Plan C - Does not contain scenes of extended peril
Life in plastic? It's fantastic.
You must have seen all of the Barbie film shots making the rounds. A friend of mine auditioned for the film and I only asked about it 13-15 times before they said in very careful and measured tones “Yes, working with Greta Gerwig would have been a dream come true. Yes.” With the heavy subtext being, “Please shut up.” which I received clearly, because he is a very good actor.
The fevered way in which we, and by we I mean the bored and very online, have grasped the joy of the Barbie film – well let’s be honest the outfits have – will result in utter fatigue and vicious backlash with hideous thinkpieces about Toxic Femininity or Woke Barbie Ruining Children etc. However, until then lets try and enjoy Ryan Gosling on rollerblades.
When I was a child, I absolutely adored playing Barbies. This was my Top Activity and I was incredibly fastidious about their clothing and dream house interiors. Ultimately there was no major narrative arc and the entire activity mostly involved making dresses and moving furniture around their dream houses. I actually bought clothes for them. I made clothes for them. I washed their hair. I called my favourite two - Rachel and Sarah. I think I experimentally called one Chloe for a while, but it felt too lofty and I think I have simply called her Barbie after a short time. I was realistically aspirational, Chloe is too cool.
When I went to my cousin’s house, we would play Barbies with her dolls. Hers were drawn on with biro, had shorn off hair and were often naked. I hated it. They were incoherent with no obvious favourites. I found this despicable. Actually, I still find this despicable and recently as I said goodnight to my friend’s daughter, I aligned the dolls to their correct car on my way out of her bedroom as is the correct and respectable response to car ownership.
My cousin favoured these perilous acting out plays where Barbies would be flung off wardrobe cliffs with dressing gown belts as ropes, screaming for Ken or pelted around the garden in a hot pink convertible. I loathed it but even at 5 years old I knew I had to go along with what other people liked so, I would gently fly my Barbie around near to the action and just sort of go along with it before eventually giving in and suddenly declaring that Barbie was saved now, and she wanted to go shopping. I am sure she looked forward to my visits.
Why does she want this high-stake peril? I’d think. It’s awful and unlovely? It made me feel nervous. I did not and still do not wish to entertain near death at height as a very specific rule for my life. As far as I tell only Tom Cruise and Fathers 4 Justice disagree and I am fine to be rightly excluded from their pleasure at height.
When my cousin came to my house and flung my dolls around, I would smile tightly and continue with my going-along-with-it politeness and when she left I simply reset all of our lives by mentally saying “well that never happened” and continue to stroll Sarah and Rachel around in dresses and having endless parties that required new dresses in my delusional dissociative state.
I wanted my dolls life so much that I can recall being absolutely furious to be zipped in to blue shorts while at pre-school. I figured these should surely - surely - be pink?! I trailed around after my mother doing that specific pathetic whine of the small child where the request is so nebulous and mad there is literally no sympathy to be found. I mewled along the lines of “Whhhhyyyyy? Pleeeaaaaassssee! They are HURTING meeeeeee!!!” I unzipped the shambolic blue shorts and - too fearful to actually make the stance of taking them off - I just looked pointedly and threateningly between my mother and the zip for a bit. The standoff came to a peaceful resolution when Rachel Barbie got some blue shorts with a pink bow on and a matching blue waistcoat as a sort of Summer in Hamptons tennis outfit she needed to be twirled around on my box room window sill - and like the fashion turncoat I have always been - I liked my blue shorts after that.
I remain committed to this lovely non- perilous version of life now and all I really do is buy clothes, fuss over interiors and go to endless parties specifically avoiding cliffs and speeding cars with a fondness for blue shorts.
The only major deviations from their life and mine are: I have brown hair and chunky legs. I see both of these things as failures.
C x
Good Words
I went to Paris, had some days off work and managed to read 3 books in a week. It turned out that was all that was required to to break out of my reading lull. Luckily, they were all absolute mega hits and written beautifully. Annie Lord is exceptional and captures the sluggish slowness of healing from heartbreak in all of its shame and glory.
1. Coco Mellors – Cleopatra and Frankenstein
2. Annie Lord – Notes on Heartbreak
3. Minnie Driver – Managing Expectations
The Good Words erroneously have love and romance theme this time. Sort of.
I cannot stress the joy and despair that watching Nathan For You will bring to your life if you haven’t had the joy and despair of seeing it already. He is back with a new show. It will be full of joy and despair I am certain. Anyway, I have a crush on him.
Nathan Fielder profiled for New York magazine
On Nathan for You, Fielder used his façade of bland charmlessness to get people to do and say astonishing things.
There are multiple streams of internet discourse devoted to identifying the source of his inexplicable attractiveness. Perhaps it’s not so inexplicable. Out in the world, he is witty, self-deprecating, and successful. He has a slim build, a still-boyish face, and the thick, slightly unruly salt-and-pepper hair of a grad student who just spent a month in the lab pulling consecutive all-nighters. Fielder speaks in the same flat, stilted voice he uses on the show, but in person, it’s infused with a tone of perpetual, bone-dry amusement.
…Corey’s response to Fielder’s scheme, and the crowd’s response to Corey, captures so much of what Nathan for You reveals about human nature — our willingness to do what we’re told no matter how wrong it seems, our credulous belief in heroes and tidy narratives.
Nell Frizell being very correct on the importance of a crush. I have about 7 crushes on the go at any given moment even though 5 of them are handbags currently.
The trickier question is what to do about these crushes now that I am – not to put too fine a point on it – getting married. In a few weeks’ time, I will stand up in front of a group of people and promise to love my partner, exclusively, for the rest of my life. For better or worse. Yet I know that if you were to put me in any room with any group of people for long enough, I would probably start to develop a crush on one of them. Not in an active way – I have never cheated and absolutely don’t want to. Who has the time? The energy? The willingness to listen to someone else’s work stories?
Between Ryan off The O.C and Dakota Johnson we do have to stand the NFT sceptics. Emma Specter on Love That for Her for Vogue. Anyway, I have a crush on her.
As Johnson told reporter Britt Hennemuth: “People were talking about the metaverse. It’s very serious business. And I said, ‘I have a couple of NFTs.’ And they said, ‘Oh really? What do you have?’ I said, ‘Nice fucking titties.’ Big laugh.” I’m sorry, but that is a perfect joke.
I am always obsessed with unconventional relationships and this longread from a wife that opened up her marriage strikes a fair balance on all of the whys and wherefores. From The Paris Review
Finally, I asked my husband, “Which scenario endangers us more: you sleeping with other women, or you not sleeping with other women?” I told him to think about it, assess, and render a verdict; I would do whatever gave us the best chance.
I found I could be happy for my husband in his fun. More than happy, in fact. It can be a real thrill to let your partner go out, give it fully to another woman, and then come home and look you in the eyes over that, kiss you deeply and touch you over that. It is romantic in a way that culturally underscripted moments often are.
I did and do worry, especially about the younger girls, in their twenties. Were they all right, these kids? How did they feel about being “on the side”? Occasionally I stumbled into something like outrage on their behalf, as though I were the spirited friend in their drama: “Fuck that guy!” Weren’t they being exploited? In fact, wasn’t I exploiting them, outsourcing the labor of care, pleasure, attention, affirmation to this scattered, precarious workforce? How sinister, in this light, those nights my husband and I spent scrolling through the faces of sexual supply, our ethic blatantly consumerist, collecting primary and vicarious thrills that redounded to our own marriage, strengthening our family through the efforts and maybe even the pain of others …
These women would probably smirk at my anxiety for them, feel insulted by it. After all, they were out there making choices, getting into compelling snares, pleasing themselves. What was troubling me most, I suspected, was that among the squatting archetypes I’d been discovering in myself—the wronged wife (righteous, sympathetic, a bit tiresome); the “don’t ask” wife (practical, family-oriented, nobly incurious); the mother of a girl (protective of these youngsters wasting their time on a married man)—was the complacently cucked wife, shoring up the patriarchy for her own convenience. My husband’s extramarital activity was (and is) convenient. His date nights gave me much that I had yearned for, lusted after: relief from the distraction of guilt, space and solitude, time to write.
I just want Cat Cohen to answer all of my queries on life for W Magazine
Is it ever ok to tell a bride I hate the bridesmaid dress she chose for me?
Even though I hate wedding culture (a pageant you pay to be in???) and think that part of my brain atrophied during the 14hr day in which I was a bridesmaid, I have to say no, it’s not okay. Just wear the dress. It’s one day. Famously not your day. And it’s not worth causing the bride, who you presumably care about, any stress. Put on the dress, wear a sexy shoe of your choosing, and have a cocktail or seven.
Just to give the full arc of the love experience the superlative Sharon Horgan for the NME
“I went to see Liam Gallagher play and as he was coming onstage, he came over to me and said…” Horgan recounts to NME, imitating the Oasis frontman’s distinctive Northern snarl, “‘Motherland! Fucking genius!’ And I thought: ‘What the fuck?!’ That was the last thing I expected. First of all, I never expect people to know me from Motherland, because I’m behind the scenes writing and secondly, I never thought Liam Gallagher would fit into its demographic. I always thought it would be mums in Green Park who watched it, so I absolutely fucking loved that.”
She’s currently working on a project that has been inspired by her own divorce.
Wanton Consumerism
I have this nice rooftop garden for my building and I got talking with a woman who was musing on what to wear for a showdown with her ex, the worst of the showdowns. After extensive chat we decided on a version of this gorgeous dress. Yellow in the summer is always a good idea. Worn best with the glow of a new love interest. Reformation.
What I am also buying - even more shirts - taking my shirt tally up to 4 million.
Bon Mots
