The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Today on Nerve's TV blog: Dance, Hipster, Dance! Plus: our latest NewsCrush — and why one army brat is breaking up with Army Wives.
Brenda Brathwaite, a
thirty-nine-year-old mother of three, was the star of our recent video games
issue. After one of our writers interviewed her at a women's gaming convention, we invited
the twenty-three-year veteran of the industry to be on our VoiceBox panel, where she predicted the online-erotic-games market was the future of internet
dating. (You can see more on her blog.) In her own designs, she's working to make interpersonal
relationships more realistic. In a few
years, if you can go on a great date and have satisfying sex all in the context
of a video game, odds are you'll have her to thank. — AC
Unfortunately, Viola Davis hasn't been doing much of anything sexy lately;
instead, she's been relegated to roles like "Grandma" in the latest 50 Cent film.
But forty-year-old Davis is one of our great underappreciated actresses, her
screen presence so powerful that other actors are left gripping the scenery. Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven is a crash course in
Davis' talent: she has nearly no lines and shares all her screen time with
Julianne Moore, yet her performance is so nuanced that
the maid becomes one of the film's most crucial characters. You can catch
her in near-constant TV appearances, but we're holding our breath for the
upcoming All Fall Down in hopes that her top billing gives her the screen
time she deserves. — GW
The Bonobo ape is the most peaceful primate on the planet. Instead of making war to settle disagreements, these polysexual animals have sex — and lots of it — about once every ninety minutes, and not just in pairs. Dr. Frans B. M. de Waal, whom we interviewed for our bisexuality issue, described a Bonobo orgy as "a free-for-all," and explained that Bonobos use sex as a social lubricant to increase cohesion within the group. If only that's what Bush had in mind when he said he was a uniter, not a divider... — Sarah Harrison
Alice Wu's film Saving Face
depicts two Chinese-American women falling in love inside the
lesbian-unfriendly community of Flushing, New York. In the process, it explores the balance
between staying true to oneself and respecting family tradition. In an interview with Nerve, Wu discussed her role as groundbreaker. "As the
Chinese-American lesbian poster child, if in fact that's what I am, maybe
I'm helping people change people's minds a little bit," she says. Looks like she's really broken through: Chinese
communities have embraced the movie, and even friends of Wu's parents love it. — SH
Chances are, when you heard that Battlestar Galactica was being remade for TV, images of Star Trek
and sci-fi conventions were enough to chill your heart and loins. That is too bad, because BSG is
one of the best dramas on TV. The show's main attraction is
Starbuck, the best pilot in the Battlestar fleet, who combines hot blond and tough dude with aplomb.
Men want her, everyone respects her, she shoots down Cylon enemies with ease, she plays a mean
poker game. And she's got great
tits. — SH
Convincing a blue-chip gallery to show your thirty-two-part, feature-length
video is a feat in itself. When each of those chapters is, according to the
gallery's press release, "a live-action recreation of a photograph of an
'extra-curricular' activity found in a high school yearbook", you've made
Nerve's New Radicals list.
In Mike Kelley's "Day is Done" (shown at NYC's Gagosian last December), a witch
transformed a fat Catholic girl into a skinny Jewish girl, while skinhead
punks in Nazi uniforms rapped about the virtues of having sex with fat
Catholic girls. Oh yeah — did we mention it was also a musical? — RH
Elyse Sewell appeared on America's Next Top Model in 2003 and instantly inspired a love-hate relationship with viewers. A pre-med student, she negotiated Paris in fluent French and chided the other girls for being dumb. She was that essential component of successful reality TV: the resident bitch. In the elimination round, when Tyra Banks asked her if she still thought modeling was purely about physical beauty, Sewell calmly elucidated the effects of internal chemicals and hormones on facial structure. She was swiftly whisked away. Click here to read the interview.
The convergence of landscape and portraiture is hot in the photo world right
now, as are carefully staged scenes that draw from fashion and film. This
work is beautiful, but it's everywhere, and it's rapidly approaching boring.
That's why we love photographers like Zackary Drucker.
A recent graduate of SVA, Drucker takes the contemporary c-print formula and
twists it. Girls stare listlessly into a wheat field, a tense couple shaves
before a mirror, a woman poses in hair rollers and discontent. Every shot
features Drucker in performative drag. And he looks damn good. — RH
Fighting for gay marriage is an uphill battle, as citizens of the United
States know all too well; last year, eleven states passed laws
defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman. So it was
downright shocking when Spain, where eighty percent of residents consider themselves
Catholic, legalized gay marriage last July. (It's the third
country to do so, along with Canada, Belgium and the
Netherlands; Britain recently passed a law allowing gays to form civil
partnerships that confer all the rights of marriage.) As expected, the
Vatican and other Catholic groups freaked. In a
recent speech the Pope called the defense of traditional marriage "not a
peculiarity of Catholic moral teaching but part of an elementary truth
regarding our common humanity." Still, according to a poll released last
May, more than sixty percent of the Spanish public supports gay marriage. Now that sounds like common humanity to us. — SH
Everyone's got a star crush, and a few years ago I fell hard for a schoolgirl-uniformed Britney
Spears. Those days are long gone. My sweetheart got married, fat and babied.
She padded into gas-station bathrooms in bare feet, wore a pink velour tracksuit at her wedding and let the paparazzi document her acne and bad
hair extensions. But she couldn't give less of a shit what you think. She
keeps going out, even when the tabs beg her to divorce K-Fed and blogs are
dis her fugly style. She shops at Forever 21 and eats Cheetos not because
she's trying to prove a point, but because that's just how she rolls. And I sort of love her for it. — SH
