Dear New Years TV marathon viewers, If you wondering when your local cafe, supermarket, and shopping mall would stop playing “Santa Baby,” rest assured: Christmas is almost here! Though my own family is Jewish, the holiday still holds so many sweet memories for me: the evening I gathered all the ornaments given to my mother [...]
Archive for December, 2009
The Kitsch of Christmas Past
Posted in advertising, domesticity, holidays, television, video on December 22, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Hanukkah Caroling
Posted in fun, holidays, Jews, music, tagged hanukkah on December 16, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Dear holiday lovers, In case you’ve lost track of your candle-lighting, tonight’s the sixth night of Hanukkah—a.k.a. the Festival of Lights, a.k.a. the Jewish Christmas, a.k.a. an excuse to eat oily, fried foods. Hanukkah sometimes felt like a hard holiday to get into as a kid. I loved the eight days of presents and the [...]
The Divided States #1: Pennsylvania Mania!
Posted in books, Divided States, fashion, music, poetry, shopping, visual culture, tagged Pennsylvania on December 14, 2009 | 5 Comments »
Dear searchers of lost time, Some of you might know that I have an odd fascination with the state guide project commissioned by the WPA during the Great Depression—a series of guidebooks detailing the history, customs, and sights of each and every corner of the nation. The guidebooks vary widely in quality, yet they remain [...]
Foxy Brown and Aunt Jemima, Exposed
Posted in advertising, cartoons, commercialism, food, visual culture, tagged aunt jemima, foxy brown on December 9, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
O pioneers of the digital frontier, Anyone who’s watched Spike Lee’s sometimes brilliant, sometimes obvious 2000 film Bamboozled, Ferris State University’s Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia might feel eerily familiar—the docile, self-sacrificing”mammy,” the lazy, stealing, and insatiable “coon” (on the left). Less familiar to some readers may be the sexually virile “Jezebel” stereotype, embodied, [...]
Healthcare and Cooties
Posted in advertising, illness, medicine, visual culture, tagged healthcare on December 7, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Dear Snuggie™ advocates, I spent much of Friday flexing my would-be public intellectual muscles at a lively and illuminating roundtable discussion on the healthcare crisis (media coverage, the public option, the Stupak amendment) organized by Harvard’s Women, Gender, and Sexuality department. Yet as Jill Lepore’s recent Talk of the Town plainly shows, healthcare has been an ongoing [...]
Rabbis, Incompetent and Feisty
Posted in books, film, Jews on December 2, 2009 | 1 Comment »
To the always already caffeine dependent, The nominations are in! No, not for the Oscars or the Golden Globes, but the awards we’ve all been waiting for: The Independent Spirit Awards. Let the office pools begin! In all honesty, while I tired of televised award ceremonies long ago, the ISA’s—or is it the Indies? the [...]
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