. of sesame oil, and 1 Tbsp. of mirin. Mix well. Fill a small bowl with water, then put a prepackaged gyoza skin (available at any Asian grocery store) in the palm of your hand and spoon 1 Tbsp. of the mixture into the middle. Wet the rim of the wrapper, fold in a half-circle, and lightly pinch the edges to seal. To cook, heat 1 Tbsp. of vegetable oil in a frying pan on high. Fry gyoza until brown on the bottom, then pour in ¼ cup of water and cover.

Steam for about 2 minutes until the skin becomes translucent. Uncover and cook for about 15 more seconds, until most of the water is gone. To make the dipping sauce, mix 3 Tbsp. of soy sauce, 3 Tbsp. of rice vinegar, 1½ tsp. of sesame oil, and a dash each of chili oil and mirin. [AMY WATANABE]

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BUY OR DIY

another bed creation GET SOME SHUT-EYE UNDER A HEADBOARD THAT’S DIY

DUVET: WWW.DWELLSTUDIO.COM; PAINTING BY KATHERINE BERNHARDT

DON’T SNOOZE ON tricking out your land of nod.

You can reuse packing Styrofoam to create a beautiful fabric-covered headboard—a recycler’s wet dream!

Start by measuring the height of your mattress, adding 24", and the width of your mattress (or bed frame, if you have one), adding 2". From a large roll of kraft paper, cut a piece slightly larger than this measurement, fold it in half, and using a pencil, draw the shape you want your headboard to be. Keeping the paper folded, cut this out. You’ll need Styrofoam 2" thick and large enough to fit your entire pattern. »

PHOTO BY AMANDA BRUNS

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real life

BUY OR DIY

Recycle smaller pieces from an appliance box or foam cooler by gluing them together using Foam Fusion ($6.99, www.hotwirefoamfactory.com)—let them dry completely before you continue—or pick some up from a moving-supply store. Unfold and pin the template to your foam, and trace firmly to leave an indentation.

Remove the pattern. You can use a knife to cut the foam, but we recommend using the 8" Pro Hot Knife and Freehand Router Kit ($139.95, www.hotwirefoamfactory.com)—the tools cut the foam like butter, with relatively no smoke, odor, or dust. Be sure to practice first; cutting evenly takes some fine-tuning. Use the hot knife to trim the foam to about 2" from your line. Then use the router to cut the shape you’ve marked. Smooth the edges using a fine/medium sanding sponge (wear a dust mask). Once you are satisfied with your shape, make your headboard sturdy by covering it with Foam Sealer ($29.95 for 25 lbs., www.hotwirefoamfactory. com) mixed with Boost ($14.95 for 16 oz., www.hotwirefoamfactory.com). Make small batches—it dries fast—by following the instructions on the Boost package. Wipe any dust off the Styrofoam, then use a trawl to apply the mix as smoothly as possible about 1⁄4" thick to one side of your headboard. Let it dry. Repeat on the other side, then seal the edges. Once they’ve dried, sand one side and the edges using 36-grit sandpaper.

To make the cover, create a pattern by tracing the entire headboard on kraft paper, adding 1" all the way around. Cut and pin this to the wrong side of 2 – 3 yards (depending on the size of your headboard) of stretch velvet (make sure its width is greater then the height of your board) and trace. Cut and set aside.

Measure along the top and sides of the headboard with a tape measure, add 1", and cut a strip of fabric to this length by 3" wide. Sew a ¾" hem along one length of the strip. Trim 1" off all sides of the pattern, pin it to cotton batting, trace, and cut. Pin the batting to the front of the headboard and secure with a staple gun. Remove the pins. Pin the large velvet piece over the batting, stretching across the top edge as tight as possible. Clip the curves of the fabric where it bunches to ease the tension. Secure along the top edge and bottom of the board with a staple gun. Remove pins.

Lay the strip of fabric along the top with the hem hanging slightly over the front edge. Pin in place, pulling it back behind the board as much as possible.

Clip the curves of the fabric on the back of the board to ease it over the rounded parts; make sure the cuts are not visible on the top. Use decorative fabric tacks to secure the strip along the hem, placing 1" apart.

Secure the back with a staple gun and remove pins.

Mount finished headboard on the wall as you would a picture, or rest it behind your bed. [CALLIE WATTS]

check your bed

BUY ONE OF THESE HEADBOARDS AND COP SOME STYLISH Z’S [BY CALLIE WATTS]

Bed Religion You may not have flying buttresses over your mattress, but with these gothic arches, you’re destined to get some ass.

Mix and match with sevendecal sets available in three color combos ($60 per set, two sets pictured, www. whatisblik.com).

Alice in Slumberland Don’t let your room be a snooze fest; top your bed off with this acrylic header

by Swedish designer Myrica Bergqvist (£304.94 for a full, www.sheerhome.co.uk).

More Cushion for the Pushin’ Catch 40 winks under velvet in bright pink ($159 for a full, uk.maisonsdumonde.com).

Sleeping Beauty Your bed will look like a dream come true under laser-cut lace ($199 for a full, www. brocadehome.com).

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real life

EAT ME [BY CHEF ROSSI]

A tasty pair of pears

better off red

EAT YOUR HEART OUT WITH THIS V-DAY MENU

FOR SOME FOLKS, February 14th means romance, chocolate, and roses. For others, it’s an excuse for a movie marathon and a vat of Chinese take-out. If all that Valentine’s Day hullabaloo has you seeing red (whether you’re coupled up or not), try channeling your inner chef-ette and eat red instead! Here’s a monochromatic menu perfect for a V-Day feast.

Red Raspberry Scarlet Salad Buy any red leaf lettuce you love—Red Romaine or Lola Rosa is nice. Wash it well, dry it, and plop it in a big bowl. Toss your lettuce in enough olive oil to coat, throw in a few drizzles of raspberry vinegar, add salt and pepper to taste, and toss again. Garnish with a heaping handful of raspberries.

Grilled Red Shrimp with Roasted Red Pepper Coulis To make the coulis, drop 4 red bell peppers on a baking pan, and shove them in the broiler until you see the skin turning black, about 5 – 10 minutes. For easy peeling, drop the peppers in a metal bowl and Saran Wrap the top so they sweat. Once they’ve cooled, take the skin off and 026 / BUST // FEB/MAR

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get rid of the seeds, then puree them in a food processor with a drizzle of balsamic vinegar and salt and pepper to taste. To make the red shrimp, buy a pound or so of peeled and deveined shrimp, or clean them yourself if you’re a toughie.

Then toss your shrimp in just enough olive oil to coat, and add a smidgen each of paprika, salt, pepper, and chili powder. Throw them on a hot grill or skillet, and cook for about a minute per side or until your shrimp start to feel firm and curl up. Toss the shrimp with your red pepper coulis and serve.

Ruby Red Poached Pears Pour 3 or 4 coffee cups of red wine into a pot.

Add 2 coffee cups of sugar, a couple of cinnamon sticks, and 4 or 5 peeled pears, and bring to a boil. Then turn the heat off and cover the pot, letting your pears get nice and soft for about 10 minutes. Remove the pears, and return your wine mixture to a boil until it reduces to a bit less then half of what you started with and has a syrupy consistency. Refrigerate the pears and syrup, and serve them well-chilled. For extra flare, add a scoop of raspberry or cherry sorbet.

PHOTO BY SARAH ANNE WARD

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real life MOTHER SUPERIOR [BY AYUN HALLIDAY]

born to lose

LETTING GO OF THINGS LET GO chasing a coat to replace the one she left in the gym is to leave this one in the gym too.

Too bad her inability to hang on to material possessions isn’t a conscious choice. I bet I’d be less of a shrew had that brand-new hoodie been abandoned deliberately along the path to enlightenment. At least I would know where it is. I hate how petty I sound, ticking off lunchboxes, hats, and calculators as if they were the very bedrock upon which our empire depends.

Believe me, if there were some nonviolent, painless, and not-too-funny-looking way to staple Inky’s belongings to

I bet I’d be less of a shrew had that brand-new hoodie been abandoned deliberately along the path to enlightenment. her, I would. Then we could both forget about them for real.

Is this condition of hers hereditary?

I’d say yes, except that I’m not so much a loser as a breaker, and my husband limits his losses to such spectacularly Hemingway-esque incidents as stepping off the train sans the accordion file containing a year’s worth of financial records. Our other child, Inky’s eightyear-old brother, is the steeliest trap of

cooling the simmering resentment I experience when no one dials the phone number I compulsively scrawl in Sharpie, ever hopeful that finders won’t be keepers. Maybe if I made a calculated play for the heart: Brandnew collapsible umbrella. ENORMOUS sentimental value. Spare a remorseful adolescent (and her ma!) endless rounds of unproductive hectoring! Isn’t that reward enough?

AYUN HALLIDAY

LAST WEEK, A staggering number of lampposts in our neighborhood bore signs offering a sizable reward for the return of a hand-embroidered baby blanket of “enormous” sentimental value. A couple of thoughts sprang to mind. One, these signs were very likely not the work of a mother raising her children in the hardscrabble projects immediately west of the hip bistros and trendy boutiques that have come to define our main shopping street. And two, I’d wager my own kids’ nonexistent college funds that the youngster from whose stroller this treasured item slipped was nowhere near as grief-stricken as the adult—hopefully not a nanny—who’d been piloting the craft.

I sympathized, sort of, but not nearly as much as I would have had the AWOL possession been a one-eyed bunny with balding ears and a prosthetic leg improvised from a stuffed baby sock.

We can spare ourselves a lot of heartache by coming to terms with the fact that kids shed. Some more than others.

My daughter is an equal-opportunity loser: the mundane, the irreplaceable, the expensive, the essential, items that have been in the family for years, as well as those she’s had for less than 24 hours.

It has started to feel like a self-fulfilling prophecy, as if the ultimate point of pur-

them all, every plastic dinosaur present and accounted for at day’s end. I try to avoid binaries when assessing my children’s strengths and weaknesses, but if I thought Milo’s was a learned behavior instead of some random gift of nature, I’d be milking him for any tried-and-true tip he might offer, some seven-step organizational process he could lay on the girl before she accidentally leaves her unstapled head in the school cafeteria, for some other kid to steal.

I know I’m supposed to be preparing her for adulthood, but given our track record, I sometimes wonder if the kindest, most motherly thing to do would be to stop badgering her to keep track of her wallet, her headbands, the meticulously labored-over craft project destined to be left on the bus before the glue has dried. Why give her a complex?

It’s just stuff. Replacing it does add up, but not nearly as much as those Juicy Couture jeans other kids soak their folks for. I’ve no stomach for juvenile champagne tastes. Fortunately, my girl’s always been a cheap date. Next time I’m rummaging through the racks at Salvation Army, I should reward her with an entire season’s worth of denim jackets.

Save myself a half-dozen trips in increasingly hard weather.

In truth, the double, triple, quadruple expenses are less crazy-making than the utter mystery of where her many missing things will come to rest. Myanmar? Haiti? I wish! The possibility of these items winding up with someone in need would go a long way toward

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12/19/08 5:22:03 PM

FASHION+BOOTY

louise sturges PHOTOGRAPHER AND PAINTER

How would you describe your style? I have a friend who calls me her glamour hippie. I would say it’s some kind of cultural mash-up. I like to pull from a lot of different genres and periods of time—relaxed and casual, but with at least one thing that’s going to stand out. Tell me about this outfit. I was at Oak in Williamsburg and tried this coat on and was like, “Oh, my God, this is totally one of those things that’s gonna make me not be sad about New York winter,” because I hate the cold. It’s stylish but functions like a comforter. Who’s the designer? Ideeen.

It was sort of my major biggie purchase, an investment piece. What do you mean by that? I definitely spend a lot of time at thrift stores and have a lot of beat-up clothes that cost 95 cents.

I think in terms of fashion, there are key pieces that you buy and invest in that won’t go out of style and you can wear every day. My best friend gave me the over-the-knee socks for my birthday. They’re from H&M. The shoes are Chloé, and those I got on super, super, super sale at Intermix. I’ve worn them to death. Who would you consider your style icon? Janis Joplin. She had a wild, feminine style, but a “who-gives-ashit” attitude. I think fashion is so much about confidence and being able to own who you are and what you have. My grandmothers had an influence on my look, and Edie Sedgwick. Do you have any style advice for our readers? People shouldn’t be afraid of doing something a little crazy, taking fashion risks. Nobody ever gets acknowledged for fashion if they’re not gonna be a fashion “don’t” sometimes. [LISA BUTTERWORTH]

PHOTO BY XABI TUDELA

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FASHIONISTA

PHOTO BY ALIX BANCOURT; INTERVIEW TRANSLATION BY VICTORIA MORRISON

looks

from paris with love THE CHERRY BLOSSOM GIRL TAKES HER STYLE FROM THE WEB TO THE RUNWAY

IN STYLE-BLOGGING circles, there’s one gal who sets the bar for everyone else: Parisian Alix Bancourt, aka the Cherry Blossom Girl. Showcasing her dreamy shoe collection and a knack for capturing perfectly styled outfits in gorgeous French landscapes, her blog (of the same name) reveals a fairy-tale world that has garnered the 23-year-old international recognition.

And now, Bancourt has turned her passion for fashion into a line of sophisticated-yet-childlike frocks, infused with the sweetness of her signature look.

Bancourt’s designs were inspired by one of her favorite children’s books, Comtesse de Ségur’s Les Petites Filles Modèles (The Good Little Girls). “The blouses I imagined the girls wearing in the book really came alive with the creation of this collection,” says Bancourt, who was also influenced by the movie Belle de Jour, starring Catherine Deneuve. “Throughout the novel, the main characters go through all sorts of life-altering events, creating a liveliness that really moved me,” she says. “My hope is for any girl who wears my line to have a life that is filled with the same positive spirit.” Bancourt’s collection came to fruition thanks to the Concours de Style contest for emerging designers, sponsored by online French fashion boutique L’atelier de la Mode. After sending in her sketches, Bancourt was chosen to receive all the resources necessary to fulfill her dream of creating and selling her first collection. Her experience with fashion design, however, is nothing new. Bancourt obtained a bac (the French equivalent of a high-school diploma) in art, before at-

The Cherry Blosson Girl gives her dress a whirl

tending ESMOD, a fashion school in Paris, and interning at Chloé and Alexander McQueen.

Bancourt’s designs include youthful, sheer blouses; Peter Pan–collared dresses; and supergirly trousers. But it’s the creamy pastels and muted color palette, uber-feminine shapes, and rich textures that give her collection the Cherry Blossom Girl aesthetic that we’ve come to expect from her blog. Grab one of her pieces for your very own at www.atelierdelamode.com (brush up on your French to create an account), pair it with some killer Chloé Oxfords, and you’ll be one step closer to capturing Bancourt’s incredibly whimsical style. [TARA MARKS]

sole mates

We used these Royal Elastics to make hand-painted kicks

SHOES PAINTED BY EMILY MAGNUSON; PHOTO BY RALPH SMITH

TAKE A PEEK AT THESE CUSTOMIZABLE SNEAKS

HAVING TROUBLE FINDING the perfect shoes? Try adding your own flair to a favorite pair.

With DIY shoe-decorating kits and classic brands getting in on the custom tip, the time has never been so ripe to pimp the hell out of your high-tops.

Keds have come a long way from the slip-ons you sported in second grade. The white canvas tennies are now a canvas for the imagination: on Zazzle.com, you can pick the color and pattern of every Keds element, even down to the soles and stitching. Choose from a rainbow of hues and prints, or upload your own photos and graphics to make a shoe that’s truly you for $50 – $70. Converse kicks are another wardrobe staple you can now trick out to your liking. In high school, I used scissors to turn my red high-tops into slip-ons; for a far more successful adventure in customization, try www.converse.com, which offers a bevy of colors and patterns for personalizing All-Stars, Jack Purcells, and, yes, the coveted slip-ons themselves, for $60 – $80. The morehands-on DIY-er will dig the JGoods shoe customization kit ($44.95, www.thejgcustoms.com/kit).

It includes a how-to guide, paintbrushes, finish remover (for prepping), and five colors of highquality, waterproof shoe paint to help you reimagine your leather sneaks. [SIRI THORSON]

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she’s got the look SNAG A RETRO STYLE THAT WILL HAVE YOU KEEPIN’ UP WITH THE JOANS

JOAN HOLLOWAY IS not your typical secretary. As office queen bee on AMC’s hit drama Mad Men, she’s breaking hearts and taking numbers—with nary a hair out of place. Even as she keeps the whip crackin’, she’s catching the eyes of Cooper Sterling’s guys—skipping a lunch martini for an occasional mattress dance with a choice silverhaired higher-up is all in a day’s work. Holloway leaves no detail overlooked (office attire included), and her schedule isn’t the only thing she likes tight. Her style is sexgoddess perfection, made up of supersnug secretary dresses, hip-hugging pencil skirts, ultrafeminine silhouettes, and no-room-tobreathe, accentuated waistlines. Topped off with perfectly sculpted copper-colored hair and her ever-present gold-pen necklace, Holloway shows you everything without giving away anything. Get her bombshell look with these awesome items, and have the girls talking about you at the watercooler. [TARA MARKS]

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JOAN PHOTO COURTESY OF AMC; PRODUCT PHOTOS BY CHRISTINE BLACKBURNE

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1. GOLD-TONE PEN NECKLACE BY 1928 JEWELRY, $20, WWW.1928.COM. 2. NAVY PARIS DRESS BY STOP STARING!, $126, WWW.STOPSTARING.COM. 3. FANTASY ENGRAVED LOVE KNOT EARRINGS BY ANTIQUITIES COUTURE, $28, WWW.1928.COM. 4. ESPIONAGE DRESS BY STOP STARING!, $112.49, WWW.MODCLOTH.COM. 5. ROUND-COLLAR COAT IN LAGOON BY TULLE, $98, WWW.TULLE4US. COM. 6. L’ORÉAL PARIS FÉRIA MULTI-FACETED SHIMMERING COLOUR IN 74 COPPER SHIMMER, $9.99, WWW.LOREALPARIS.COM. 7. SHADES BY BARIELLE NAIL POLISH IN CHERRY PIE, $8, WWW. BARIELLE.COM. 8. BLAIZE PUMP BY MINNA PARIKKA, €270, WWW.MINNAPARIKKA.COM.

PHOTO BY GLYNIS SELINA ARBAN

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BOOTY CALL

Ba-Tonka-Donk You’ll be hella warm all trucked out in these long janes. Made of 95 percent cotton with an itch-free tag, these stretchy thermals are so soft and snug, they’re more like underwear for lounging ($42, www.ginchgonch.com).

[CALLIE WATTS]

It’s Quiltin’ Time This crafty kit in a tote includes stepby-step flashcards, bias tape, yarn, needles, and 48 charm squares to make a 36” x 26.5” throw. All you need now is batting and backing.

Go on, quilt while you’re ahead ($38.99, www.homealamode. com). [CALLIE WATTS]

PRODUCT PHOTOS BY CHRISTINE BLACKBURNE

looks

Snow Dance Don’t be a menace to South Central while blasting your jams in this hood. Speakers on the inside of this bomber let you listen to your beats discreetly while the fleece lining keeps your noddin’ noggin toasty ($44.99, www.bulabula.com). [CALLIE WATTS]

test kitchen [ THEIR PRODUCTS, OUR INTERNS ] L’Oréal’s Skin Genesis Wet Cleansing Towelettes, $7.59, www.drugstore.com www.drugstore.c

AL MA

These cleansing towelettes are clearly not the sustainable choice for face washing, but they sure came in handy on nights when I was too profoundly lazy or drunk for my usual three-step washing process: soap, water, and towel.

I’ll admit, swiping my face with something that resembles a baby wipe felt kinda slimy.

But after a couple of days, my complexion looked clearer, and the towelettes did a nifty job of removing the icky crud that was last night’s mascara.

Aquafina Moisture Replenishing and Exfoliating Facial Scrub, $5, 5, www.aquafinaskincare.com m

SA RI

These wipes are my new favorite thing! They smelled sweet and yummy and caught every bit of makeup on my face. The towelettes didn’t leave behind any icky residue, and my skin remained soft and silky-smooth all day long.

I have a thing for scrubs—this one smelled fresh and made my face tingle a bit after each use. It definitely woke me up, and I’ve noticed a glow, too. Careful, though: it wasn’t as “sensitive” as it claims to be.

This scrub left my skin feeling smooth and refreshed. Unfortunately, it also felt and smelled like Bengay (minus the muscle-pain relief). Probably a no-no for ladies with sensitive skin, as it left my forehead red and blotchy.

This exfoliator now holds a place of honor in my bathroom cabinet! The scrubalicious granules felt all tingly when I massaged them into my skin and left my face feeling oh-so-fresh and soft that I couldn’t stop touching myself (shut up).

Wash With Joe Invigorating Coffeemint Bodywash, $24, www. washwithjoe.com

J ESS IC A

This is one of the best body washes I’ve ever used. It smelled fantastic (coffee and mint—yum!) and snapped me out of my sleepy state.

It left my skin feeling uberclean and soft—I didn’t even need to use lotion afterward.

Joe is welcome in my shower any day!

The coffee-chocolate-mint-scented wash was a refreshing change from the tuttifrutti aromas that plague many body washes. It looks a bit like iodine but left my skin all tingly-fresh and soft.

This body wash did little to calm my inner java junkie, but once I took a shower, I pleasantly discovered how minty-cool and refreshing it felt. The scent lingered for hours, leaving me jonesing for a big ol’ cup of café con leche!

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PAGE O’ SHIT

tour of booty

HONORABLE UNMENTIONABLES YOU WON’T WANT TO COVER UP [BY CALLIE WATTS]

From left to right: Love Boat These seafaring skivvies let you put the motion in the ocean ($6.50, www.shopplasticland.com). Hot Pocket This set is so soft, you’ll be feelin’ on your own booty. Plus, the undies have a spot to stash condoms, tampons, or even the remote during pantsless TV time ($39 for bra, $27 for panties, www.spreegirl.com). Tighty Brighties These handmade briefs are a Technicolor dream ($15, ruffeoheartslilsnoty.etsy.com).

Picknickers Shake a tail feather in handmade ruffle-butt bloomers ($26, clarebare.etsy.com).

Set It Off It’s a double whammy when you rock this hand-embroidered panty and cami by Odd Molly ($52 for camisole, $75 for panties, www.shopgreenapple.com).

PHOTO BY AMANDA BRUNS

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looks Timing Is Everything Put your best face forward with these slim-band watches

by Normal. Sayings like “Golden Girls Fan” and “When Did Rock ‘n’ Roll Become So Fucking Boring” will have you lovin’ every minute of the day ($19.95 each, www. bust.com). [CALLIE WATTS]

PRODUCT PHOTOS BY CHRISTINE BLACKBURNE

Tempest Temptress Better than sunshine on a rainy day, these vegan pumps—with an insole that sparkles in metallic gold— shine from all angles. Start dancing up a storm, and remember that lightning strikes first, and then it starts raining men ($40, www.ironfistrocks.com). [CALLIE WATTS]

Funny Face There are a million beauty blogs, but only one has me snorting at its snark: Babyassface.

com. Since “naturally beautiful skin is just hundreds of products away,” blogger Jenny Sandbank’s out to test as many as possible, giving the low-down in a way that’s helpful and hilarious.

have it your way

Royal Pink shows off their Mode Merr attire

BACK IN THE 19th century, before ready-to-wear clothing dominated the fashion scene, ladies often got their outfits made especially for them by a local dressmaker.

Today, such luxury strikes most shoppers as extravagant, but with the explosion of the DIY movement putting thousands of skilled seamsters at consumers’ fingertips via the Internet, getting a custom look is actually easier than you’d think.

Why go custom? Maybe you want your prom or wedding gown to be totally unique. Or you have a great idea for your bridesmaids, bowling team, Vespa club, or retail employees. Perhaps there’s a style you’re dying to wear but can’t find in your size. These are all times when an indie designer is your new best friend.

For example, when my band, Royal Pink, wanted to amp up our image with retro-inspired band uniforms (pictured), we called up Angela Zampell from www. modemerr.com. Likewise, the vegan cupcake superstars at N.Y.C.’s Babycakes bakery got outfitted by Wendy Mullin, of www.builtbywendy.com. And when green fashionistas want to recycle their favorite-but-falling-apart garments into something new and personalized, they send ’em to Minnae Chae, of www. chema-d.com. So the next time you’re itching to get an outfit from your brain to your bod, ping that designer whose online styles make you drool, and find out if her crafty fingers can work especially for you! [EMILY REMS]

PHOTO BY SCOTT ROUNDS

GET THE PERFECT FIT WITH A CUSTOMIZED OUTFIT

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I love you, I need you, I want you… to get me a subscription to

PHOTO: CHRIS VERENE

SUBSCRIBE ONLINE : WWW. BUST. COM

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looks

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 GIRLS [#36] Get your shopping done at Jump the Gun

The Brighton Pier fills England’s shore with good cheer

brighton, u.k.

LIFE’S A PEACH IN THIS TOWN BY THE BEACH [BY KATIE ALLEN]

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ONE HOUR FROM England’s capital, Brighton’s kitschy, welcoming seaside oasis lures daytripping Londoners and vacationers alike with its idiosyncratic mix of retro shops, organicsmoothie bars, glamorous clubs, and beachfront entertainment. The town has a young, creative vibe, and the city’s well known for nurturing stylish tribes. In the ’60s, two opposing British subcultures, the spiffy-suited Mods and the leather-wearing rockers, duked it out on the beaches of Brighton (a fight immortalized in the retro flick Quadrophenia), and there are still scooter rallies and club nights for the different fashionable factions. It’s also famous for being the gay capital of the U.K., hosting a massive Pride festival every August. Its fun-loving reputation dates back to the liberal days of the Prince Regent, son of King George III, who made Brighton the place to be in the early-19th century—a trait that it still holds onto 200 years later.

If shopping’s your thing, head to The Lanes, a small historic area with winding cobblestone alleys and quaint little shops—particularly, indie-music stalwart Rounder Records (19 Brighton Square). Or spend a few hours in the bohemian North Laine district; it’s crowded

Colorful huts brighten the beach up

with cool vintage shops, boutiques, bookstores, cafes, and galleries. Want a tattoo or a piercing to commemorate your trip? Stop by Punktured (35 Gardner Street), the parlor with the friendliest staff. Then pop next door to Jump the Gun (36 Gardner Street), which stocks the best Mod merchandise. Vintage store To Be Worn Again (24A Sydney Street) is perfect for picking up an ’80s handbag or ’60s slingbacks; or if you’re prepared to walk for your goodies, scout out Frocks Away (17 St George’s Road), a girly boutique stuffed with vintage and modern dresses, petticoats, stockings, and frilly underthings. Get Cutie (33 Kensington Gardens) sells kickass handmade frocks, and Pussy Home Boutique (3 Bartholomews) is a kitschy emporium of naughty greeting cards, saucy gifts, and arty books. While you’re in the Laine, be sure to scope some of the amazing street art, including a cherished piece by Banksy on the wall of hipster pub The Prince Albert (48 Trafalgar Street).

Brighton is a dream for those who like to eat, so come hungry. If you’re after a good fried breakfast with a retro theme, head to Rock Ola (29 Tidy Street), a tiny café decorated with Elvis and Beatles memorabilia. Vegetarian, vegan, PHOTOS BY KATIE ALLEN

12/19/08 5:44:31 PM

It’s always fun at the The Mash Tun

Buy clothes with a grin at Make To Be your Worndigs Again divine with finds from @home Lounge hard in the Pavilion Gardens

or gluten-free? Visit Iydea (17 Kensington Gardens) for a satisfying meal at an excellent price: pick up a wholesome veggie lasagna plus two types of salad with change from a fiver. If you’re a cake fiend, head across town to the Mock Turtle (4 Pool Valley), a twee grandmotherly tearoom with mismatched vintage china, lace-edged tablecloths, and homemade sweets (including spectacular donuts).

Time to work off the calories with a brisk walk and some culture. Brighton has several little galleries worth visiting, such as O Contemporary (80 Trafalgar Street) and Fabrica (40 Duke Street), which is housed inside an old church. But for a cosmopolitan mishmash of 20th-century design, Victorian frocks, and Chinese art (depending on the season), explore Brighton Museum & Art Gallery (Royal Pavilion Gardens) inside the spectacular Royal Pavilion in the middle of the North Laine. Once the Prince Regent’s fanciful pleasure palace, it is a formidable facade of Taj Mahal–like domes and minarets, but watch out for the lines of snaphappy tourists. Sit for a bit in the Pavilion’s lovely gardens, and listen to the buskers.

The Royal Pavilion is one in a million

Brighton wouldn’t be Brighton without its piers, even if the locals may be a little jaded when it comes to the Palace Pier’s bright lights, fairground rides, and tacky slot machines. The solitary and brooding presence of the West Pier—which was mysteriously burnt to a blackened shell a few years ago—is worth a few moments’ reflection on the horizon.

The beach in itself is entertaining, for although it lacks the sweeping sands of more picturesque British shores, the stones are perfect for picnics in summer and bracing walks in winter. The seafront is crowded with ice cream stands, skateboarders, and stalls selling tons of goods like sarongs and books. Pop in for a cider at the Fortune of War (157 King’s Road Arches), where you can sit on the pub’s outdoor benches and watch the fashionistas stroll past.

Brighton has a wide choice of bars, including the superpopular Hop Poles (13 Middle Street), with its famous pub quizzes and hearty sausages and mash, and the Caroline of Brunswick (39 Ditchling Road), where you’ll likely find punks, rockers, goths, and a pounding soundtrack. Grab

Have a panty raid at Frocks Away

a pint at The Mash Tun (1 Church Street), a cheap and student-heavy hangout, or try Pintxo People (95-99 Western Road) for tapas and award-winning cocktails— particularly the Bloody Mary—in glam Edwardian surroundings. If you want to dance the night away, persevere (if you dare) down main drag West Street for cheesy clubs frequented by raucous bachelorette parties.

Or wander through the city’s eclectic streets to the Engine Room (5 Preston Street), my favorite sweaty, sticky-floored club featuring rock and rockabilly nights, or Legends (3132 Marine Parade), the seafront gay bar.

Spending the night in Brighton can be pretty pricey, but there are a number of affordable travellers’ hostels, like The Grapevine Hotel (75-76 Middle Street and 29-30 North Road). If you’ve got extra cash and a taste for camp extravagance, stay at the Hotel Pelirocco (10 Regency Square), which boasts kitschy rooms including one with a Bettie Page theme and another decked out in Diana Dors décor.

No matter who you are, or what you like, Brighton is sure to have something that will tickle your fancy. Who knows, you may even end up staying! // BUST / 037

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12/19/08 5:45:22 PM

T’S 9:30 IN the morning, and I’m poring over the menu at a restaurant on New York’s Lower East Side when Amber Tamblyn appears, scanning the small space and looking slightly hurried. I catch her eye and she comes over, setting down a bag of doggie treats with a wry grin. “Here,” she says, “I brought you these.” For a second I think she might be serious, until she tells me she’s brought along her boyfriend’s dog—a perky-eared mutt instantly familiar to anyone who’s seen the paparazzi shots of the 25-year-old actress with her significant other, actor/comedian David Cross. Leaving her oversized sunglasses on the table, she sweeps out to tie her canine charge up closer to the entrance, where she’ll be able to keep an eye on the dog through the windows.

It was Tamblyn’s idea to meet here at Shopsin’s, a tiny restaurant with an eccentric, 800-item menu. I’ve barely familiarized myself with the 50 flavors of French toast when Tamblyn returns, tossing her bag on the floor, shedding her long, hooded sweater, and unwrapping a colorful scarf from around her neck. She’s wearing black leggings, black boots, and a big gray T-shirt that says “Write Bloody” over a bird-on-a-typewriter graphic. I notice her black-painted fingernails as she whips her long brown hair back into a messy ponytail before ordering orange juice and huevos rancheros (“I’m going to be totally boring and get what I always get”). She tells me she flew in from Los Angeles the previous evening and went directly to Williamsburg to see her friends the

BY LISA BUTTERWORTH // PHOTOS BY MICHAEL LAVINE STYLING BY DEBORAH AFSHANI // MAKEUP BY KRISTOFER BUCKLE HAIR BY MATTHEW MONZON // PROPS BY WIL PIERCE

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DRESS: ALBERTA FERRETTI; HEADPIECE: JENNIFER BEHR; EARRINGS: RJ GRAZIANO; GLOVES: LACRASIA

With a new TV show, a new famous boyfriend, and a new home base in the Big Apple, actress Amber Tamblyn is moving at warp speed. Here, she puts on the brakes for a quick breakfast and talks about poetry, politics, and plotting with Amy Poehler

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Cold War Kids play, which explains the neon paper wristband she’s sporting. “I’m literally wearing the same thing I wore last night,” she says. It’s not an apology, just an example of her willingness to tell it like it is.

Tamblyn’s brazenness, coupled with her smart and snarky attitude, sets her apart from her peers in the industry—she is no one but herself. Though born and raised in Venice Beach, CA, she doesn’t subscribe to the Hollywood aesthetic, maintaining a refreshingly normal weight and refusing to “fix” her adorably less-than-perfect teeth. As an actor, Tamblyn takes roles for the challenge they provide or to work with women she admires, not necessarily for exposure or to be “the next big thing.” And whereas many actresses attempt to cross over to pop-singer

DRESS: J. MENDEL; EARRINGS: RJ GRAZIANO; HAT: JENNIFER BEHR; GLOVES: LACRASIA

“It’s very rare that you !nd anything that’s good for young females. I’ve read a hundred scripts this year.

Crap, crap, and more crap.” stardom, Tamblyn has been successfully building a second career as a published poet and spoken-word performer. (At a recent reading in an indie record shop in Nashville, TN, she shared “Hate: A Love Poem,” killing the audience with lines like “I sit in fast-food bathrooms just to remember your smell” and “My fist thinks you’re ugly and would tell you to your face.”)

She’s independent and outspoken—a self-proclaimed feminist in a time when many people shy away from the word, especially in the media. And she’s always fighting for the cause, whether it’s as a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood, campaigning on behalf of Hillary Clinton in the presidential primaries, or rocking the mic at Girl Fest in Hawaii, an event dedicated to ending violence against women and providing girls with role models. When I tell her she strikes me as the quintessential BUST girl, she says, “Holla!” then leans into my recorder on the table to add, “You hear that, readers?”

Tamblyn was born into a Hollywood family: her father is Russ Tamblyn, an actor famous in the ’50s and ’60s (he starred in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and West Side Story), and again in the ’90s, when he played Dr. Jacoby on the television series Twin Peaks. David Lynch happens to be a family friend, and Dennis Hopper and Neil Young, both close friends of her father, are Tamblyn’s godparents. “My dad was adamantly against me acting, because he was a child actor,” Tamblyn says. But it was his career choice that led her to inadvertently join the business: her father’s agent came to see a 10-year-old Amber in a school production of Pippi Longstocking and immediately suggested sending her to auditions, helping her to land a role on General Hospital in 1995 that lasted six years. Acting, Tamblyn discovered, was surprisingly grounding. “My mom didn’t put me on any meds when I was younger, even though I was really hyperac-

tive and crazy,” she says. “But she did let me act, and that was a very focus-driven experience for me; it helped me curb all of my energy into one single resource.” She came into her own at 20 with her leading role on the television series Joan of Arcadia, which aired from 2003 to 2005. In it, she nailed the role of a sassy teenager who receives messages from God—an angsty, funny, sympathetic performance that garnered her an Emmy nomination, making her the second-youngest actress ever to be up for the award.

That role also launched her into the realm of girl culture, a position that was solidified in 2005, when she starred (along with America Ferrara, Blake Lively, and Alexis Bledel) in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, that super-rare specimen of a highly successful girl-buddy movie. Now she’s making the move back to television as the lead in a new show on ABC called The Unusuals, about a police unit in New York’s Lower East Side. “She’s a real tough girl with a smart-ass attitude,” Tamblyn says of her character, fresh-tothe-force Detective Casey Shraeger. It suits Tamblyn, and it’s the kind of role she waits for. “It’s very rare that you find anything that’s good for young females. I’ve read a hundred scripts this year. Crap, crap, and more crap.”

To shoot The Unusuals, Tamblyn is moving to New York, a big change made easier by her blossoming relationship with Cross, who lives here. Her union with the nearly-20-years-hersenior comic instigated countless comments of the “WTF?!” variety in the blogosphere last August, when photographers first snapped the couple together while they were out walking Cross’ dog. But despite the age difference, chatting with Tamblyn makes it clear how much the two have in common. She happens to be hilarious, cracking off-handed jokes about everything: whether it’s the paparazzi (“Oh yeah, love ’em. Every household should have two—one for the kitchen, one for the bathroom”), the random facts I know about her background (“Aww, girl, you done read up on your Wikipedias”), or how she leverages her acting ability (“Sexually? To my disadvantage”). When our food arrives, Tamblyn reveals that Cross introduced her to Shopsin’s— which is as well known for its grumpy, foul-mouthed owner/chef as it is for its culinary offerings—on one of their first dates. “I fell in love after that,” she says with a hint of sarcasm in her voice, “right here at Shopsin’s. As soon as he was like, ‘Oh, you’re gonna like this place, where if you ask for orange juice they say go fuck yourself.’ I knew he was right,” she says, feigning wistfulness. Though she says she wasn’t much of a pooch person before meeting Cross, she’s a doting dog-sitter to Ollie Red Sox, and when she tells me she’s gotten really into cooking recently, she adds, “especially with my boyfriend. We cook a lot together; we’re nesting.” Still, preparing to move east is not without its stress. “I’m trying to move all my stuff from L.A. to New York and I’m like, ‘What should I pack?’” she says. “Should I take this to New York? Am I going to be this person in New York? What if I’m not?”

But it’s hard to believe this represents anything more than a momentary freak-out, because Tamblyn seems completely comfortable in her own skin. It’s this confidence that, even with her kinetic energy, lends her an air of maturity. She seems older than her 25 years, something that not only makes the age gap between her and Cross less shocking, but also explains how she’s // BUST / 041

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totally against everything I just said, so basically, I’m a liar.” That book, which she’s editing and shopping to publishers now, will include personal emails, “funny anecdotal shit,” and articles she’s written for Nylon and Interview, along with poetry, she says. If that’s not enough to keep her busy, Tamblyn’s also active in the spoken-word community: she masterminded The Drums Inside Your Chest, a huge event that’s held annually in Los Angeles and features performances by the best contemporary poets in the country, and before our interview, she performed at The Lasers of Sexcellence, a Midwest tour of readings, with her “creative other,” poet Derrick Brown—the man behind Write Bloody, the publishing company her T-shirt extols.

Tamblyn says she thinks her poetry was the reason she landed her role on General Hospital in the first place. “They did what’s called a cattle call, when the audition is open to anybody. I must’ve come in like five or six times. It was between me and this one other girl, and I totally brought a poem up in that room.” The poem was the aforementioned “Kill Me So Much,” which she casually mocks as a superpolitical, “call-to-arms” piece. “I think they were like, ‘She’s wise beyond her years,’” she says, affecting a deep, “adult” voice. I mention that she probably gets that a lot. “I think I’ve gotten it so much that if I don’t get it, I get worried,” she confesses. “I’m like, ‘Oh, shit! Am I not wise beyond my years anymore? Am I less wise than my actual years?’”

I don’t think she has to worry yet. While many young actresses make their rounds on the club circuit, Tamblyn puts her celebrity to work for the issues she believes in. During the presidential primaries, she, along with Sisterhood costar America Ferrera, were the acting heads of Hillblazers, a youth-oriented organization supporting Hillary Clinton, and Tamblyn’s been an avid promoter of Planned Parenthood for years, most recently helping them lobby to overturn an amendment that prevented college students’ birth control from being covered by insurance. “It’s odd to me how controversial the idea of basic women’s health care is,” she says. “I do not understand the idea of anyone being pro-abortion; I think it is an oxymoronic term. At no time ever is any woman like, ‘Yay, I’m gonna go get this done.’ There is no group of people that want to further the advancement of that experience. It’s about the freedom of your own body; that’s what the argument is about, and I get really irate about it.” Tamblyn took particular offense to the way abortion was discussed by the candidates during the final presidential debate. “Hearing those two dudes talk about abortion, I screamed at the TV, ‘You don’t get to talk until you can push a pineapple through your penis hole!’” she says, passionately, holding up a scolding forefinger. “‘Neither of you! Shush!’”

Tamblyn’s combination of energetic irreverence and unapologetic opinion makes me feel as if I’ve truly gotten to know her, though when the check comes, I still want to know more—it’s easy to feel comfortable around someone who is so obviously at ease herself. I ask if there’s anything else we should cover before she walks Ollie over to the photo shoot. “I think we need to talk about why I haven’t taken a bite of your French toast yet,” she says, reaching over the table with her fork. “Oh, snap,” she says with her mouth full, then declares my selection “delish” and air-kisses her fingertips. “No, I don’t think there’s anything else. Mayonnaise: not into it. There, we’re done.” B

TOP AND SKIRT: SONIA BY SONIA RYKIEL; CRINOLINE: VINTAGE; STOCKINGS: WOLFORD; SHOES: LANVIN; EARRINGS: RJ GRAZIANO

managed to avoid the typical pitfalls of young celebrity, like DUIs, stints in rehab, or incriminating photos. “Having parents who are my friends, that’s the main reason,” she says, “but I wasn’t always the greatest of greats. I moved out when I was 17. I had a lot of problems with my dad. We had a really hard time seeing eye to eye,” though she adds that he always let her make her own choices.

“My dad’s full of sayings. He’s always like, ‘Go to the edge, take a peek, and then come on back.’ I think I’m still hanging on by two fingers, off the edge, at times.”

It probably helps, too, that Tamblyn makes fast friends with intelligent, creative, inspiring women, and her working relationships go well beyond the final “cut.” Alexis Bledel, Tamblyn’s Sisterhood costar, is one of her besties, and when she receives a text message from Tilda Swinton—with whom she starred in 2006’s Stephanie Daley—during our conversation, it prompts Tamblyn to tell me her nickname for Swinton is “Anam Cara,” Gaelic for “soul friend.” It’s fitting that Tamblyn is our current cover girl, not only because she’s paved her own way in an industry that rewards conformity, but also because it’s like honoring one of our own: “I subscribe to BUST. I’ve bought BUST for years. I’m an avid reader!” she says. In fact, if Tamblyn had her way, the cover of this issue would look very different. “I emailed Amy Poehler, who’s a very dear friend of mine, as soon as I found out about this [story], and I was like, ‘Listen, dude, if that toast ain’t comin’ out of the toaster anytime soon…’” she trails off, miming a pregnant belly. “I wanted to do the cover with her, of us recreating the Janet Jackson album cover, with her holding my boobies from behind, and it would read ‘Women support women—without underwire.’ She was so down! But she was like, ‘Girl, I’m gonna pop.

I don’t even know if I’d be able to get my hands around you. Trust me, it’s not easy doing Will doggie style.’”

Tamblyn met Poehler on the set of Spring Breakdown, a comedy they filmed several years ago—along with Parker Posey and Rachel Dratch—that has yet to see the light of day. But for Tamblyn, just shooting the movie, in which she plays a high school student on spring break, was awesome enough, “especially because I went through a really gnarly, very bad breakup at that time,” she says.

She doesn’t name names, but I assume she’s referring to Travis Burkheimer, a music producer she lived with in L.A. “Sometimes life just does that for you—it gives you great circumstances,” she says.

“I did that film right after this very toxic relationship, and it was so amazing to just laugh all the time with those girls.”

The experience moved Tamblyn to write a poem for Posey, which she plans to include in her next book. Tamblyn’s been writing poetry since she was a kid, putting out two chapbooks on her own (with the help of Kinko’s) before Simon & Schuster published Free Stallion, a collection of her poems, in 2005. But if you’re imagining rudimentary verses scribbled in a journal, think again: Tamblyn counts family friend and San Francisco’s poet laureate Jack Hirschman as a mentor. “Kill Me So Much,” a Hirschmaninspired poem she wrote at age 11, was later published in San Francisco’s Café magazine. Her poems are intimate and raw, but that kind of exposure, she says, “never scared me. Poetry has been a way for me to relate my experiences without any direct repercussions, whereas a magazine quote or something you say on the red carpet directly comes at you.” She furrows her brow.

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BY TERRY SELUCKY

ELLEN WATSON SCREAMED, whipping her head from side to side as the men forced a thin, stiff cowboy’s rope around her neck. They’d dragged her and her husband up the side of a rocky cliff, not far from Watson’s Wyoming ranch. According to eyewitness accounts, the men had accused her of stealing livestock—and rumor had it she’d even offer sex in exchange for a few good calves. How else, in 1889, would a woman amass 61 head of cattle in just one year?

Watson and her husband were found the next morning, dangling side by side, their faces swollen and discolored from strangulation. Proved innocent almost a hundred years after her death, Watson, also known as Cattle Kate, was one of the first American cowgirls, and her story suggests a picture much different from the western women of popular myth. Mention the word “cowgirl” and people conjure an image of a sexy, buxom, red-lipped beauty, soft curls spilling from underneath her Stetson.

Mounted on her strong, muscular horse, she embodies freedom and sexuality, independence and courage, femininity and strength all at the same time. From this image, you’d think cowgirls never got their hands dirty for fear of breaking a nail. But the lives of real cowgirls were not nearly as easy as the carefree smiles on vintage postcards make it seem. Along with wrangling cattle and raising horses, cowgirls had to do things like brand cattle, shovel manure, and dress horse wounds. Whether they knew it or not, their struggles paved the way for women today, and in many ways, cowgirls were

PHOTO COURTESY OF LEGENDS OF AMERICA

American cowgirls had to fight a lot more than a few head of unruly cattle to make their way on the trail. Here, we explore their forgotten past and talk to some present-day women who are still striving to win the Wild, Wild West for themselves

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Ellen Watson, aka Cattle Kate, during happier times in Wyoming circa 1889

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some of the country’s first feminists.

Up until the second half of the 1800s, women were barely a presence in the West, much less a force for equality. Back then, the lawless environment didn’t offer much more than a lonesome livelihood for fur traders and a glimmer of hope for gold prospectors. The population was predominantly male (except for prostitutes), and they earned a reputation for booze-binging and bar fights in ad hoc boomtowns full of debauchery. Life was harsh, demanding, unpredictable—not exactly the most inviting environment for ladies.

However, with the advent of the Transcontinental Railroad and the passing of the Homestead Act in 1862—which granted up to 160 acres of land to any man or woman who had never taken arms against the U.S. government, as long as they improved upon it—the “new frontier” became a more inviting prospect for

men and women alike. As Teresa Jordan writes in her book Cowgirls: Women of the American West, many middle-class women in the East who subscribed to the prevailing notion of the “cult of domesticity”—that is, a values system in which piety, purity, submissiveness, and taking care of the home were the “proper” virtues—felt it was their opportunity, even their duty, to bring civility to an otherwise savage land.

Homesteading women had to be at least 21 and unmarried, and by the early 20th century, approximately 30,000 to 40,000 women had taken up the challenge and earned property in their own names. A surprising thing happened, though, when these prim and proper ladies arrived in the Wild West: in that untamed environment, they found they had to carve out new roles for themselves. Stretching their abilities to fit the demands of the western lifestyle, women performed physical labor in addition to their duties in the home. As Diana Vela, director of education at the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in Fort Worth, TX, puts it, “On the ranch, things aren’t based on biology; they’re based on need. So the gender issue recedes.” The amount of work that had to be done on a ranch required everyone’s participation and, as Jordan states, “some women found that they liked to herd the oxen, milk the cows, and plow the field.” Back in the buttoned-up East, women like Voltairine de Cleyre and Margaret Sanger were barreling toward equal rights, but most of their Eastern sisters still married early and lived as mothers, domestic workers, or teachers. Out West, however, instead of immediately defaulting to marriage and the cult of domesticity, the spirit of self-reliance allowed women to explore what lay beyond their already entrenched roles. As Vela explains, “While women in the Northeast talked and wrote about feminism, women in the West were doing it.”

One woman who made the West work for her was Caroline Lockhart. Born in Illinois in 1871, she’d moved to Boston and enjoyed work as a journalist, an actress, and a novelist. Successful as she was, she still “chafed, especially at the leisure society of stuffy seaside resorts,” writes John Clayton, author of The Cowboy Girl: The Life of Caroline Lockhart, via email, “where high-society traditions kept a firm rein on women’s activities, their enthusiasms, and even their attire.” So after flirting with a few short trips to the West, in 1904 Lockhart “chased away the roles that society dictated and homesteaded in Wyoming, where she hoped to be independent,” says Clayton. There, she pioneered an anomalous life: She established her own cattle empire, solely owned, and remained a permanent bachelorette, as promiscuous as any of her cowboy counterparts. She also became a bestselling novelist whose work featured strong female characters and realistic portrayals of life in the West. And being part owner of the Cody Enterprise made her the first woman to buy into

PHOTO COURESY OF THE AMERICAN HERTIAGE CENTER / UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING

Caroline Lockhart lookin’ wily in Wyoming, circa 1904

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PHOTO COURTESY OF THE WESTERN HISTORY COLLECTIONS / UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA

A 24-year-old Lucille Mulhall shows off her roping skills at 101 Ranch in Oklahoma in 1909

newspaper ownership (up until that point, if a woman ever acted as publisher, it was because she inherited the paper).

Watson may not have been as aggressive as Lockhart, and she may not have achieved as many “firsts,” but before she was lynched, she, too, had blazed a new trail for women. After a divorce and move to Wyoming in early 1886, she got a job cooking at a tavern that belonged to her new husband-to-be. Homesteading some nearby land, she eventually bought cattle with the money she saved and began tending to them full-time, while her husband managed the post office and a general store. Yet her murder indicates that not everyone accepted the subversion of gender roles out West. There are even a handful of accounts of women dressing like men, suggesting that some women found it easier to pretend to be a cowboy than to face societal disapproval as a cowgirl. In the mid-19th century, “Cowboy Jo” Monaghan served on juries and participated in cowboy roundups, living in Idaho for about 30 years.

It wasn’t until “his” death that people discovered Jo was actually Josephine, a woman who had moved to the West after being disowned by her parents for getting pregnant out of wedlock.

Women in the West pushed boundaries because they wanted— and, in Cowboy Jo’s case, needed—to have a fuller experience of living. They weren’t necessarily seeking feminism or even equality, but eventually, word of their actions drifted to the East. One of the earliest recorded uses of the word “cowgirl” was in the January

29, 1888, edition of The New York Times, in which a short article describes a man and woman herding their cattle out West. In it, a reporter notes that “cowgirls, when encountered by chance on lonely trails, may be observed riding with a foot in each stirrup, à la clothespin.” At the time, as Vela explains, “people thought that women riding straddle would ruin their reproductive organs and that it was unladylike.” The idea that cowgirls lacked a sense of propriety continued to pop up; a poem entitled “A Kansas Cowgirl’s Fate,” published in the Times in 1898, told of a “pretty maiden living in a Western Eden” who was “wilder than the antelope at play,” adding that though “many riders tried to win her,” “this saucy little sinner/Only laughed to scorn their wild, impassioned pleas/When the love of one she’d smother she would quickly rope another/And would bring him as a pleader to his knees.” Given the sexual freedom and aggressiveness implicit in these descriptions of cowgirls, perhaps it’s not so shocking that Watson’s lynchers thought she was selling herself for cattle.

The figure that finally brought the cowgirl into the realm of acceptability—and even elevated cowgirls to a mythical status—was Lucille Mulhall. This 17-year-old friend and protégée of cowboy/ comedian/vaudeville performer Will Rogers began cowgirling at age 7, at her father’s 80,000-acre Missouri ranch. Bringing her talents to the rodeo, she became the very first professional woman athlete, roping and riding with men in various events. In 1903, she // BUST / 047

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was described in The Atlanta Constitution as a young woman with a “pretty head” and a “frank, girlish, ingenuous, and honest nature,” with “two small, steel-muscled hands” who was “not the least masculine in appearance.” Because of pretty, charming, approachable Mulhall, cowgirls were finally welcomed into the popular culture.

For years to follow, more and more women competed in rodeo events, often winning prize money that allowed them to independently support themselves. They helped make rodeo a popular sport in the U.S., with events from Monterey County to Madison Square Garden, providing a link from ranching past to present. Today, the Women’s Professional Rodeo Association has more than 2,000 members, sanctions over 800 women-only races, and awards prize money nearing $4 million annually.

These days, cowgirls have become so associated with rodeo that women who actually work cattle on horseback often don’t even consider themselves to be cowgirls. MaeCile Brown of HorseWorks Wyoming is one of them. Brown co-owns an 18,000acre ranch with her husband, Nate, near Grass Creek, a tiny town that’s not much more than a few dilapidated buildings in the Wyoming hills. Along the road into Grass Creek, skeletons of weather-worn homesteads—much like the ones Watson and Lockhart inhabited—stand near the creek like beacons. On the Browns’ ranch, just off Grass Creek Road, they keep nearly a

hundred horses and look after as many cattle. They also have goats, two turkeys, and a community of cats. Brown awakens each morning at 5:30 a.m., give or take an hour, depending on the season and the day’s schedule. Along with Nate, she manages day-to-day operations, getting help from friends and interns who pitch in to tend the horses, irrigate some 200 acres of hay land, cook dinner, clean up, and run errands as needed. Though there are times when the loudest noise is the crunch of gravel under her boots, Brown is always moving, cutting or baling hay, wrangling horses, or leading riding workshops. But when asked if she considered herself a cowgirl, Brown shakes her head. “I’m a rancher. Not a cowgirl so much,” she says, explaining that “these days, the common definition for ‘cowboy’ and ‘cowgirl’ is a rodeo hand. So by the modern definition, I am not a cowgirl, but I am a rancher that can ride as fast as the best of them.”

It’s as if the term “cowgirl” has been hijacked, so that we can’t even recognize a real cowgirl when we see one. Brown, being a woman who works cattle on horseback, is every bit a cowgirl—certainly as much as modern-day rodeo gal Dawn Peil.

Another Wyoming resident, Peil competes in rodeo events on the weekends and is one woman who has benefited from Mulhall’s pioneering. Currently living in Thermopolis, she owns, breaks, raises, and sells horses with her husband, all the while keeping a full-time job and caring for her year-old son. Her life is simple,

PHOTOS THIS SPREAD: COURTESY OF AUDRA LAMOREAUX

MaeCile Brown riding the range in Wyoming

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“being a cowgirl is more about your attitude.

It’s about doing whatever the boys can do and whatever you need to do.” and unglamorous, yet she says it’s everything she wants it to be. Like cowgirls of the past, her life isn’t about trying to be a pioneer but instead about doing what she loves to do.

“I grew up on horses and rodeoed and roped,” says Peil. “But I don’t think a cowgirl is what it used to be. There are women that still cowboy for a living—probably not a lot, but being a cowgirl is more about your attitude. It’s about doing whatever the boys can do and whatever you need to do. That’s really what it is: when it’s hot and you’re tired and there’s still work to do, you do it because you know it’s just something you gotta do.”

Like their predecessors, women still do double-duty on the ranch— Brown and Peil both work all day, then go inside to cook for the family and clean the house. But as women become less threatening figures on the ranch, and society in general is more comfortable with strongminded women, things are changing. Consider the fact that some of the men who lynched Ellen Watson were members of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, a kind of union that was founded in order to organize and standardize the cattle industry. A century later, Beverly Sparrowk was elected the first female president of a similar organization, the Foundation Beefmaster Association. Sparrowk, co-owner of Sparrowk Livestock and a 2008 inductee to the Cowgirl Hall of Fame, believes that in the world of ranching, women are achieving more than ever. “Women are taking more leadership roles,” she says. “Maybe people realize that women are ready to take on more responsibility.”

To understand the impact of the American cowgirl is to consider what life would be like had they never trampled the stereotypes in place at the time. And even if their courage grew out of necessity or their leadership was a requirement of harsh times, the cowgirl, throughout history, has paved the way for women today. Perhaps they’re the reason why western states, including Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado (in that order) were the first ones to grant women the right to vote.

And perhaps this is why we uphold the cowgirl myth. One glance at these confident charmers of the West and we can identify within ourselves the fierce independence, the free spirit, and the contentedness that comes with knowing yourself and being comfortable even in the most demanding environments. The cowgirl icon is a way to remind us of the real stories of women who have passed down a legacy of courage. Donna Howell-Sickles, a 2007 Cowgirl Hall of Fame inductee who creates cowgirl-themed art of all kinds, feels that cowgirl stories are as

important as ever. “Up until recently, cowgirls were one of the few heroines little girls could look up to,” she says. “The cowgirl is a capable, courageous, iconic figure who inspires. And it’s easy to lose a story that no one talks about. It’s easy to lose rights that no one thinks are rights.

But stories of women doing what they needed to do to express their creativity and who they are? Those are stories worth telling.” B Dawn Peil pats her little guy in Thermopolis, WY

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BODY OF WORK

DISSECTING THE AUDACIOUS ANIMAL ART OF TAXIDERMIST SARINA BREWER

WHEN SARINA BREWER opens the front door of her South Minneapolis home for me on a chilly November afternoon, I can tell by her auburn Bettie Page bangs that she’s got a preference for the 1950s.

Inside, the retro theme continues, but with a twist: in between the zebra-print rug and ceramic bust of Elvis hangs a lamp crafted from the dried-out body of a puffer fish.

Brewer made the lamp herself with a carcass she bought off eBay. The fish has an expressive, almost smiling face, and sharp spines cover its translucent body. And it’s just one of many morbid creations that inhabit Brewer’s home. For the past 10 years, Brewer has practiced something she calls “rogue taxidermy”—she essentially creates fanciful, often irreverent sculptures by splicing together the bodies of various taxidermic animals or, in other instances, transforming the creature into a freak-show mutant by adding an extra head, leg, or other body part. For her, taxidermy is more than a way to preserve a hunting trophy; it’s art. “Some artists use paint, some use metal,” she says with a shrug. “I use skin and bones.”

Pulling aside a red velour curtain, Brewer beckons me to the tidy dining room in which she displays her work. Unlike traditional taxidermy, which tends to be solemn, many of Brewer’s pieces, like “Forever Yours,” which she constructed out of dead bunnies and surgical staples, appear as cuddly as stuffed toys. Others delve into the mythological, like “Goth Griffin” (a cross between a black cat and a raven) and the fantastical, such as “Capricorn” (part chicken, part carp, and part stillborn lamb). Still others have the

BY CHRISTY DESMITH

P H O T O B Y R O B Y N V O N S WA N K

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STILL LIFES: COPYRIGHT CUSTOM CREATURE STUDIOS 2008

Sarina Brewer’s Custom Creature creations.

Clockwise from top left: “Ivory Griffin”; “Frick and Frack”; “Forever Yours”; “Mother’s Little Helper Monkey.”

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She still has the box she made in memoriam to a frog: its body is lovingly gilded, and a halo is earnestly painted above its head. “Some people put their pets’ ashes in urns. This is what I was inspired to do,” she says. sinister feel of a genetic gaffe, like the two-headed rats.

Alongside these is her vast collection of fossils and newish acquisitions—the fetal piglet in a jar, for example. “It has a parasitic twin,” she points out, noting the bizarre appendages springing forth from its belly. Then there are the long-held prizes, such as the mummified possum, whose tiny body is curled in the fetal position on a shelf. “It’s one of the first things I found,” she says, explaining that she came across it in the barn on her uncle’s farm in central Iowa when she was a little girl. There, Brewer remembers fondly, “I started fossil hunting and went looking for bones.”

Brewer grew up in St. Paul, MN, with her artist parents. Her mother collected “fossils, agates, and a little taxidermy,” she says, adding, “We always had tons of pets—snakes, rats.” The family was exceptionally reverent of deceased animals, too; their pet cemetery was dug up and transplanted whenever they moved. “My dad did a really good job of bagging the animals,” recalls Brewer. “But once in a while, one of the bones would fall out, so I’d pick it up and put it in a little velvet bag.” In high school, she started mummifying the carcasses of rodents and deceased pets. She still has the box she made in memoriam to a frog: its body is lovingly gilded, and a halo is earnestly painted above its head. “Some people put their pets’ ashes in urns. This is what I was inspired to do,” she says.

Once Brewer landed at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in the late ’80s, she started making mixed-media paintings that incorporated bird remains. She also began collecting and repairing vintage taxidermy. After graduation in 1992, she outfitted a makeshift painting studio in her basement—but it mostly went untouched. Then, around 1998, Brewer’s interest in artistic shrines and memorials suddenly converged with her fascination with biology and her “dark sense of humor.” She purchased an instructional

book on taxidermy and created her first two-headed squirrel shortly thereafter. “I knew right away—I just knew this was what I was going to do,” she says.

“One of the biggest preconceived notions about taxidermy is that it’s bloody and involves a lot of guts,” says Brewer. But in truth, “you just take off the skin, build an armature”—the sculptural framework, basically a mannequin—“and reapply the skin,” she explains.

Brewer uses a scalpel to carefully peel the skins from underlying muscles; then she uses the skeleton to sculpt the armature from clay. Whereas most taxidermists favor prefab mannequins, Brewer has no choice but to build hers from scratch. “You can’t buy a mannequin for a ‘Goth Griffin,’” she points out. Next, she tans the hides and repositions them over the armature and uses hide glue to secure the skin in place.

Brewer sells the vast majority of her work through her Web site, CustomCreatureTaxidermy.com (although she sells the twoheaded rats to traveling sideshows that, in turn, pass them off as freak natural occurrences). And most of it is “out the door as soon as I make it,” she says. The few pieces she holds on to are samples and sentimental ones. A favorite, “Mother’s Little Helper Monkey,” rests at the center of Brewer’s dining table. It was inspired by her sense of needing a helper at a particularly difficult time of her life: in 2005, she ended a 13-year relationship with her fiancé. But Brewer didn’t want the piece to be entirely tragic—she gave the monkey a set of bird wings and a fez cap, so it resembles “the flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz.” Brewer is careful to emphasize that she doesn’t kill her subjects. Rather, she uses casualties of the pet trade, including euthanized pets; destroyed rodents (donated by the Science Museum of Minnesota, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, a few pet stores, and various friends); and the plentiful roadkill available on local streets. “I never go anywhere without a cooler, rubber gloves, and a hacksaw,” she says.

And unlike traditional taxidermists, who preserve only animal hides, Brewer tries to avoid wasting the innards. As a consequence, she makes a fair amount of carcass art, which she creates by chemically treating muscle tissue before fashioning them into a whimsical pose—like a sculpture of dancing squirrel guts. Still, a sizable number of activists interpret her work as disrespectful to animals, and Brewer spends an inordinate amount of time answering their angry emails. “I think their time would be better spent picketing McDonald’s,” she says. “These animals are already dead.”

Brewer sees her work as having evolved from a deep respect for nature and an interest in memorializing the dead.

But she struggles to articulate exactly what she’s trying to express by rearranging the natural order of these animals.

That work might be best left to the viewer. After all, as her Web site declares, “She calls it art. You can call it whatever you want.” B // BUST / 053

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MossAppeal

DRESS: CATHERINE MALANDRINO; BRACELET: STEPHEN DWECK

Engaging in a little rainy-day repartee with our Editor-in-Chief, Mad Men’s Elisabeth Moss opens up about Broadway, Scientology, and most of all—Peggy AS THE MOUSY secretary-cum-copywriter Peggy Olson on AMC’s award-winning show Mad Men, Elisabeth Moss expresses the uncomfortable combination of ambition and shyness that drives her character with frequent nonconfrontational downward glances, tentative yet firm gestures, and yes, those awful bangs. She even changes her speaking pattern to fit the character, a fact that becomes clear when I talk to her by phone. In contrast to Peggy’s soft, slow, measured speech (she’s the quintessential low-talker), Moss' real-life speaking voice is louder, faster, and much more confident.

But Moss’ ability to speak loudly and clearly should come as no surprise. After all, she needs to be able to project in Broadway’s Speed-the-Plow, David Mamet’s classic play in which she’s currently performing. It’s a grueling schedule, with eight shows a week, but the talented Ms. Moss is up to the challenge and has already received accolades for her performance by such hard-ass critics as The New York Times.

While today she is best known for her role on Mad Men, the 26-year-old Moss is no newcomer to the entertainment industry. She was landing and performing small parts in television and film from the time she was 8 years old, culminating, at the age of 17, in her first large role, as the president’s daughter on The West Wing. That show received four Emmy awards

for Best Drama Series in its first four seasons, and the case could be made that Moss is some kind of an Emmy magnet, as Mad Men also recently won the Emmy for Best Drama Series. (Moss herself was on the short list to be nominated for a Best Actress Emmy but unfortunately, did not get the nomination this year.)

Mad Men's Peggy Olson is the character we’d all probably be if we were suddenly transported back to 1962—the smart girl with ambitions beyond being “just a housewife” or a low-level secretary, the two main options for women at the time. While we might find the Sex and the Single Girl life of the character Joan to be more appealing (her outfits definitely are), Peggy, despite her sexual innocence, her bizarre inability to realize she was pregnant until she gave birth, and her bad haircut, is nevertheless the character that's closest to what women have become. We are glued to her storyline and are right there with her during her ad pitches in a roomful of men, thinking about how we would have done in that sort of situation, fighting for respect at a time when most men held women in such low regard.

A native of California, Moss has been living in N.Y.C.’s East Village for the past few years, which is where she spoke to me by phone.

BY DEBBIE STOLLER // PHOTOS BY DANIELLE LEVITT STYLING BY TAMMY ECKENSWILLER // HAIR AND MAKEUP BY JIM CRAWFORD FOR TRESEMMÉ // BUST / 055

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How does it feel to take over a role that Madonna once played? [laughs] Everyone asks that! I don’t know; I was six when she did Speed-the-Plow. The only funny thing is, I never thought that I would be in the same sentence as Madonna! So that’s cool.

What’s your take on the character Peggy? Are you anything like her?

Oh, yes, for sure. Matt [Weiner, Mad Men's creator and executive producer] and I have talked about how the actors on the show bring a huge part of themselves to their characters, and that inspires the writers—it’s a back-and-forth kind of relationship. Peggy is a modest person; she’s very optimistic, and she’s not a very cynical person, and that’s very similar to me. But then there are parts of me that are not like her as well.

In the beginning, she doesn’t really know him; she just knows that she wants to be part of that world. I don’t think she’s really ever had the attention of a man before, and he comes to her apartment, and it’s very intoxicating. I defy anyone who has ever questioned that to look at their own life and say that they never picked the wrong person. We’ve all been there! [laughs] In the episode with the “exerciser,” your character had to basically try out a vibrator, and simulate the big O. Was that difficult to do?

No. It wasn’t really like I had to do the whole thing; all I had to do was give a little yelp. I think if I had had to really invest myself in it, I would have been embarrassed. I mean, I’m an extremely modest person— just talking about this embarrasses me.

“ You can have a 60-year-old male actor playing the romantic lead, but you’re never, ever going to have a 60-year-old woman opposite him.”

Like what?

I think I’m much more fun than Peggy is! [laughs] A number of people have called your character the great feminist hope of Mad Men. Do you think Peggy is a feminist?

She’s the utmost feminist. She represents the women who had no predecessors and nobody to follow. They were the first women to ever sit in the conference room with the men, the first to be allowed to present their ideas. I feel very proud and happy that I get to play that part of that era.

Have you ever faced the kind of sexism that Peggy faces in pursuit of your own career?

Not really, but that’s not to say that sexism doesn’t exist in the industry. I mean, you can have a 60-year-old male actor playing the romantic lead, but you’re never, ever going to have a 60-year-old woman opposite him.

Your character seems like such a smart girl.

Doesn’t she realize how creepy Pete is?

How much time do you get to have the scripts before you go to shoot an episode?

Only about a week, max; usually it’s only about four or five days. But it’s not that hard, it’s almost like filming a movie in 13 parts; you just kind of get the next part of the film, and then the next part of the film.

It’s not like preparing for a play. It’s little bits, little scenes, and it all gets pieced together.

Your looks are really toned down to play this role. In the first season, you even had to wear a fat suit. Is that difficult on your self-esteem? Most people want the miracle of film to make them look better than they really do.

It actually doesn’t bother me. I would be happy to put on a fat suit and play that part any day over anything else. Of course, I would love to wear the gorgeous, tight clothes that Christina [Hendricks, who plays Joan] wears, or the petticoats and ball gowns that January [Jones, who plays Betty] wears, but would I give up playing this

incredible storyline for that? No. I mean, if I was walking around and people were saying, “Oh, my God, she’s so dowdy!” then I would feel offended. But it’s on purpose; I was wearing padding, they cut my hair into bangs, and Peggy wears barely any makeup at all, she only wears mascara and a little bit of concealer, and that’s it. It’s part of the role, so I don’t care.

Do people recognize you on the street despite the fact that your looks are so played down on the show?

Yeah, they do. Usually I’ll get a lot of staring until people figure it out, because I do look kind of different. I’ll ride an entire 20-minute subway ride with somebody staring at me.

I’ve lived in New York for six years, and I get a little attitudey, like, “What are you looking at?” You get that little protective, New York thing. And then when I get off the train they’ll be like, “I love your show!” and then I feel all bad that I was throwing looks at them.

On Mad Men, you’re the only female copywriter working in a field of men, and in Speed-the-Plow you’re working with two men. Do you prefer working with men?

On The West Wing I worked with mostly men too. I don’t choose it consciously, but I do kind of like it. I’ve never been really inspired by the wife or the girlfriend role; I’d rather play the girl who is the man’s competition. That’s more exciting to me. I love being a part of the boys’ club. The Mad Men guys are awesome; it’s like I have five big brothers. They’re so funny and adorable.

I’ve been really lucky.

How do you keep from getting crushed out on John Hamm? [laughs] It is difficult. But at some point, you cross over—I’m really good friends with him, and I adore him; he’s like a big brother to me, more than anyone else in my life. So I can’t really go there.

The Scientology Celebrity Center’s Web site lists you as a member. How did you get into it?

Oh, my parents are Scientologists.

Is there’s any way to explain in a nutshell what Scientology is and what it does for you?

I think the best way to describe it is that it’s an applied religion. It is religious in the sense that you believe in something bigger than yourself; there is a faith that is involved.

056 / BUST // FEB/MAR

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TANK: REBECCA TAYLOR; SKIRT: JEAN PAUL GAULTIER

Elisabeth Moss in her dressing room at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre

But it also gives you things you can use in your everyday life. I think what it’s done for me is, it’s given me stability and this sort of knowledge of myself. And not only myself but my relationships with other people. The thing that people most find after they get into Scientology is how practical it is. I mean, there are a lot of things that deal with faith and morality and relationships, things that people can use every day to help them get along in life. That’s basically all it is.

You always hear about so many actors being involved in it; is there something in Scientology that’s particularly helpful if you’re involved in the performing arts?

Well, Scientologists believe that the artist injects life into the culture, and that art and artists are a huge part of the planet, and they give it a sort of beauty and life, and that without them we would be lost. So there’s a huge respect for artists in Scientology. But also, artists tend to be more in the

spotlight, so you hear more about them being Scientologists, but there are thousands and thousands of people who aren’t actors who are Scientologists—you just don’t hear about them.

I appreciate your talking about it.

Yeah, there are a lot of misperceptions out there, and I’m happy to give the truth about it.

You’ve got a background in dance, you’ve been a voice actor, appeared in film and on television, and now you’re on stage— what is there left that you still want to do that you haven’t done? Are you gonna come out with a record anytime soon?

I know, my friend keeps asking me when my clothing line is coming out [laughs]. I think I’m sticking to film and television and theater for now. No perfume line.

But it would be so nice for there to be a Peggy Olson line of skirts or bags.

Oh—that would be great!

People spend so much time watching the fashion on the show. It’s really a pleasurable part of the whole experience, and your poor character does not get the most exciting outfits to wear—although they’re getting cuter and cuter as time goes on. Are you interested in fashion?

Not to sound like a perv, but what are you wearing right now? [laughs] I’m wearing my pajamas right now. That’s not very exciting. It’s all rainy out, and I’m inside, and I’m wearing my pajamas. I love dressing up and wearing pretty dresses to go out, but other than that, I like my flip-flops, jeans, and a T-shirt. I like to be comfortable. But the clothes on Peggy have thankfully evolved a little bit. I finally told [costume designer] Janie [Bryant] that she’s not allowed to put anything mustard-colored on me anymore; that I was done. So, things are getting a little bit better. B // BUST / 057

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FROM LEFT: ON MATT: GOGGLES BY KRISTIN COSTA, WWW.KRISTINCOSTA.COM; SUIT BY JEAN PAUL GAULTIER, ALBRIGHT FASHION LIBRARY N.Y.C., WWW.ALBRIGHTNYC.COM; GRAY WOOL VEST BY DESIRA PESTA, WWW.DESIRAPESTA.COM; BELT BY KRISTIN COSTA; LACE-UP BOOTS BY FRYE, WWW. THEFRYECOMPANY.COM. ON CELIA: VINTAGE HAT BY PATRICIA UNDERWOOD, WWW.PATRICIAUNDERWOOD. COM; BLOUSE BY BB DAKOTA, WWW.BBDAKOTA.COM; BLAZER BY BETSEY JOHNSON, WWW.BETSEYJOHNSON. COM; SKIRT BY ADAM, ADAM, N.Y.C., 212-229-2838; VINTAGE BOOTS, ALBRIGHT FASHION LIBRARY N.Y.C.; LACE GLOVES BY GRANDMA WAS A FLOOZY, GRANDMAWASAFLOOZY.ETSY.COM; FISHNET TIGHTS

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APOCALYPSE NOW Perfect for this anxious age, steampunk-inspired styles are all the rage

PHOTOS BY SARAH WILMER // PAINTINGS BY MIKE SCHULTZ // STYLING BY LORI MESSERSCHMITT // MAKEUP BY MASHA GVOZDOV // HAIR BY WESLEY O’MEARA

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12/23/08 1:24:13 PM

VINTAGE SCARF WORN AS HEADBAND,

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12/22/08 4:04:33 PM

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// BUST / 063

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12/22/08 4:05:41 PM

GOGGLES BY STEAMED PUNK LABORATORIES; BLACK BODYSUIT BY AMERICAN APPAREL; CAPE BY COCO IRENE, COCOIRENE.ETSY.COM.

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12/22/08 4:08:53 PM

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// BUST / 065

12/22/08 4:09:48 PM

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12/22/08 3:12:27 PM

the bust guide

MUSIC

…AND YOU WILL KNOW US BY THE TRAIL OF DEAD The Century of Self (Richter Scale/ Justice) If I were to use one word to describe the glorious sound this Austin-based band makes, it would have to be “dramatic.” On their sixth album …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead embody teen angst in its purest form.

Think heavy instrumentation, raging guitars, keyboards, and crashing percussion, with vocal duties shared by Jason Reece and Conrad Keely (who the bratty croon belongs to). Yet, the reason they call this stuff art rock is evident in the buildup of melodies until they’re whipped into a rapturous frenzy. “Far Pavilions” and “Halcyon Days” are classic Trail of Dead while “Bells of Creation” recalls the group’s signature psychedelic crescendos. I’ve always felt this band courts the Hot Topic crowd, yet they dig so much deeper than the typical radio-friendly rock/punk band.

At live shows, I am usually the old fart in a sea of barely legals, but if loving Trail of Dead at my age is wrong, I don’t wanna be right. [LAURIE HENZEL]

ANIMAL COLLECTIVE Merriweather Post Pavilion (Domino) If previous Animal Collective releases were experiments in chaos, Merriweather Post Pavilion is an exercise in control. Though the crazy tempo changes, layered instrumentation, and looped samples we’ve come to expect are plentiful, the album is carried by percussion that makes more sense than not. Big and bouncy drumand-bass beats, as in “My Girls,” make this a surprisingly dance-inducing collection from a usually cerebral band of boys. On the flipside, “Bluish” is a sensual noise ballad as Avey Tare sings, “I’m getting lost in your curls/I’m getting crushed out on the things that only I should see/Not for boys, they’re just for me,” while “Lion in a Coma” muses on mental/emotional uncertainty. Perhaps most satisfying is the epic last track, “Brothersport,” which could easily be played as one of those “get pumped” songs at a sporting event.

That is, if the crowd was on acid and

asobi seksu HUSH (POLYVINYL)

TRANSCENDING THE HAZY margins of au courant psychedelia, Hush, by atmospheric indie-rock duo Asobi Seksu, stands out as a well-crafted, melodic missive sprung from the depths of a dream-pop gold mine. Eschewing the multilayered production of earlier releases and avoiding traditional pop structures, lead vocalist/keyboardist Yuki Chikudate and guitarist/vocalist James Hanna display their classical training and dynamic sensibilities. Much more than the sum of their retro elements, the two make magic with sleigh bells and echoing snare drums, which would be cliché in less visionary hands.

Although Asobi Seksu are often tagged as shoegaze revivalists, up-tempo tracks such as “Me and Mary” sound more like Altered Images songs you can’t quite sing along with. Chikudate’s airy chirp alternates so quickly between Japanese and English that she may be the most challenging singer to decipher since Liz Fraser. Outshining the current crush of music by fellow Brooklynites who paint a shallower sonic watercolor, Hush will no doubt be remembered fondly long after this year’s swirling neon visions from the borough fade. [DEVIN ESTLIN] // BUST / 067

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the guide MUSIC the half-time show was a Technicolor rave, complete with tribal dancing and a drum circle. [SARA GRAHAM]

ANDREW BIRD Noble Beast (Fat Possum) Andrew Bird’s latest release, Noble Beast, meanders among relaxing dreamscapes where violin, whistling, guitar, glockenspiel, and mandolin (all of which he is well-versed in) are heard at length, accentuated by spurts of group clapping. His folksy style recalls Peter Bjorn and John—if they met Peter, Paul, and Mary, and the six of them had dinner with the Kings of Convenience. Bird’s voice is sweet, at times comparable with Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, and utilizes an occasional falsetto not unlike Coldplay’s Chris Martin. This album is chock-full of ear-enticing songs, including my favorite, “Not a Robot, But a Ghost,” which is awash with a spread of instruments, each subtly telling its part. On the whole, Noble Beast is best saved for a day spent unwinding at home.

[WHITNEY DWIRE]

THE BIRD AND THE BEE Ray Guns Are Not Just the Future (Blue Note) Enchanting retro-pop duo the Bird and the Bee had us at hello with their sophisticated self-titled debut in 2007, since vocalist Inara George and multiinstrumentalist Greg Kurstin’s stylish blend of ’60s-inspired Tropicalia and classic jazz was incredibly pristine compared with their indie peers’. It’s with a playful sense of humor that Ray Guns Are Not Just the Future sparkles even more eloquently, particularly on the bubbly “You’re a Cad” and “Diamond Dave,” an animated homage to David Lee Roth’s colorful alter ego. Dreamy “My Love,” complete with cheerleading handclaps and dizzying piano loops, and the easy airiness of “Baby” will awaken your inner groove thing.

As George sings on the funky “Polite Dance Song,” “Give it up for me please/Put your hands in the air/If you know what’s good for you/You want to shake it like you just don’t care.” Hells yeah. [MACKENZIE WILSON]

THE BLOODY BEETROOTS Rombo EP (Dim Mak/Downtown) What hath Justice wrought? The ubiquity of their bloghouse blues—the pounding bass pulse that’s there but not, synths so in the red that all 88 keys are bleeding, and crispy percussive R&B like a snort of digital meth—offers so much to pilfer but so little space on the hard drive to do it. So it’s a testament to the skill set of Bloody Beetroots kingpin Bob Rifo that he’s able to draw from the likes of Justice as well as the structured form of classical (his first domain of study), punk’s raw power, and the art-damaged futurism of New Wave to exercise his right to rawk.

The Rombo EP is a tease and taster for future things, and as a place marker, it’s spot-on; peripatetic ’00s pop produced for provocation, even if only in thought rather than deed. [ERICK HAIGHT]

THE BPA (BRIGHTON PORT AUTHORITY) I Think We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Boat (Southern Fried) The Brighton Port Authority is a moniker for Norman Cook, aka Fatboy Slim, and a horde of his fave featured artists.

The BPA’s fun and rhythm-heavy I Think We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Boat is clad with various forms of percussion, bass, synths, guitars, and some friendly distortion thrown in for good measure— and it’s as good as Cook’s classic You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby. The track “Superman” is smoothly delivered and certainly the best song about the last son of Krypton in a while; “Seattle” is an optimistic homage to the States. Among vocal appearances by Iggy Pop, David Byrne, Dizzee Rascal, and Emmy the Great, Cook’s dependable musical formulas are always apparent. It’s the sort of album I’d entrust to the 10-year-old daughter that I don’t have as an introduction to experimental pop rock. I’ll definitely keep it readily on hand for the occasion. [WHITNEY DWIRE]

BUMBLEBEEZ Prince Umberto and the Sister of Ill (81) Bumblebeez’ latest release is like every song you’ve ever

danced to, concentrated and distilled into 16 excellent tracks. The band, founded by a brother-sister duo, deftly channels Beck, Amanda Blank, A Tribe Called Quest, Happy Mondays, the Tetris theme song, Pavement, and fellow Aussies the Vines at once. The group’s sophomore effort, Prince Umberto and the Sister of Ill, takes you on a journey from sassy raps to reggae guitars, vocoder voices, and neopsychedelic riffs.

It’s a grab bag with a few jarring transitions that are eclipsed by irresistible, danceable hooks. The album includes snotty-girl anthems like “Spaceships,” a song that reminds me of the ’80s hit “I Know What Boys Like.” Standout track “Comin Fa Ya” is a direct play on M.I.A.’s “Bucky Done Gun” with a steady, lazy chant, “We’re coming for your money/ We’re coming for your time.” Consistent with the group’s first effort, Prince Umberto is ridiculous, fabulous, hilarious, and full of energy—everything you’d want in a raucous night out. [ERIN GRIFFITH]

COTTON JONES Paranoid Cocoon (Suicide Squeeze) With the crush of indie, and decidedly not jam bands, reviving the acid-andmushroom-friendly psychedelic rock and pop sound of the ’60s (with heavy doses of the Dead, Jimi Hendrix, and Pet Sounds passed around like blotter paper), very few have referenced the Doors. On Paranoid Cocoon, the breezy debut from Cotton Jones, spacey bass carries “Little Ashtray in the Sun,” swirling keyboards shine on “Photo Summerlude,” an instrumental so airy it floats, and Michael Nau (formerly of Page France) channels Jim Morrison often, drawing heavily on his kaleidoscopic range on “Up a Tree (Went This Heart I Have).” But Cotton Jones is more than a one-trip pony. The shimmering “Some Strange Rain” is more the Sea and Cake than Soft Parade, while the twang on “Gone the Bells,” a beautiful duet with vocalist Whitney McGraw, recalls Richard and Linda Thompson or, more recently, Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward’s She & Him. Nau and McGraw croon on “By Morning Light,” “It always disappears into the white,” and on this trip, it certainly does.

[DYLAN STABLEFORD]

BENJY FERREE Come Back to the Five and Dime Bobby Dee Bobby Dee (Domino) The idea of a eulogy album for a dead child star seems sweet but boring.

However, Benjy Ferree’s second album, Come Back to the Five and Dime Bobby Dee Bobby Dee, is neither.

Laced with glam-rock, blues, and an air of old-school rebel folk, the 14 tracks examine the rise and obscure death of child actor Bobby Driscoll, who was made famous by Disney’s 1953 rendition of Peter Pan. The Bobby Driscoll theme appropriately leaves the album musing on the fear of growing up. The track “Big Business” sarcastically commands young men to shave and suit up for work, while on “Whirlpool of Love,” Ferree claims to be relinquishing regret in a Freddie Mercury–style lament. Other than the dopey, heroinladen “When You’re 16,” the album is full of uproarious instrumentation and sing-song lyrical arrangements that keep the vibe good-spirited. The opener, “Tired of Being Good,” lays it all out on the table with a backup orchestra, choir, and a heavy bass chord to guide this anxious funeral march of an album. [CHRIS STIEGLER]

GRINGO STAR All Y’all (Self-released) Jangly, fuzzy, and distorted, much like another Atlanta-based band you may have heard of (rhymes with Back Rips), Gringo Star works really hard at laid-back psychedelic garage rock on their debut full-length, All Y’all. Superproduced by Ben H. Allen, who’s also worked with Animal Collective, the dirty mixing is pretty insincere. However, this isn’t to say it’s not a good listen. Just like the less-popular Beatle to which the band attributes its name, All Y’all is fun and lovable but reminiscent of the past. A healthy mash-up of the Nuggets compilations and the garagerock revival of the early 2000s may be heard in these 14 seemingly endless tracks. Grab a groupie, and make Mick Jagger–esque smoochy faces to party cuts like “Up and Down” and “Rebel Kind (Hazelwood).” Then head south with country ballad “Transmission,”

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the guide MUSIC and find yourself in a piano-bar waltz as you go on the “March of the Gringo.”

[MARY-LOUISE PRICE]

MAIA HIRASAWA Though, I’m Just Me (Thrive) For fans craving the girly, adolescent appeal of pure piano pop like Regina Spektor’s, yet feel shame over neighbors hearing it, there is now a solid album to satisfy all candy-coated desires.

Not only did she write, produce, arrange, and record all the songs herself, but Hirasawa also played nearly every instrument on Though, I’m Just Me. Resembling Feist and a less-anxious Björk, Hirasawa uses horns, bells, and cheery backup vocals behind her powerful voice, achieving a dramatic ’50s musi-

cal-theater feel. The beautifully melodic track “Gothenburg,” about Hirasawa’s hometown in Sweden, conjures all bittersweet journeys home—and could likely end up in an Apple commercial. Hirasawa rarely gets too serious, focusing mostly on childlike pleasures such as firecrackers, MySpace, birthdays, and boys, with a keen sense of fun that no neighbor could frown upon.

Pop music hasn’t been this delightful in a while. [ANGELA LOVELL]

ELENI MANDELL Artificial Fire (Zedtone) When L.A.-based singer/songwriter Eleni Mandell decided to make the album of her teenage dreams, she recorded Artificial Fire. The sedated,

{cool ep alert}

THOSE DARLINS Wild One EP (Oh Wow Dang Records)

Those Darlins’ debut EP, Wild One, is a completely worthwhile tease.

Each of the three songs is so full of energy and fun on first meet that you hope and pray there was some sort of mistake and you’re actually listening to a full-length album. The opener, also called “Wild One,” perfectly combines a ’50s country twang with brassy vocals from bandmates Kelley Darlin, Jessi Darlin, and Nikki Darlin, while “Whole Damn Thing” has a kitschy variety-show feel as the girls sing about devouring an entire chicken while drunk. The EP closes with “Snaggle Tooth Mama,” a sarcastic ode to country living in Tennessee, with jangly guitars and hollers in the background adding extra down-home charm. Just one request: please, please send an LP soon! [MELYNDA FULLER]

rockabilly guitar matched by her Exene Cervenka–meets–Melody Gardot vocal style shines most on ’60s-popinfluenced “Right Side” and “Personal.” “I Love Planet Earth” showcases a spectacular use of auditory space fog, which gives the song a haunting—if not morbid—air, as she croons, “I saw myself die/Under an oncoming semi/ Wanting to say ‘I love planet earth.’”

Standout track “Cracked,” with its girly pop-punk sound, could have been Lorelai’s theme song in the pre-CW– Gilmore Girls era. Nevertheless, Mandell’s vocals are so smooth that some of the songs get lost in the shuffle.

While 15 tracks is some great bang for your buck, you may find yourself hitting the “next” button in search of Artificial Fire’s more blazing tracks. [ERICA VARLESE]

MATT AND KIM Grand (Fader) Move the living room couch against the wall, and put away anything breakable. Matt and Kim, Brooklyn’s favorite power-pop–punk duo, have released their much anticipated sophomore album, Grand, and it’s time to celebrate with a good old-fashioned house party. Although their formula—keyboards, drums, and upbeat tunes— seems simple, Matt and Kim are much more than a buzz band and to prove it, they’ve dropped new tracks that are catchier and more danceable than ever. The nostalgic lyrics and pop-drenched beat of opening track “Daylight” make it impossible not to ditch your grumpy mood and hit “repeat” when the song ends. Even with improved production on Grand, nothing compares to the hysteric frenzy of their live show, so be sure to pick up the album and stay tuned for the tour. But consider yourself warned: you’ll leave the venue out of breath, bruised, covered in other people’s sweat, and smiling from ear to ear. [DAWN MAUBERRET]

NICO VEGA Self-titled (MySpace) From the first track, “Burn Burn,” L.A. trio Nico Vega is clearly a wannabebadass rock band that gives you the

feeling you should be enjoying them at a dive bar while wearing a cropped leather jacket. Aja Volkman is the soulful, bold, and sometimes screaming voice of Nico Vega, who manages to rise and fall dramatically with the catchy riffs of Rich Koehler’s guitar and the backbone beats of Dan Epand’s drums. I love “Gravity,” which will have you shouting, clapping, and busting out dances, even if they are too-coolfor-school moves. The album’s less memorable songs are still abrasive and emotional, and it’s hard to resist chanting along with all the trio’s “na-na”s and “la-la”s. Falling somewhere between the White Stripes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Nico Vega will find a place on your musical shelf. [ALLIE ALLEN]

THE PAINS OF BEING PURE AT HEART Self-titled (Slumberland) Take one part Belle and Sebastian, two parts the Jesus and Mary Chain, and just a splash of modern indie rockers like the Shins, and you come close to getting the Pains of Being Pure at Heart. The N.Y.C. band borrows stylistically from others on their self-titled debut—particularly the oft-overlooked shoegaze genre, with its fuzzed-out guitars and “what-the-fuck-is-that-guy-singing?” vocals—yet manages to produce a sound that is refreshingly unique. The tunes are upbeat, even—dare we say it?—sunny, with sweet harmonizing between vocalists Kip and Peggy.

But lest the songs be too saccharine, lines like “Can’t you see his arms are a hell/And you won’t ever leave?” on “Stay Alive,” and allusions to heartbreak in songs like “Young Adult Friction” (which wins in the “awesomesong-title” contest), undercut the sweet with just the right amount of bitterness. [AMY PLITT]

PSYCHIC ILLS Mirror Eye (The Social Registry) Following up their debut album, Dins, N.Y.C.’s Psychic Ills returns with psychedelic fuzz fest Mirror Eye. The 10-minute “Mantis” starts this fab collection of electronic ditties with dreamy vocals riding over

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the guide MUSIC modulated sonic waves, anchored by a slow tribal beat. “Meta” picks up the pace, containing trance-like singing and Indian-influenced guitar echoes.

“Sub Synth” is a laser-like mini instrumental, and then it’s off into orbit for the spacey, free-form “Eyes Closed.”

“I Take You As My Wife Again” is one of the best “out there” guitar/synth/ percussion jams these old, acid-encoded ears have ever heard—it’s right up there with Syd Barrett–era Pink Floyd and the Orb. As a psychedelic aficionado, I must say Psychic Ills is the real deal—they don’t just make noise but truly deliver the distorted, groovy goods. Mirror Eye stands as a testament to the genre, proving it’s not a dated ’60s relic. [MICHAEL LEVINE]

TELEPATHE Dance Mother (IAMSOUND) Say what you will about Brooklyn’s latest electro-darlings Telepathe, but you’ve got to admire their restraint.

While some bands influenced by hiphop and ’90s pop might be tempted to write nothing but hook-driven hits destined for Hot 97, these ladies prefer to merely hint at their inspirations—and the result is positively hypnotic. Produced by TV on the Radio’s David Sitek, Dance Mother is an avant-garde/hip-hop hybrid and a big ol’ pile of conflicting elements that seamlessly melt together into one gorgeous—and infectious—drone.

Tracks like “Devil’s Trident” and “In Your Line” pair the duo’s signature sing-song with fun, driving dance beats (think Out Hud remixed by Three 6 Mafia), eventually vaporizing into the ethereal harmonies of “Can’t Stand It” and the seductively menacing “Michael.” Though each song wafts with the familiarity of its influences, not one feels like a rehash, or a gimmick, making Dance Mother true avant-pop brilliance. [MOLLIE WELLS]

THESE ARE POWERS All Aboard Future (Dead Oceans) Sonically amorphous yet stridently opposed to such catch-all categories as “no wave” and without a clearly discernible allegiance to a particular

scene, noise-rock outfit These Are Powers (who split their time between Brooklyn and Chicago) is harder to pin down than most. With their latest inscrutably hip effort, All Aboard Future, whirling dervish frontwoman Anna Barie and company will no doubt inspire a bullying excess of superlatives in the underground media. Most of the album’s nine tracks slither, stomp, and stutter without a cohesive groove, adding credence to the rumor that much of the record is improvised (or at least consciously produced to sound like it). “Life of Birds” features dive-bombing guitars and wails as strangely avian as the title suggests, while the vocals on “Easy Answers” sidestep between a sexy scat and striving rap. “Sand Tassels” is a creepy and discordant urban sea chantey, proving that the territory of modern noise music can—under the lively stewardship of capable artists— transcend the narrow cultural boundaries of Wicker Park loft parties and Williamsburg keggers. [DEVIN ESTLIN]

M. WARD Hold Time (Merge) Having spent most of 2008 performing under the She & Him moniker with actress Zooey Deschanel and wooing music patrons with their perfect pop-tinged collection, Volume One, Portland, OR-based tunesmith M. Ward returns to his solo roots for the long-awaited Hold Time. Following up the rustic flavor of 2006’s Post-War, this 14-song set fills the heart in an ohso-familiar way and is Ward’s brightest rock moment with his most revealing songs yet. Deschanel’s girlish vocals shine on the infectious “Never Had Nobody Like You” and the slow dance charm of “Rave On,” while Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle joins Ward for “To Save Me,” a jubilant rocker where sadness explodes into absolute joy. Even at his most wistful—“Oh Lonesome Me” featuring Lucinda Williams and “Fisher of Men,” which could have been a Johnny Cash song—M. Ward hints at hope with his genuine approach.

One listen to the cool guitar-driven saunter of “Epistemology” and you’ll get it. In two words: simply stunning.

[MACKENZIE WILSON]

A POUND OF CURE

Two new tributes to the sultans of sad Because Cure fandom tends to conjure images of sensitivedude types, goth mallrats, and aging rockers at packed stadium shows, I’ve kept my longtime Robert Smith–lovin’ status under wraps. Well, the jig is up, because it seems I’m not the only one stoked on the classic canon of the Cure. Indie and underground artists are giving a cool nod to the gurus of gloom with two brand-new cover albums. [SARA GRAHAM] Just Like Heaven: A Tribute to the Cure Various Artists (American Laundromat) This encomium is Top-40 Cure done by under-the-radar artists. Though the selections here are safe, they are reinterpreted with no singular musical approach. The title-track opener, by Joy Zipper, is nearly as devastating as the original, while the Brunettes take “Lovesong” on a noir-lounge detour, and Dean and Britta do an intimate version of “Friday I’m in Love.” Though musical stylings from many genres have been unleashed on these covers, several miss the mark, most notably Kitty Karlyle’s emotinged take on “Inbetween Days,” and the Wedding Present’s punk version of “High.” Though the Rosebuds’ rendition of “The Walk,” is decidedly benign, Elizabeth Harper’s “Pictures of You” tugs at heartstrings just like it should.

Instead of reinventing the Cure, artists here celebrate the divine mass appeal their tunes have offered for decades.

Perfect as Cats: A Tribute to the Cure Various Artists (Manimal Vinyl) Bands who fly even further under the radar than those featured on Just Like Heaven do experimental renditions on this two-disc set. The selection of songs on this consummate collection match the avant-garde vibe of the artists featured, with tracks taken from weirder albums like The Top, Japanese Whispers, and Seventeen Seconds. Highlights include a freaky folk rendition of “The Caterpiller” by Astrid Quay, a literal, post-punk interpretation of early Cure gem “Grinding Halt” by the Muslims, and Bat for Lashes’ heartbreaking “A Forest.” Superfans will geek out over the insane Indian Jewelry cover of “The Walk”: its haunting, layered vocal loops, searing guitar, and chilly drums echo the confused industrial pop of Steven Severin and Robert Smith’s ’80s side project, the Glove. Though there’s a bounty of generally unknowns here who are hardpressed to improve a Cure song, that’s not the point. Consider Perfect a glimpse into today’s underground scene through the eyes of a no-fail avant-pop standard. // BUST / 072

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the guide

BOOKS

LITPICK

a comrade lost and found: a beijing story

BY JAN WONG [HOUGHTON MIFFLIN]

THOUGHTLESSLY SNUBBED FRIENDSHIPS, callously abandoned lovers, betrayed confidences—almost everyone has an ethical lapse that keeps them up at night. But few of us possess one as potentially ruinous as renowned journalist and author Jan Wong. And rare indeed is the person fearless enough to not only publicly admit to her transgression but to also actually travel halfway around the world to probe its consequences—and then publish a book about it.

In 1972, in the heyday of the Cultural Revolution in China, the Canadian-born Wong became one of the first two Westerners allowed to study at Beijing University. A KoolAid–drinking Maoist, Wong embraced all things Red, and so when approached by a fellow undergrad, Yin Luoyi, who told her of her dream to move to America, Wong was aghast.

Sensing an opportunity to help a slipping comrade (and not comprehending how dire the punishment for “thought crimes” were), Wong ratted on Yin to a Communist Party stalwart.

Three decades later, armed only with Yin’s name, Wong returned to find out if she was still alive and, if so, what horrors befell her as a result of Wong’s misguided gum-flapping.

That’s no easy task in a country where 40 percent of the population shares 10 surnames.

But a hopeless, humorless morality tale this ain’t. Despite the bleak subject matter, Wong manages to spin an uplifting, surprisingly hilarious tale that also serves as a helpful primer on China’s history, society, food, and Byzantine code of etiquette. Wong comes off as a brainy Clark Griswold on her own National Lampoon’s Chinese Vacation with her unbridled optimism in the face of certain defeat, her eye-rolling teenage sons, and her supportive, bemused husband. This joie de vivre provides necessary comic relief for what is, after all, a story of life and death. And Wong never lets us forget it. [KATHLEEN WILLCOX]

THE BEST AMERICAN COMICS 2008 Edited by Lynda Barry, Jessica Abel and Matt Madden (Houghton Mifflin) These days, comics aren’t geek, they’re chic—and they’re definitely not just for the boys. For proof, look no further than this colorful melting pot of an anthology. The latest in the annual series edited by comics writers Jessica Abel and Matt Madden, this 26-story collection is both eye candy and a solid read for hard-core enthusiasts and newbies alike. Iraq, queers, dysfunctional families, and drum-playing turtles are only the beginning of the subjects that appear here, as the storylines range from the innocent and childlike (“The Monkey and the Crab” by Shawn Cheng and Sara Edward-Corbett) to the sexually taboo (“Who’s Your Daddy” by Alison Bechdel) to the downright

dark (“Burden” by Graham Annable). From graphic royalty such as Sarah Oleksyk and Matt Groening to supertalented unknowns from Canada, Mexico, and the U.S., this collection is like a long, leisurely drive through the Sunday comics section of the newspaper—if said paper represented the intelligent, artsy, politically aware slice of society—and you’ll find yourself perusing the goods again and again. As Lynda Barry, who edited this edition, writes in her ultra-cool comic-strip intro, “For best results it is best to read something twice so that you can misunderstand it at least once.” With such a diverse and engrossing collection, you’ll want to peel it like an onion, digest it in small parts, and literally read between the lines. Whether you’re just trying comics on for size or you’re Comic Con–bound, you’re sure to learn a thing or two about this underground world—and maybe even about yourself. [MICHELLE KEHM]

BLONDE ROOTS

By Bernardine Evaristo (Riverhead) In Blonde Roots, Bernardine Evaristo revises history by reversing the slave trade: here, traders capture slaves in “Europa” to sell in “Aphrika.” At the beginning of the story, the narrator, an Englishwoman named Doris, is a “privileged” slave; she works as an administrative assistant for her African owner. Doris is, by her own description, “slick, sarcastic, sophisticated, opinionated, literate, numerate,” and she relays abuses familiar from actual history—overcrowded slave ships, whippings and hangings, backbreaking labor in cane fields. But Evaristo uses Doris’ world-wary perspective to comment on race relations today as well, giving the novel an ambiguous time setting, since there are no dates mentioned. “Whyte” women

in the “Burbs” go tanning, get black kinky hair extensions, and undergo nose-flattening procedures to try to emulate the dominant race’s beauty ideals. They’re called “wiggers”; the boys wear baggy pants; and monotheism, monogamous relationships, and conservative European clothes are considered “barbaric.” Blonde Roots is Evaristo’s first novel in prose, and her background in verse shows through the book’s metaphors and imagery, like her description of bananas, “still on the stem, like bunches of upturned fingers.” The story centers on Doris’ attempt to escape into freedom, but exposition fills the book more than action. Though Doris’ commentary makes the narrative drag, the novel covers an ambitious amount of material. And while it teaches a common lesson—in paraphrase of Evaristo’s Nietzsche epigraph: history’s interpretations depend on who holds power—Blonde Roots serves as a provocative reminder. [STACEY COBURN] // BUST / 073

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the guide BOOKS DELICATE EDIBLE BIRDS: And Other Stories

By Lauren Groff (Hyperion/Voice) Since this collection is made up entirely of stories about women, it is not much of a stretch to infer that Lauren Groff figures her women as “delicate, edible birds”—a sad statement, indeed, but one that applies nearly universally to her female protagonists. They all, even when resisting, suffer terrible fates at the hands of a male-dominated world.

The stories leap across time and place, but the sadness of the women they feature remains the same: there are young Chinese girls forced into sexual slavery in a small American town, a Latin American dictator’s wife complicit by association in his acts of atrocity, and a suicidal suburban housewife who becomes a performance artist and conceives of increasingly self-destructive pieces. The title story—the last, longest, and best in the collection—is about an American war correspondent in France during World War II. An incredibly strong and independent woman, especially for her time, Bernice goes by “Bern,” is sexually liberated, and, in the line of duty, can “kick brain matter off [her] shoes and go unhurriedly on.” She even has those familiar traits meant to signal a powerful, almost masculine woman: a foul mouth and a love of scotch. And yet even Bern succumbs to the pressures of her male peers when she is called on to sleep with a Nazi sympathizer in order to save them all. Perhaps it is the desensitization that comes from such a continuous sense of impending doom that prevents Groff’s stories from being heartrending, for though the blows keep coming for her women, the collection is an unsettlingly quick and superficial read, populated by characters that Groff fails to make us care about. [EMMA HAMILTON]

FEED ME!: Writers Dish About Food, Eating, Weight, and Body Image Edited by Harriet Brown (Ballantine) Very few of the 23 essays in Feed Me! are ultimately more than tracts about slender women who are hor-

rified by their weight. And the writers’ discourses—about relationships with food, eating disorders, body image, and self-esteem—just reinforce the argument that women still have a long way to go toward self-acceptance. In one standout essay, Kate Harding rejects terms like “voluptuous,” “plump,” and “fluffy,” insisting she is just plain “fat.” Further reading reveals she’s “kind of small” for a fat person, and the oxymoron is not lost on the reader. Most of the other writers struggle with what appears to be a collective case of body dysmorphia, their personal demons and diseases causing them to wrestle with their emotions and jean sizes.

Where does that leave the bulk of the female population, underrepresented here, who are yearning to find a chemise to cover their womanly curves? Are all these women de facto morbidly obese? With its overall deference to modern, slender, body-revering values, this book is not pretty or funny, though it does breed some semblance of solidarity. That said, the essays— by such writers as Joyce Maynard, Caroline Leavitt, and Diana AbuJaber—are beautifully written, teeming with feeling and, more often than not, a high frequency of self-loathing. Feed Me! is full of women who continue to be corseted, struggling to free themselves from the grips of a cultural ideal of the female form. [RACHEL BRAVMANN ]

GASOLINE

By Dame Darcy (Merrell) Acclaimed illustrator Dame Darcy has been quietly gaining a cult following for some time now, thanks to her Illustrated Jane Eyre and her Meatcake comic series. With Gasoline, the dame tries her hand at a graphic novel, and the result is a compellingly bizarre, postapocalyptic fairy tale. The story takes place in a world in which civilization and most of the general population have been obliterated due to rampant pollution. Among the few survivors are an orphaned fam-

ily of Wiccans known as the Armbusters, who have gained power and notoriety in their community due to their voodoo rituals and possession of the last automobile on Earth. When they drive out of their utopian community in search of gasoline, nightmarish and surreal adventures follow the family— including run-ins with zombies and treasure-chest-protecting sailors; celebrations with debauched, cave-dwelling hedonists; and being kidnapped by a group of feral, homicidal survivors known as the Nihilists. Darcy, a staunch environmentalist, was inspired to write the book during our recent gas-crisis woes. Her drawings are evocative, and her colorful, childlike, and doe-eyed style lights up the page.

Readers, however, may find themselves more enticed by the fanciful artwork than the story itself, as the plotline is more style than substance. [ADRIENNE URBANSKI ]

IT WILL COME TO ME

By Emily Fox Gordon (Spiegel & Grau) Gordon first made her mark with Are You Happy?, a memoir detailing her 1950s childhood, which, in spite of her parents’ bullying and negligence, was joyful. Her second book, Mockingbird Years, structured around the decades she spent in therapy, delved further into her own psyche. It’s little wonder, then, that with It Will Come to Me, Gordon has produced a work of fiction in which most of the dramatic action is internal. Set in an unnamed southern town, the story is about Ben, a middle-aged philosophy professor, and his wife, Ruth, a stymied author best known for a novel she wrote two decades earlier. They are estranged from their mentally ill and homeless son, Isaac, though they support him financially by giving checks to his therapist, who refuses to tell them anything specific. Ruth spends the majority of her time reminiscing, not writing, and worrying about what acquaintances think of her.

Assigned a new, laughably incom-

petent secretary, Ben grows more and more frustrated with his job until, finally, he takes a stand, which immediately backfires. Are they happy? Not particularly. But Gordon’s writing possesses a close-tothe-ground quality, rendering the details of her characters’ daily lives and thoughts with an empathy and quiet humor comparable to Anne Tyler’s. Ben and Ruth’s conflicts never reach a boiling point, and the surprising encounter at the end doesn’t qualify as a resolution, but what makes the novel successful is Gordon’s extraordinary attention to minor details, both tragic and inane. [SARAH NORRIS ]

THE LOCAL NEWS

By Miriam Gershow (Spiegel & Grau) In her first novel, writer Miriam Gershow powerfully explores themes of love, longing, family, friendship, and loss, from the perspective of a young woman who hasn’t recovered from the disappearance of her brother more than 10 years earlier.

It’s a timely subject, one we can’t avoid seeing splashed across today’s news, gossip sites, and episodes of CSI. Kids get taken; they disappear, they die, and we read/ watch/learn all too much about it—how they died, and where, and when, and who did it. What we don’t often learn about is what happens to the families left to pick up the pieces after a child reaches an untimely (or uncertain) end.

That’s what Gershow delves into in this book.

Narrator Lydia Pasternak was 16 when her brother Danny vanished.

She was also everything he wasn’t— she was the socially awkward geek next to his happy, shiny, cool kid.

Their relationship was fraught with youthful complexities; though they got along as children, Danny had begun to torment Lydia in high school, making her feel an odd sense of relief when he disappeared. Forced to remember the bad old days at a 10-year high school reunion, Lydia reflects on the days surrounding her brother’s disappearance with a mix

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BOOKS {INTERVIEW}

love bites

THE AUTHOR WHOSE NOVELS INSPIRED TRUE BLOOD MAKES HER STORIES HURT SO GOOD How much creative input do you get on the show?

None. I promised Alan that I wouldn’t interfere with his writing of the show if he wouldn’t interfere with my writing of the books. We have a deal. I just have to trust him.

Has anything you’ve watched really surprised you?

As a rape survivor, it was very difficult for me to watch the scene in which Jason put that hood on and was waiting in the dark for Dawn to get home. I couldn’t watch that.

ILLUSTRATION BY WESLEY ALLSBROOK

Are there aspects of Sookie that have been lifted from your own life?

What I identify most with in Sookie is that even though she can read people’s minds, she tries so hard to stay optimistic and really, genuinely wants to see the best in people.

EVEN BEFORE HER acclaimed Sookie Stackhouse novels were turned into the cult HBO hit True Blood last year, Charlaine Harris was a pretty big deal. In fact, her soon-to-be nine Stackhouse books—centering on the supernatural adventures of a telepathic Louisiana barmaid and her romance with a local vampire—represent only one of four popular mystery series the Arkansas-based mother of three has been churning out for her avid fan base since 1990. It was her decision to grant writer/director Alan Ball (Six Feet Under) the rights to adapt her vampire novels to the small screen, however, that launched the 57-year-old to a whole new level of popularity, and her first Stackhouse book, 2001’s Dead Until Dark, up onto The New York Times Best-Seller List. Here she talks about watching her characters live lives of their own, and other topics closer to home. of blunt honesty and wry humor. As a writer, Gershow succeeds in creating a likable character struggling with big-time family issues. Does Lydia ever learn what became of her brother? You’ll have to read the book to find out. [LAURA BARCELLA]

NOTHING RIGHT: Short Stories

By Antonya Nelson (Bloomsbury USA) I don’t know how I missed the extensively published and

acclaimed writer Antonya Nelson, but I’m glad my first encounter was this collection of short stories. They are funny in a dark, subterranean way, gracefully told, and populated by characters you wouldn’t want to know but already know intimately.

Her women tend to watch life with disenchanted detachment, bemused by perverse thought and impulse, yet revealing little on the outside. They suffer insomnia, irritability, cramps; they don’t suffer fools gladly but tolerate those they are tied to by blood or marriage.

And that’s true of you, too? That’s admirable considering that you mentioned being a rape survivor.

I am surprised to realize that it is true of me, too. Also, very much like a rape survivor, when Sookie gets attacked, it’s not something that she rests up from and then is all fixed. Her healing is emotional and physical and takes place over the course of time. In her happier aspects, Sookie is somewhat based on my daughter.

What is it about vampires that makes them so exciting to women?

Well, the idea that this guy who’s been with every kind of woman over hundreds of years has a special interest in you is very powerful. Plus, if he’s been having sex for hundreds of years, by now he must be pretty good at it! [EMILY REMS] Nelson’s writing rhythms give the impression she is working out family tribulation; too many elements repeat from one story to the next to ignore a sense of real life being exorcized. For example, I believe there is a sticky kitchen tabletop in every single story. Other repeats: the older, stauncher sister on the phone with her pregnant sibling during a family disaster; “wine cures” and “beer remedies” buffering households from too much self-awareness; the angry, punky teenager suddenly softened by maternal feeling; an

elderly mother figure in decline; cancer; infidelity; a young, vulnerable son. More than one character fights the urge to slap or sharply elbow an obtuse man in her company, rummages through someone else’s medicine cabinet, notes shed hair on pillows or floors. Each keeps secrets, often to protect others rather than herself. These difficult characters in differing families across 11 stories may seem impossible to like, but because of Nelson’s fluid skill and insight, you end up caring about them all. [FRAN WILLING] // BUST / 075

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the guide TAMARA DREWE

By Posy Simmonds (Mariner) Posy Simm o n d s (noted for her graphic novel Gemma Bovery) began drawing Tamara Drewe in 2005 as a weekly series for The Guardian. Based on Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, the installments eventually totaled 110 episodes and have now been refined and joined into one nuance-filled piece. Set in Bournemouth, England, Tamara Drewe explores the lives of Beth, the manager of a writer’s retreat in the countryside; her cheating husband/acclaimed novelist, Nicholas Hardiman; Andy, the hunky groundskeeper; and Tamara Drewe, a cosmetically modified hot-piece-of-ass columnist who just inherited her mother’s house down the street. A handful of peripheral characters add their individual blends of candor to the plot. As in any good soap opera, a bevy of secrets, affairs, and deception steams up the pages. Simmonds’ drawings are intricate and expressive, and her characters’ pointed personalities are in harmonious contrast to the elegance of their delicate, graphic build. She’s careful to mind small details, such as animals grazing (or doing the “hibbity-dibbity”), “Celebrity Watch” page-layouts similar to those found in popular magazines, stylish outfits, and buildings adorned with realistic-looking graffiti. Her use of color is subtle, featuring mostly pale, subdued hues, accentuated sparingly by bright ones.

Having read my fair share of graphic novels, I unexpectedly find Simmonds’ cartoons to be the truest to human expression I’ve seen in a while. I dare say Tamara Drewe loosely reminds me of my beloved Archie comics, only more sincere, sexy, funny, bold, clever, unpredictable, and (thank God) R-rated. [ WHITNEY DWIRE ]

THE WELLDRESSED APE: A Natural History of Myself

By Hannah Holmes (Random House) Hannah Holmes’ The Well-Dressed Ape is the type of book only one person in every household needs to read. Not because it isn’t interesting but because it’s so full of fascinating factoids that the reader will end up spouting them out. “Huh, apparently Joseph Stalin tried to breed a half-human, half-chimp army,” you might say to whomever’s listening. Not a book to read by yourself on the subway.

Holmes sets up her study of Homo sapiens to mirror what you’d see in a field-guide entry about a rabbit or lemming—there’s a description of our own habitat, eating habits, physical form, and so on. Looking at ourselves from an outside perspective, we certainly do seem like strange creatures. But Holmes goes beyond this gambit to take a deeper look at herself and at us. She takes an endearingly honest look at her life—her childlessness, her love of ’shrooms—through the lens of an obsessive number of scientific studies, covering such varied topics as the human development of tools and language and what tickles our pleasure sensors. The results of these studies aren’t indisputable, and Holmes is up-front about this.

In fact, when it comes to questions of evolution, she lists a whole bunch of theories for many of our attributes and sometimes adds her own convincing hunch.

The idea that humans have a lot in common with animals isn’t a shocking conclusion. More interesting, and what Holmes ends her book with, are the differences. The capacity for abstract thinking led humans to tools, and though a few other creatures use tools as well, Holmes shows how we have used ours to kill off our predators and produce enough food, allowing our species to grow to unsustainable numbers. But unique as well is the human capacity to analyze our actions and hopefully change our behavior. [KARIN MARLEY]

women of the cloth

FOUR BOOKS LOOK AT RELIGION FROM THE FEMALE PERSPECTIVE

DATING JESUS: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism, and the American Girl • By Susan Campbell • (Beacon Press) • As a young girl, author Susan Campbell was in love with Jesus. She would memorize quotes he’d said, sing songs giving him praise, and even go to his house multiple times a week to hear his greatest hits. She wanted to know everything about him, until she began to come into her own gender consciousness. Dating Jesus is both a coming-of-age story about the mixed messages Campbell received growing up as an evangelical Christian in America’s Bible Belt and an investigation into her childhood suspicion that, as a female, giving your heart to Jesus meant taking a back seat in his Astrovan to Heaven. Campbell’s wry wit and ability to break down Scripture crown her the Sarah Vowell of feminist theology. A must-read for anyone who’s wrestled with coming to terms with women’s social roles in her own faith. [TAYLOR CHAPLIN ORCI]

I’M PERFECT, YOU’RE DOOMED: Tales from a Jehovah’s Witness Upbringing • By Kyria Abrahams • (Touchstone) • For most, Jehovah’s Witnesses mean a knock on the door, an occasional interruption to one’s day. For stand-up comic and poet Kyria Abrahams, the religion was a way of life for her first 23 years. I’m Perfect, You’re Doomed is not only a memoir of her time in a faith often construed as a cult but also a tale of OCD, addiction, and broken families. Jehovah’s Witnesses do not celebrate birthdays or Christmas and believe that those who do (known as “worldly” people) will perish in Armageddon. Abrahams recounts her strict upbringing, her marriage at the age of 18, and a dark spell of drinking and cutting herself when her husband won’t let her work, until, eventually, she finds her salvation in worldly folk. Abrahams tackles her story with deft humor—her riff on how her public-school teachers dealt with her strict religious rules is especially witty—and her comedy is enhanced by just how humorless her life has been. If you’re a believer in the equation that comedy equals tragedy plus time, I’m Perfect may serve as mathematical proof. [HEATHER MUSE]

QUIVERFULL: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement • By Kathryn Joyce • (Beacon Press) • In this engrossing look at the evangelical Protestant “Quiverfull” movement, we learn that the conservative patriarchal group takes its name from Psalm 127, which states: “Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one’s youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.” (In other words, “Want to be in God’s army? Start having babies—as many as God can give you.”)

Stripped of equality, Quiverfull wives are servants of the home and of their husbands. Having an “unsubmissive” wife means a man can’t control his home and is therefore unfit for church leadership. The patriarchy movement doesn’t allow women to have friendships with other women, as the husband should be the only source of emotional support, and it even encourages young women to not merely save themselves for marriage but to save their first kiss for the marriage altar. Skillfully reported by journalist Kathryn Joyce, Quiverfull has echoes of The Handmaid’s Tale. Unfortunately, it’s not fiction. [REBECCA BRAVERMAN]

TAKING BACK GOD: American Women Rising Up for Religious Equality • By Leora Tanenbaum • (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) • This is a book about women who honor organized religion but struggle with their second-class status within it. From the story of two Muslims who organized a woman-led prayer service despite bomb threats, to the tale of a devoted Catholic advocating to be legitimately ordained as a priest, Tanenbaum covers women working both within their faith’s social structure and against it, as well as those who thirst for change but feel powerless to speak up. With attention to Catholic, evangelical Christian, Muslim, and Jewish women—along with chapters on sexuality and language in worship, perspectives from primary texts and contemporary, forays into ancient history, and her interviews and attendance at services and conferences—Tanenbaum is thorough but never patronizing. Warm and informative, her own voice enriches the text as she talks about women rising up against the practice of their preachings. [CHRISTINE FEMIA]

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the guide

Luke Ford’s on the run in The Black Balloon

PHOTOS COURTESY OF NEOCLASSICS FILMS LTD., STRAND RELEASING, AND OVERTURE FILMS

THE BLACK BALLOON Written and Directed by Elissa Down (NeoClassics Films Ltd.) It’s hard enough fitting in at a new high school without having a father who talks to teddy bears and an autistic older brother whose antics effectively kill any hope of popularity. But for Thomas (Rhys Wakefield), an army brat whose family is constantly being uprooted, this is a problem he faces with every move. His indefatigable mother, Maggie (skillfully played by Toni Collette), is usually the glue holding their unusual family together, but when a high-risk pregnancy confines her to bedrest, the task of looking after Thomas’ brother, Charlie (Luke Ford), falls to Thomas and his father, (Erik Thomson). It is this shift for Thomas, from long-suffering younger brother to caregiver, that lies at the heart of The Black Balloon.

Early on, it becomes clear that Thomas has his work cut out for him.

While Charlie is sweet, he’s also entirely unpredictable. Sometimes his outbursts are funny, like when he leads his boxers-clad brother on a chase through the neighborhood, ending up in the bathroom of Thomas’ crush, Jackie (Gemma Ward). But when Charlie reacts to his mother’s absence by throwing tantrums and playing with his own feces, Thomas is forced to confront his long-simmering resentment of both his brother and his new responsibilities.

This not-so-typical coming-ofage story artfully combines family

Elmar Wepper is awesome in Cherry Blossoms

drama with dark comedy, and Wakefield gives a moving performance as Thomas, bringing to life his character’s journey from a self-absorbed teen to a young man who can accept his brother despite the expectations of others.

Writer/director Elissa Down has a talent for creating both laugh-out-loud moments and powerful dramatic scenes, and her personal experience with an autistic sibling ultimately gives the film the ring of truth. [ERRIN DONAHUE]

CHERRY BLOSSOMS Written and Directed by Doris Dörrie (Strand Releasing) In this latest offering by renowned German writer/director Doris Dörrie (Men, Me and Him), she introduces audiences to Rudi and Trudi (Hannelore Elsner and Elmar Wepper), an adorable elderly couple living a simple life in the picturesque German countryside. Their children have grown up and gone to live more cosmopolitan lives in Berlin and Tokyo, so when doctors tell Trudi that her husband doesn’t have long to live, she decides they should pay their kids a visit. But it is Trudi, instead, who dies suddenly during their trip, and after her funeral, the devastated Rudi decides to travel to Japan to stay with their son. Trudi had always wanted to visit Japan, and her love of Japanese Butoh, an expressive dance movement from the ’60s, had been something of a mystery,

MOVIES

Amy Adams (left) and Emily Blunt share the scrubbing in Sunshine Cleaning

even an annoyance, to Rudi. Wandering the city, however, he tries to find a connection with Trudi in the madness of Tokyo and comes to understand why she found Butoh’s celebration of life, death, love, and pain so appealing.

As gooey as it all might sound, there isn’t a mawkish frame in this entire movie. Filmed In German, English, and Japanese, with English subtitles, Dörrie’s international story about complicated familial relationships will speak to audiences as diverse as the locations in which she shoots. Her eye for family rituals—like the little songs people sing together or the ambivalent way a daughter might cry when seeing her aging mother walk away—is what makes this film so perfect.

Dörrie also displays an incredible amount of attention to detail, letting her camera linger on an empty bedroom or a fly on the window of a train. It is in these moments that we truly experience the evanescent loveliness of the world Rudi comes to find in his travels. [ANNA BEAN]

SUNSHINE CLEANING Directed by Christine Jeffs (Overture Films) Who knew crime-scene cleanup could be such a swell time? In her latest outing, Christine Jeffs, director of Sylvia, brings to the screen a funny and at times moving story about Rose and Norah Lorkowski (Amy Adams and Emily Blunt), working-class sisters try-

ing to get by in Albuquerque, NM. Essentially this is a film about the kind of hard work familiar to many women— mothering, caring, and cleaning—but with a bloody twist.

Norah, the tattooed and sassy younger Lorkowski, still lives with her father and struggles with a series of dead-end jobs, while her sister Rose, a single mother who works cleaning rich people’s homes, is stuck in an affair with her married high school boyfriend (Steve Zahn). But when Oscar, Rose’s son, is almost kicked out of elementary school, she enters into the lucrative crime-scene-cleanup business to afford him a more suitable education. Enlisting Norah’s help, Rose, who keeps a Post-It by her mirror that says, “You are strong, you are powerful, you can do anything, you are a winner,” comes to find her new line of work quite rewarding, even if it involves mealy worms, fingers in bathroom sinks, and bodily fluid–soaked mattresses. As it turns out, bloody death scenes are not entirely new for these gals, and viewers get to watch them work through their haunted pasts as the story progresses.

Rose and Norah’s father, played by the hysterical Alan Arkin, adds much to this film’s appeal, but it is Amy Adams who steals the show. Writer Megan Holley has also done a nice job here bringing her characters to life. Though at times Sunshine Cleaning can feel a bit formulaic, that wouldn’t stop me from seeing this movie again in a second.

Look out for it in March. [ANNA BEAN] // BUST / 077

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sex files

lights, camera, action!

ILLUSTRATION BY ERIN WENGROVIUS

WEB VIDEOS ARE THE NEW VENUE FOR STRAIGHT TALK ABOUT SEX

WE’VE COME A long way since the crackly, awkward, black-and-white movies in 7th-grade health class; these days, you can find sex education packaged as ultracool (and sometimes hilarious) online content. Here’s an introduction to the tech age’s newest crop of sex-ed-video pioneers. And no, Paris Hilton doesn’t count.

Cherry TV (www.cherrytv.com) is the perfect Web site for viewing a little girl-to-girl sex chatter that doesn’t, as founder Jill Abrahams stresses, focus on how to please your partner. You’ll find Cherry TV’s totally relatable panel of female pundits (including writers, sex educators, even BUST’s very own Callie Watts) opining about masturbation techniques and the best positions for orgasming on round-table discussion show Cherry Dish, or giving some serious answers on Fresh Advice. And while the site also features blogs and user forums, according to Abrahams, video is their most useful medium, since viewers can “see the [hosts] and know that they are everyday chicks.” And similar to a late-night gab sesh with your BFF, nothing is taboo. Messy anal sex, farting, weird smells—it’s all covered, often by way of laugh-out-loud anecdotes that both entertain and enlighten.

Pioneer sexologist Betty Dodson and activist/ entrepreneur Carlin Ross are clearly an unstoppable force when it comes to honest info about all things sex-related. And now they’re getting in front of the camera to get their point across. Their new collaborative site, DodsonAndRoss.com, is

packed with both conversational and instructional videos on such oh-so-vital topics as multiple orgasms and analingus. “We both believe that sexual liberation is the last phase of feminism,” says Ross. “And we wanted to create a forum for women where they could embrace their sexual selves in the right environment.” Coming soon from the duo is a video series teaching basic skills—from oral sex with a condom to clitoral stimulation—so be sure to watch this space.

Unlike the straightforward style of Cherry TV and DodsonAndRoss.com, the Midwest Teen Sex Show (www.midwestteensexshow. com), a monthly video podcast series aimed at adolescents, couches sex-educational tidbits in sketch-comedy-type vignettes. Nothing screams “teenager!” quite like sarcasm and masturbation jokes—which is why these five-minute webisodes are the most relevant source of sex-ed a young’un today is likely to encounter. Created by Nikol Hasler and Guy Clark (with co-host Britney Barber playing numerous characters), the show uses irreverent storylines to tackle serious issues like birth control and date rape. And while it aims mostly to entertain—a recent episode about orgasms featured a Crocodile Hunter–esque host searching for the “elusive clitoris”—its creators strive to keep the message intact. “It’s a nice bonus that we get to provide information to people,” says Clark, “and hopefully keep teens from making poor choices.” [MOLLIE WELLS] // BUST / 079

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sex files

ask aunt betty and cousin carlin

DR. BETTY DODSON AND CARLIN ROSS TELL YOU EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX BUT WERE WAITING FOR SOMEONE ELSE TO ASK

Q.

I’d like some suggestions on how to deal with a supportive but “too

tired” partner who has a different arousal

Q.

I’ve been sexually active for about two years now and have found that it is

difficult for men to orgasm during intercourse

schedule than myself. I am randy at night,

with me. I’m lucky enough to have several small

whereas she is a rise-and-shiner. How do I

orgasms throughout sex, but only one of my

deal with lying next to someone I am very

partners has been able to orgasm. Could it be

much attracted to, who would rather sleep

something I am (or am not) doing? Is there a way

than sleep with me? She finds my attempts

to stimulate my partner more during intercourse?

at masturbating next to her offensive, and

No-Cum Conundrum

as a Scorpio, I have trouble waiting until the morning when I’m more interested in

Betty says: I’d say your girlfriend is being sexually selfish when she is offended by your masturbation. Since she’s supportive and you want to stay together, I suggest you go into the living room or bathroom and pull off an orgasm or two. Save partnersex for Saturdays or Sundays and holidays. On the weekends, you can flip a coin to determine whether or not you “do it” in the morning or at night.

Carlin says: My boyfriend and I have the same issue: he’s a morning person looking for sex in the a.m., and I’m a night owl looking to get some in the p.m. Our solution? He masturbates in the morning (I leave lube and porn around for him), I masturbate in the evening, and we hook up mainly on the weekends. Be honest and communicate your sexual needs to your partner. Like Betty said, you may have to find someplace other than the bedroom to masturbate so your girlfriend can sleep.

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Betty says: This one is a first for me. Women usually complain about the opposite—they’re the ones who can’t orgasm during intercourse, because guys come too fast and there’s no direct clitoral stimulation. A few possibilities might be: they don’t trust your method of birth control, maybe you have bad breath, or your vaginal muscles are loose and don’t offer sufficient friction. If the latter is the case, do pubococcygeus(or PC)-muscle exercises (aka Kegels) and tone up your vagina. Meanwhile, you can reach down and make a ring with your thumb and finger at the base of his penis and hold tight. Another solution would be talking dirty while you’re fucking. That’s usually hot.

Carlin says: Congratulations on the orgasms!

When I want to make my man come, I talk dirty, like Betty suggests (creating some sort of scenario usually about a threesome or anal sex), break up the vaginal sex by giving him oral, and the grand finale: I give my finger a good lick (or use some lube if it’s available) and slowly rub around the outside of his asshole so that it opens a bit; then I slide my finger in, locate his prostate (to find it, curl your finger—it feels like a walnut), and massage away. It works every time.

MARCELLUS HALL

snoozing. Any advice? Late-Night Lover

Got a question for Betty and Carlin? Post it at www.bust.com/auntbetty

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sex files ONE-HANDED READ

talk is cheap

A GAL AND HER RUNNING PARTNER FINALLY GO THE DISTANCE [BY THE AIR IN the bathroom felt cramped and close with a half-naked man in the room, though I certainly hadn’t complained when Stowe removed his wet T-shirt, sweaty from our morning run, after we got to my house. I sat on the edge of the tub, still in my shorts and sports bra, trying to stay out of his way while he rummaged through the storage chest, pulling out hydrogen peroxide and gauze.

Muscles rippled across his back as he moved. Freckles were scattered over his shoulders like cupcake sprinkles.

Oh, how I’d like to lick them. I looked up through the skylight as I tried to adjust my breathing so I wouldn’t sound like a woman in heat.

He’d kissed me, damn it. After two years of being running partners, why did it take me falling down and scraping my knee for him to notice something besides my minutes-per-mile time? Stowe knelt in front of me, the warmth from his chest making my toes clamp down on the cold tile floor. He held my calf in one large hand while he used a soaked gauze pad to dab at the wound with the other. I inhaled sharply and he looked up at me.

“Suck it up, Claire. It’s not too bad.”

“You suck it up,” I blurted out.

His eyes went to my mouth, tracing it, as if he were remembering our kiss. My lips tingled as I imagined future onslaughts. “Tell you what.” His voice had gone soft, like he was telling me a secret. “You get in the shower and get that knee cleaned off, and then I’ll bandage it up.”

“Where are you going?” I sounded like a petulant child.

He sat back on his heels, his shorts stretching across his crotch. I pictured my toe running up the middle seam, his cock hard against my instep. “I’ll go downstairs and fix us some breakfast.” He stood up and turned his back to me, but not before I had seen the slight bulge in his shorts.

LETTY JAMES]

Damn, I was glad I wasn’t the only one. He raised his arms to put his sweaty T-shirt back on.

“Wait. I have some old shirts of my brother’s around here. I’ll get you one.”

I went to slide by Stowe at the same time he tried to back up. We got caught together between the sink and the toilet. I tried to push by without touching him, smelling him, wanting him. He took my arm, just above the elbow and held it, running his fingers across my skin, making the rest of my body ache for that same touch. “Could we do it again?” he asked.

“Again?” I looked up into those mesmerizing eyes of his.

“Kiss me.”

I threw caution out the door like yesterday’s trash as I ran my hand over his jaw, smooth from this morning’s shave. Tracing my index finger over his lips, I admired their shape—a little too broad, the lower plumper than the other, but oh, so sweet. His mouth parted, welcoming my finger inside. Soft and gentle, unlike our earlier, violent joining. The tension crackled between us. I kissed one beautiful dusty nipple, flicking my tongue over its sensitive nub. He was salty and musky, like my favorite caviar.

Stowe moaned as he captured my head with his hands.

Bringing his mouth to mine, he stroked and nibbled my lips until I thought of nothing else but wanting him. I stood on my tiptoes, pushing against him. Pulling his hair, I opened my mouth under his and demanded with my body that he go deeper, further. He crushed me to him, taunting me with his cock jumping against my belly. I ran my hand over the fabric of his shorts. He grabbed my wrist and stood up straight, his breath loud and strained against my cheek as my own was against his chest. “No. Not now,” he said.

“You started it.” I pulled away from him, rubbing my arms.

“I know. I’m sorry. Why is it when I’m around you I always do

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something stupid? We need to talk before things go any further.”

My eyes narrowed. We were both single now. What the hell was there left to talk about? Turning on my heel, I went into my bedroom to find something Stowe could put over that way-too-tempting chest.

He was waiting out in the hall, looking down at the garden by the time I found an old blue concert T-shirt. I tossed it to him, not wanting to risk touching him again, and watched while he pulled it on.

The sleeves bunched underneath his armpits, and the fabric pulled across his chest, outlining his pecs. With the faded blue accenting Stowe’s eyes, it was almost better if he went bare-chested. I clasped my hands together so I wouldn’t run them across the soft cotton.

“I’m going to take my shower now.” I firmly shut the bathroom door behind me and flipped the overhead bulb off, preferring to shower by the sun coming through the skylight. Stripping down, I stepped into the hot, sharp spray of water. I ran the soap over my neck and down my breasts, flinching at their tenderness, biting my lip from the exquisite self-torture. How dare he leave me in this state?

What kind of hot-blooded man left a woman waiting?

A chill draft ruffled the tub curtain. “I brought you some orange juice,” announced Stowe. I knew he still stood there as the sunlight illuminated my body like a dancer behind a screen. I turned to face the showerhead, putting my profile in high relief. The water splashed over my face and chest. Raising my leg, I propped it against the edge of the tub. If he wanted a show, I’d give him one he’d never forget.

I washed each breast, lavishing them with soap from the bath sponge, groaning softly as the rough texture grazed my nipples. I slowly dragged the sponge around my ribs to the curve of my ass, curling my spine, thrusting my tits in the air. I threw my head back, sliding the sponge from my butt, over my hip to my pussy, spreading my legs further. I wiggled it against my clit. My moans couldn’t be contained as my hips swayed. If only Stowe would touch me as I touched myself. I dropped the sponge, my fingers entering my cunt as my palm pressed against my clit. My other hand danced over my breasts, pulling at my nipples. The shower became my waterfall, the steam became the mist in the forest and I imagined Stowe, a lone hunter, watching me. Waiting.

The curtain opened slowly, the sound of the silver rings gliding on the metal rod sparking my fantasy into reality. Stowe stood naked, his face wet with sweat as if he’d just finished a run. His cock pulsed with need. I stepped out of the shower, refusing to masturbate any longer. Pushing him down on the fuzzy pink toilet cover, I replaced my fingers with his throbbing stiff cock, making both of us groan. He leaned down, sucking my nipple hard into his mouth as his hands clutched my ass. We built from slow, wet strokes to fast, hot thrusts until our shouts of release echoed up to the skylight.

We sat panting, stuck together. His kisses caressed my shoulder.

“Do we still need to have a talk?” I swirled my tongue over his ear to indicate my thoughts.

Stowe stood up, holding us together, his cock still buried deep inside me. “What talk?” B BUST (ISSN 1089-4713), No. 55, Feb/Mar, 2009. BUST is published bi-monthly in Feb/Mar, April/ May, June/July, Aug/Sept, Oct/Nov, and Dec/Jan by BUST, Inc., 78 5th Avenue #5, New York, NY, 10011-8000. Printed in the U.S.A. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and additional mailing offices. Subscription prices, payable in U.S. funds, are $19.95 for one year (6 issues). Additional postage: In Canada add $10 per year, and in all other foreign countries add $20 per year.

POSTMASTER: Send address changes to BUST, P.O. BOX 16775, NORTH HOLLYWOOD, CA, 91615.

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LONDON CRAFTACULAR DEC. 6 AT ST. ALOYSIUS SOCIAL CLUB Cherry Bakewell

Craftacular organizers Clare and Vikki Tatty Devine Party girls the Vinyl Vendettas: Clare, Nat and Bethan!

Learning to knit with Artyarn

Laurie from BUST and Sheila B

L.A. CRAFTACULAR DEC. 6 AT THE ECHOPLEX Craft baby

Eager shoppers pose for the camera

Vanessa from Sweetleigh

DJ Audrey Napoleon

Miranda July

The line around the block!

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Cute BUST volunteer!

LONDON PHOTOS BY JULIAN LASS, YACINTA WIDJOJO, ESME DEACON AND RACHEL SERVICE. L.A. PHOTOS BY AMELIA BURNS

Vie Moderne

In London, BUST-y liasons Vikki Woodcock and Clare Chadburn put together a smashing BUST Christmas Craftacular, featuring an amazing assortment of crafters, knitting and cross-stitching lessons, and Tatty Devine’s Craft Clinic. Sponsored by Indiequarter, a U.K. blog for designers, artists, and crafters, the event drew over a thousand eager shoppers who enjoyed 12 hours of indie bliss while listening to DJs the Vinyl Vendettas, Sheila B, Golden Silvers, and the Shellac Sisters! At the same time, in sunny Los Angeles, hundreds lined up around the block to get inside the West Coast BUST Holiday Craftacular. Izze drinks flowed while shoppers cruised the finest in crafty goods, made their own giftwrap at an all-day Craftnight, and bopped to DJs C. Brown and Audrey Napoleon. Both locations had goodie bags and raffles, including a Singer sewing machine giveaway in LA!

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KEEP UP WITH THE BUST IEST EVENTS. SIGN UP FOR THE BUST LINE NEWSLETTER AT BUST.COM

NEW YORK CRAFTACULAR DEC. 14 Signing up for a sub!

Paul Dinello, Amy Sedaris, and Chris Kattan

Stella Zotis

BUST’s Susan Juvet (center) and friends

DJs Leah and Jaime (Nouvellas) Clare Bare

The

Stylist’s Closet

Happy Stylist’s Closet shoppers

Babycakes

DJ Dirty Finger

The following weekend, BUST exploded in N.Y.C. for the fourth annual BUST Holiday Craftacular, teaming up with Etsy, Burdastyle, and ModCloth to make it all the merrier. Thousands got up bright and early for a chance to snag a goodie bag and sign up to win a Singer sewing machine. Dogfish Head beer hosted the afternoon open bar, while Amy Sedaris and Stella Zotis (wo)manned their own Craftacular tables and entertained oodles of star-struck shoppers. The first ever Stylist’s Closet was bananas with unbelievable deals for the VIP ticket holders. Music was provided by DJs Leah and Jaime, Dirty Finger, and Heloise Williams. This was the most stylishly successful BUST Craftacular ever, so you better make it your beeswax to come next year!

PHOTOS BY ALEXANDRA MARVAR

When monsters attack

086 / BUST // FEB/MAR

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bustshop SHE COMMERCE, SERVICES, AND MORE

FOR ADVERTISING INFORMATION EMAIL ADS@BUST.COM OR CALL 212.675.1707 X106

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bustshop SHE COMMERCE, SERVICES, AND MORE

FOR ADVERTISING INFORMATION EMAIL ADS@BUST.COM OR CALL 212.675.1707 X106

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bust PRODUCT SHOWCASE

workingforpeanuts.etsy.com Nate - in Love $15

www.abbabyboutique.com Wristlet Key Ring $12

www.asianinvasionsaloon.com Cupcake Train Case $48

www.beqiclothing.com Birdland Necklace

www.designbynihan.etsy.com Hug Me $258

www.joncarling.etsy.com Kraken

$10

www.s-a-swank.com Divine

$30

www.pinupgirlclothing.com Para Ti Necklace $48

www.earthdaughterarts.com Birch Leaves $29.95

barkingmaddison.etsy.com Custom Word Belt $95

www.craigsbs.com Craig’s Butter Wax

$12.99

www.ashidashi.com Pencil Socks

$9.99

www.iheartbrooklyngirls.com IHBG 2009 Calendar $10

MaeFayne.etsy.com Collage Art

$225

www.deborahcrooks.com Deborah Crooks CD $12.95

www.LuraJewelry.net Evil Eye Amulet

$140

www.mycaretta.com Knit Hoodie Wrap

$52

ohhellofriend.etsy.com Follow Your Heart $15.50

www.knitgrrl.com Reboux Hat Pattern

$5

practicalmagicjewels.vpweb.ca Envious Heart $22.95

www.ritual-bath.com Love Sugar Scrub

$8.50

www.traceellements.com Bedroom Eyes

$34

www.vickiberndt.com St. Lucy Candle

orionstars.etsy.com Bitch Away

$8

www.evebeharceramics.com Orange Dot Sake Set $75

www.sourpussclothing.com Pin Up Lamp $25

www.spitfiregirl.com Eye Love You

www.schoolofburlesque.com Burlesque Classes $15

www.nanopod.tv/nanotopia Heart of Glass $32

hexbaby.etsy.com Sheri Cuff

$7.95

$8

$16

$10

www.dustdesignco.com Steampunk Ring

$22

www.pantherbyhand.com Handmade Briefs $20

prettyusefulstuff.etsy.com Kiss Me You Fool $12

www.early2bed.com First Timers Kit

web.me.com/ameliaspirit Awakening Rattle

$26

$77

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X GAMES [BY DEB AMLEN]

winter warm-ups 65. Change, as a clock 66. N.Y.C. rock trio ___ Greyhound 67. Be without 68. Way to get big hair 69. Command to Fido 70. Amo, ___, amat (Latin exercise)

Down 1. Bluesman’s lick 2. Carmen highlight 3. Christmas trees, often 4. Wobble, as on high heels 5. “Barely there” underwear 6. ___ de sac 7. Torah holders, in Judaism 8. Soak up again 9. I Like You author and BUST cover girl 10. Figure-skating jump 11. “___ be a cold day...”

12. Hole lead singer Courtney 13. Flexible Flyer, e.g.

18. Gradually stops nursing 22. Scoundrel 24. Go postal 26. It brings out the child in you 27. Loosen, as laces 28. Blondie hit “Heart of ___”

Across 1. Cast Away carrier

20. “__ your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night...”

29. Where some eye tests are taken: abbr.

30. Word repeated before “gone”

5. Mark left by Zorro?

21. Popular 1990s teen TV series My __ Life

31. “My Aim Is True” singer ___ Costello

9. Does some recreational boating

23. Chows down

32. “P.D.Q., Doc!”

14. Adjective for Rastafarians 15. Robert Smith band, with “The”

25. Capek play that introduced the word ˇ “robot”

16. Glorify

26. Toasty preludes to a yoga class?

17. Toasty preludes to a jog?

33. Beaujolais, par exemple

19. Dig, as for information

34. Heidi’s hubby

ANSWERS TO “BODY MATH INDEX” FROM THE DEC/JAN ‘09 ISSUE. FOR ANSWERS TO THIS ISSUE’S PUZZLE, SEE NEXT ISSUE OF BUST.

33. Like the Great Plains 37. 35mm-camera design 39. Does one better than 40. Baz Luhrmann’s 1992 hit flick ___ Ballroom

35. Migrating salmon

43. Come (from)

36. Liberal studies

45. Ab-building exercise

38. Fancy footwear

48. American Gladiators host Laila

41. Warhol muse and author of Superstar

49. Brit band Bat for ____

42. Attendance counter

50. Interstellar cloud

44. They’re often pickled

53. Kids’ hiding place

46. Something to pick

54. It may be waved at the Olympics

47. Toasty preludes to a long jump?

55. Big butte

51. ___ mode

56. Burns up

52. Net-surfer’s stop

57. Suckling spot

53. Like Kathleen Hanna

59. Muslim holy man

58. Picasso was one

60. Animal lovers’ org.

62. Place for 2-Down

61. Admonishing sounds

63. Toasty prelude to lifting weights?

64. Rudy’s coach in Rudy

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thelast the lastlaugh laugh {BY ESTHER PEARL WATSON}

96 / BUST // FEB/MAR

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A

boobtique

A

A portion of all proceeds are donated to the fight against breast cancer.

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