The print version hasn’t even hit the streets yet, but Lynn Hirschberg’s supremely unflattering New York Times Magazine profile of rapper M.I.A. (nee Maya Arulpragasam) is burning up the blogosphere. Yesterday, M.I.A.—stupidly? brilliantly?—threw oil on the fire by publishing Hirschberg’s personal phone number on Twitter.

You can see why the Sri Lankan-by-way-of London artist would be perturbed: Hirschberg has done a grade-A hatchet job, exposing everything that’s juvenile, contradictory, and hypocritical about M.I.A.’s whole sloppy Warholian/terrorist-chic persona. It should immediately be added to every J-school reading list, right after Janet Malcolm. (If you haven’t read it, Vulture has pulled out the 10 harshest moments, and Rob Harvilla has listed the 11 most undermine-y lines.)

The thing is, M.I.A.’s politics have always been incoherent at best. Do I really need 8,000 words to remind me of this?

This quote from Diplo—M.I.A.’s often-producer and erstwhile boyfriend—offers an interesting lens on Hirschberg’s critical M.O.: “In the end, Maya is postmodern: she can’t really make music or art that well, but she’s better than anyone at putting crazy ideas into motion. She knows how to manipulate, how to withhold, how to get what she wants.”

Isn’t this exactly the kind of thing today’s pop artists usually get praised for? Isn’t that kind of the point? But Hirschberg quotes it as some sort of damning gotcha. The way she sniffily details M.I.A.’s obsession with fashion also seems to miss the point—as if fashion undermines her art, when in fact it is her art. Reading Hirschberg’s takedown definitely tickled my shadenfreude center—Stars! They’re just as stupid as us!—but I wish she had tried to engage with M.I.A.’s work more sympathetically. Is there nothing interesting or valuable about her? Is everything to be dismissed so cavalierly? It’s not like I would have preferred a vapid, celebrity interview that took everything M.I.A. says on face value. But Hirschberg’s piece is uncharitable to the point of being critically unhelpful.

(Meanwhile, here’s a smart defense of M.I.A.’s work and aesthetics by Mike Barthel.)

Photograph of M.I.A. by Larry Busacca/Getty Images.

Tags: art, fashion, lynn hirschberg, M.I.A., new york times magazine

If you have not yet seen Sex and the City 2, you have probably heard about its outrageous climax, which takes place at a market in Abu Dhabi. Samantha is wandering around the souk in shorts and a tee-shirt, bra strap showing. She gets chased down by a man who thinks she has stolen a purse. He grabs it—it’s her own purse—and many condom packs drop out. The men stare at her, horrified. Samantha stands up and yells, “Yes! Yes! I have sex,” and comically thrusts her hips as a circle of angry, hairy men crowd around and scowl.

The encounter reminded me of a scene in another movie, also in the genre of posh-lady-traveler-seeks-adventure-in-Arab-lands. In Sheltering Sky, Debra Winger plays Kit Moresby, a pampered, creative type who comes to Morocco to wander. That movie also ends with Kit in an Arab souk, surrounded by a crowd of angry men, also outraged by her loose morals. The movies are worlds apart in many ways. But the difference between these similar scenes hinges on one critical plot twist: Kit is being pilloried because she slept with an Arab man.

Why is that important? For much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, European leisure travelers made endless romantic speculations about the “secrets of the harems,” writes Judy Mabor in Veiled Half-Truths. They filled their fantasies with erotic scenes of dark-eyed women, but kept their distance; even as they fantasized, they pitied the poor, backwards Arab women, Mabor writes. In later years, however, Westerners began to feel guilty about these one-sided Orientalist fantasies. In Muriel Spark’s The Mandelbaum Gate, Hideous Kinky, and Sheltering Sky, the Western woman sleeps with an Arab man. The experience turns the tables on the usual fantasy. Now it’s the Western woman who becomes the other, exotic and dangerous. She gets humbled as she is forced, temporarily, to live by Muslim mores. For a while, she leaves her smug cocoon of Western superiority.

In Sex and the City 2, Samantha could easily have slept with an Arab man; she sleeps with everyone else, after all. This might have helped her understand the sex appeal of the veil, and the allure of a world in which sex is not always immediately there for the taking (just as she once experienced this on the show with her tantric yoga instructor lover). But nothing like that happens. The Arab men on the show are all tea-pourers or personal shoppers or camel herders. The cute butlers who are assigned to the women at their posh hotel are off-limits because one is sweetly in love with his wife, and the other is gay. The rest of Arab mankind is a sweaty, hairy, angry mob even Samantha wouldn’t touch. To find the women a suitable man to sleep with, the movie has to dredge up a Danish architect and Aidan, Carrie’s ex-boyfriend, who mysteriously shows up at the souk. They travel 18 hours by plane for a romantic adventure with people they could have met at home in safe, superior New York.

Kit Moresby escapes from the mob, but she is forever chastened out of her louche, pampered existence. Samantha heads to the airport, huffing, “New Middle East, my ass!” Soon after, we cut to her screwing the Dane on a car as fireworks burst behind. We are, of course, supposed to be cheering for sexual liberation here. But really, the whole thing is more effective, as Moe Tkacik suggests, as a terrorist recruitment video.

Photograph of man by Salah Malkawi/Getty Images.

Tags: sex and the city 2

During this continuing era of the memoir, women have written about their personal trials through the prism of sex addiction (Susan Cheever), alcoholism (Mary Karr), and real estate (Meghan Daum). In her new book, Cakewalk, novelist and Salon editor Kate Moses writes about her life as a series of chaotic episodes stitched together by recipes. The title is misleading in both mood and meaning; Moses' childhood was, in fact, harrowing, and her early culinary obsession served as something of a desperate attempt to “redeem with sweetness those moments that left, however bitter on occasion, such a lasting taste in my mouth.”

Food in this memoir does not serve as a grand metaphor. Sweets just happen to be the organizing principle of her most vivid childhood memories, the one thing that seemed easy to understand. A frustrated artist trapped in a miserable marriage, Moses' mother used cakes and candy as a way to create a conspiracy of joy. She fed them M&Ms as she told them elaborate family stories. “Your cakes are always better than anybody’s,” Moses tells her, and her mother agrees: “You are so right.” Her father barely ever talks to his children and when he invites them to visit him at work keeps them waiting for hours. As a child she was baffled by him but recalls vividly the bag of iced animal cookies his secretary always took out of her drawer to appease.

Moses’ sensory memory is so vivid that she keeps our interest through the slow dissolution of her parents’ marriage and then her own disillusionment with her mother, until eventually, she goes years without speaking to her, although she never stops baking. I haven’t tried any yet, but the recipes, for what it’s worth, look as promising as the book itself.

Tags: Cakewalk, Kate Moses

Recommended reading for the long weekend: Jonathan Van Meter's delightful profile of Joan Rivers in this week's New York. There is a lot to admire about Joan, but I particularly liked her unwillingness to give up the spotlight or to lavish false praise on younger female comics. Van Meter says he asked her what she thought of Kathy Griffin via e-mail a few years ago. Joan wrote:

"I am her friend but also furious. ... She is the big one now. My club dates have simply vanished and gone to her. She will last as she is very driven. Like me, she wants it. But every time a gay man tells me, ‘Oh, she is just like you! I love her!’ I fucking want to strangle them. But, please God let someone give me credit. I feel so totally forgotten. The fucking New Yorker did this big piece on the genius of Rickles, who is brilliant but who hasn’t changed a line in fifteen years. Meanwhile, I am totally ‘old hat’ and ignored while in reality I could still wipe the floor with both Kathy and Sarah. Anyhow, fuck them all. Age sucks. It’s the final mountain.”

There's a documentary about Joan Rivers that is coming out next week, called Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, and Van Meter notes that there's a full-on Rivers revival afoot: She recently won the Celebrity Apprentice, she's got a show on TV Land, and she's getting great press for this documentary. While some may want to lump her in with Betty White—another famous comedian and grandmother who has been getting raves of late—what I appreciate from Joan is that she still has her old vigor and venom. No disrespect for the fantastic Ms. White, but the mass love of her performances is often tinged with condescension: That cute old lady said what? How shocking and adorable! Rivers refuses to tone down or to stop competing. According to Van Meter, Joan even has a pillow that she embroidered that says: "DON’T EXPECT PRAISE WITHOUT ENVY UNTIL YOU ARE DEAD." Gotta love it.

Photograph of Joan Rivers by Jemal Countess/Getty Images.

Tags: joan rivers, joanthan van meter, new york magazine

—The higher a woman climbs in her career, the more likely she is to have no spouse or children. And it’s not by choice. [Washington Post]

—Meg Whitman moves rightward on immigration to compete with her conservative opponent in the Republican gubernatorial primary. [Politico]

—The secret mistresses of Italian priests band together to fight the Vatican’s rule on celibacy. [Guardian]

—The House voted last night to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell,” but no changes will take effect until December, when the Pentagon releases a study about its impact on troops. [Washington Post]

—Everybody hates Sex and the City 2. Film critic A. O. Scott says that “the ugly smell of unexamined privilege hangs over this film like the smoke from cheap incense.” [New York Times]

Correction, May 29, 2010: In the original version of this post, repeal was misspelled.

Tags: we're talking about