My Parents Are Awesome

...because they filled out my cherished Cabbage Patch Kid adoption certificate with the ridiculous-sowhatwhocares-she-can't-read-anyway names "Bill Stuff" and "Sweaty Betty." Can't blame 'em for thinking I'd manage to destroy the paper long before I'd master phonics, I suppose.

Bravo Appreciates Art Like It's 1984!

While I never expected Bravo's newest competition reality show, Work of Art, to be anything more than an Andy Cohen-approved showcase of lame pop culture references and unfounded smugness, I was brought to uproarious laughter last week when resident sorority girl-cum-artisté Jaclyn found herself swimming in a sea of praise from the hackneyed committee of NYC art wonk judges. In her absurdly cliched collection of photographs of anonymous men looking at her bronzed, tumid fun sacks as they walked past her on the street, the judges found an 'impressive' and 'successful' effort to subvert the so-called 'male gaze'--a chestnut of an idea about as interesting and revolutionary to artists and intellectuals as Myspace is to teenagers. Perhaps next week she will subvert capitalism by setting fire to dollar bills taped to an Audi? Viva la revolucion, Bravo.

(Please find below selections from my current fine art wishlist ~ in case you're wondering what it takes, creatively, to please an old crank like me.)

When Your "Personal Massager" Was Your Doctor

We read hundreds of books during graduate school, but none stuck with us quite as much as Rachel Maines' The Technology of Orgasm: 'Hysteria,' the Vibrator and Women's Sexual Satisfaction (2001). We recently flipped through it again, and had a nice chuckle at the thought of 'hysterical' (read: sexually unsatisfied) women achieving great 'relief' from physician-administered 'vibration treatment.' As Maines details, physicians didn't particularly like to offer this very popular therapy (knowing, presumably, the very carnal source of their patients' relief), so it was with much joy that they began recommending handheld 'personal massagers' upon their appearance in the early 1910s. Below are two images and an excerpt from a 1908 physician's manual on vibration therapy, or what Maines cheekily calls 'the job nobody wanted.'

Egregious Mad Men History Gaffe

Whoops!: In season 1, episode 6, Joan implies to Peggy that she need not personally thank Don for her new copywriting gig by motioning to her own comely face and remarking, "You know what they say, the medium is the message." A clever reference, for sure, but rather unfortunately anachronistic; they didn't start saying this until four years later, after it was coined by Marshall McLuhan in his renowned 1964 book Understanding Media.

(At last, our advanced degree in American media and culture pays off. Makes the tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt totally worth it. Yep.)

Fashionably Narcissistic

At first glance, I thought these clever photo collages by Felice Fawn were actual screen-printed garments. Alas, they are not. Seems you'll still need to go to the county fair to get your vaguely gang-related custom airbrush clothing.

Helmets & Ringlets (Or, "The Future")

In 1939, Life asked Hollywood imagineers to dream up "The Girl of Tomorrow." Quite predictably (the future, after all, always looks the same), they envisioned us wearing "wire eyelashes," "indelible lipstick that lasts two weeks" and tight ringlet hairstyles protected by bulbous celluloid helmets. Instead, of course, we're injecting sausage poison into our frown lines, gluing synthetic hair to our scalps and sewing sacs of salt water into our bosoms--a reality so grotesquely unimaginable, I'm not surprised they missed the mark back in '39.