August 24, 2009
This year's Teen Choice Awards, broadcast Aug. 10 on Fox, generated the kind of buzz usually reserved for MTV's often-racy Video Music Awards. The agent provocateur? Miley Cyrus. The 16-year-old's performance of her new song "Party in the U.S.A." featured her pole-dancing on a moving ice cream cart while wearing short shorts and a bra-revealing top. Many have speculated that Miley's moves were intended as an homage of sorts to Britney Spears, who was present. After the show, Miley tweeted a thank-you note to all of those making that comparison: "For all the people calling me 'the next Britney' THANK U. I couldn't ask for a better compliment :)" These eyebrow-raising antics come on the heels of another round of suggestive pictures of Miley published in the August issue of Elle magazine. [Fox, 8/10/09; mtv.com, 8/10/09; sfgate.com, 8/11/09; newsday.com, 8/11/09; Elle, 8/09]
QUOTE: "[My] performance tonight is funny, but I wanted it to be about [something more]. Party in the U.S.A. is an all-American song, and so I come out tonight and I'm literally in a trailer park. It's a blinged-out trailer park. ... This is to represent where I am from. I'm so proud of it. All the girls trying to be Hollywood and stuff with their big glasses, me shooing them away." —Miley Cyrus, explaining her dance routine, which she says her father, Billy Ray Cyrus, helped plan [mtv.com, 8/10/09]
Disney took preemptive action to distance itself from Miley's performance, issuing this statement before the awards show: "Disney Channel won't be commenting on that performance, although parents can rest assured that all content presented on the Disney Channel is age-appropriate for our audience—kids 6-14—and consistent with what our brand values are." [mtv.com, 8/11/09]
QUOTE: "I don't blame that little girl [Miley] for doing the things she's doing. She only 16, and has hardly known any other life. I blame her parents, and Disney, for sexualizing her—and, in turn, mainstreaming aggressive eroticism to tweens and young adolescents. ... As the father of young children, including a young girl, I literally cannot wrap my mind around parents who push their children to get involved in beauty pageants. Nor can I wrap my mind around the idea of a father—the aforementioned [Billy Ray] Cyrus—turning his daughter into what Miley Cyrus is becoming. Years from now, when that poor girl becomes tabloid fodder, and her character is consumed by the kind of tawdry fame he's building for her now, what kind of accounting will he be able to give for how he executed the immense responsibility that falls on all of us privileged to be fathers (and mothers)?" —Rod Dreher, Dallas Morning News columnist and author of Crunchy Cons [blogs.beliefnet.com, 8/12/09]
As for the Teen Choice Awards themselves, 83 million votes yielded surfboard trophies in a whopping 87 categories encompassing movies, television, music, sports, video games and pop culture. Miley walked away with six awards in three categories (movies, music and TV). But Twilight almost doubled her take, with 11 wins. Teens bequeathed TV honors on content that edged toward sleazy (Gossip Girl nabbed four awards) and wholesome (Disney shows JONAS, Hannah Montana, Sonny With a Chance and Princess Protection Program). A similar dichotomy was evident when it came to musicians honored, who included Lady Gaga, Black Eyed Peas, Beyoncé, Kanye West, Jason Mraz, David Archuleta, Taylor Swift, Demi Lovato, Jonas Brothers and Paramore. Though few R-rated films actually took home awards (Friday the 13th being one exception), many of the movies nominated for Teen Choice Awards this year carried that rating. [mtv.com, 8/10/09]
QUOTE: "While the recipients of Teen Choice Awards are chosen by teens 13-19 who vote online, nowhere does Fox state who selects the nominees; nor is the nomination process explained; nor do the voters have any say in the award categories—including such awards as 'Choice Liplock,' (for the 'hottest' kiss), 'Choice Rumble,' (for the best fight scene), and 'Choice Male/Female Hottie.' Viewing a list of the nominees, it becomes clear that the so-called Teen Choice Awards are less about teenagers and children genuinely having the opportunity to reward their favorite stars, and much more about marketing the products the entertainment industry wants to push at youngsters. ... [And] many of the individuals and products nominated are wholly inappropriate for teenagers." —Parents Television Council writer Christopher Gildemeister [parentstv.com]
Last fall, CW's Gossip Girl raised eyebrows by using the obscene text shorthand "OMFG" for the show's ad campaign. This season, a series of new ads will feature another vulgar acronym employing the letters "WTF." The phrase stands for the question "What the ..." followed by the f-word. In CW's wink-wink double entendre usage, however, it means, "Watch This Fall." [nydailynews.com, 8/10/09]
QUOTE: "We had an episode that went all the way to the script phase in which Stewie does come out. It had to do with the harassment he took from other kids at school. He ends up going back in time to prevent a passage in Leviticus from being written: 'Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind. It is an abomination.' But we decided it's better to keep it vague, which makes more sense because he's a 1-year-old. Ultimately, Stewie will be gay or a very unhappy repressed heterosexual." —Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane, in an interview with Playboy, on the sexual preference of that show's youngest star [nydailynews.com, 8/13/09]
QUOTE: "I can't even tell you how many people just say, 'Oh, get an abortion.' Like it's not a big deal." —reality TV star Kourtney Kardashian. She said boyfriend Scott Disick was supportive of whatever decision she made, but ultimately she decided to keep the baby. "For me, all the reasons why I wouldn't keep the baby were so selfish," she told People magazine. "It wasn't like I was raped, it's not like I'm 16. I'm 30 years old, I make my own money, I support myself, I can afford to have a baby. And I'm with someone who I love." [foxnews.com, 8/19/09]
In an issue addressing the subject "Total Body Confidence," Self magazine editor Lucy Danziger approved the alteration of singer Kelly Clarkson's cover shot in order to "make her look her personal best." Danziger defended the choice, saying, "A [magazine] cover's job is to sell the magazine. ... In the sense that Kelly is the picture of confidence, and she truly is, then I think this photo is the truest we have ever put out there on the newsstand." Critics, however, allege that Self designers actually altered the bone structure of Clarkson's face. And in the interview itself, the American Idol champ says, "When people talk about my weight, I'm like, 'You seem to have a problem with it; I don't. I'm fine!' I've never felt uncomfortable on the red carpet or anything." It's not the first time Clarkson's features have been digitally slimmed. "[The record producers] have definitely Photoshopped the crap out of me," she blogged about of the cover of her latest album, "All I Ever Wanted." [washingtonpost.com, 8/12/09; eonline.com, 8/12/09]
QUOTE: "I've reached the age when my children sometimes ask, 'Dad, what were things like in the olden days, when you were a teenager?' They mean the 1980s, and it's not so easy to explain. The ancient past never is. But in a pinch I can turn to The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles and Ferris Bueller's Day Off. The haircuts, the music, the clothes—it's all there, and also something of the buoyancy and confusion of being young in those days when VCRs were still a novelty, and vinyl records were not yet obsolete, when text was not a verb, and the potential of the Internet was something not even the nerds of Weird Science could intuit. John Hughes, who died on Thursday [Aug. 6] at 59, directed only eight films, of which the four I've mentioned are the best. ... Historians of cinema may be slow or begrudging in appreciating his achievement, but if auteur status is conferred by the possession of a recognizable style and set of themes, Mr. Hughes's place in the pantheon cannot be denied." —New York Times film critic A.O. Scott [nytimes.com, 8/8/09]
QUOTE: "[The Breakfast Club] offers a window into the adolescent world that's still relevant today. ... I am amazed at how a film that's almost 25 years old can still help us understand the trials and travails of teenage life. ... It's a movie that I still point to as a timely primer on teenage life and culture." —Walt Mueller, founder of the Center for Parent/Youth Understanding [learningmylines.blogspot.com, 8/7/09; cpyu.com, 8/7/09]
Call it the Julie & Julia effect. The popular film about a woman cooking her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking has spurred a run of sorts on the famous cookbook. The weekend that Julie & Julia hit theaters, Child's 48-year-old cookbook was Amazon's most popular book. Bookstores are reporting selling out of it, and interest is also high for Child's other books. Meanwhile, the book that came from the blog that inspired the film, Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously, is No. 2 on The New York Times best-selling paperback nonfiction list. [latimes.com, 8/11/09; usatoday.com, 8/12-14/09; nytimes.com, 8/14/09 c&e]
The security firm Symantec Corp., with help from OnlineFamily.Norton, has identified the Top 100 Internet searches conducted by children. No. 1: YouTube. Google and Facebook follow. Fourth on the list is "sex." "Porn" was No. 6. [Reuters, 8/12/09 stats]
All four books in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series have now spent 52 weeks among the Top 10 on USA Today's bestseller list. The Twilight books have sold 40 million copies in the United States, compared to 143 million copies of J.K. Rowling's seven-book Harry Potter saga. [usatoday.com, 8/5/09 stats]
QUOTE: "Books enlarge us by giving direct access to experiences not our own. In order for this to work, however, we need a certain type of silence, an ability to filter out the noise. Such a state is increasingly elusive in our over-networked culture, in which every rumor and mundanity is blogged and tweeted. Today, it seems it is not contemplation we seek but an odd sort of distraction masquerading as being in the know. Why? Because of the illusion that illumination is based on speed, that it is more important to react than to think, that we live in a culture in which something is attached to every bit of time." —Los Angeles Times book reviewer David L. Ulin [latimes.com, 8/9/09]
QUOTE: "Dear Twitter, My water broke." —Sara Williams, wife of Twitter creator Evan Williams, announcing to her Twitter followers that she was heading into labor. Sara continued to tweet updates during labor: "Timing contraction on an iPhone app," she wrote at one juncture. "Epidural, yes please," she said at another. [news.sky.com, 8/11/09; salon.com, 8/12/09]
QUOTE: "One might see TwitterBirthing as the ultimate proof that we live in the Age of the Overshare. And fair enough. But I still sense a difference between a personal Twitter feed and, say, under-examined confessional journalism, over-examined celebrity lives, various forms of TMI TV, all of the latter (arguably) diminish the gravitas of discourse, substitute voyeurism for storytelling." —Salon's Lynn Harris on Sara Williams' delivery room tweets [salon.com, 8/12/09]