So I asked myself what I wanted for my birthday, and after many, many microseconds of narrowing it down, I figured I’d knock out a nice, fresh, extra-large (10 pictures!) Zooeypalooza.
Embiggening requires only the merest click.
Paloozas aforethought: ZP 1, ZP 2, ZP 3, ZP 4, ZP 5, ZP 6, ZP 7, ZP 8, ZP 9, ZP 10, ZP 11, ZP 12.
This is most likely not the result of my shooting off my mouth, but I am disturbed by it anyway:
It is a sad day in indie town: Actress/singer/New Girl Zooey Deschanel, 31, and Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard, 35, have announced the end of their two-year marriage.
The duo’s split was confirmed to US Weekly by a rep; a source says that the parting is amicable, and involves no third parties.
(Title inverted from here.)
Celebrity profiles are generally pretty godawful, especially if you have no particular interest in the celebrity being profiled.
That said, Zooey Deschanel disclosed “25 Things You Don’t Know About Me” to somebody at Us, and one of them simply must be mentioned here: “I know This is Spinal Tap by heart.”
Not incidentally, this was number 11.
Zooey Deschanel takes on the National Anthem:
Allow me, please, a Marv Albert-ian YES!
(Since it’s their actual embed code, I think we can safely assume that this presentation has the express written consent of Major League Baseball.)
Kristi Harrison at Cracked.com (what, them again?) apparently suffers from Why Do Guys Fall For This Type When I’m Right Here? Syndrome.
And by This Type, she means, well, this type:
The plaint:
If “cute” was a commodity Zooey would be the Federal Reserve. Scratch that. She’d be China and the rest of us girls would be used food stamps that once doubled as Clue scorecards. THANK GOD cute is not a commodity is what I’m saying.
Do you remember back when Friends was big, and every girl you knew had Rachel’s haircut? (AC)ZD is the Rachel of girl people right now. If you’re of the female persuasion and you don’t want to dress like syphilis in a tube top, this is who you’re probably getting some fashion cues from. And if you’re a guy, a reasonable facsimile of this girl is who you’re trying to meet, not to have dirty, filthy sex with, but to marry and make babies and dirty, filthy noodle casseroles with.
But you never, ever will. Everevereverever. You have a better chance of meeting a meatball lady and making SpaghettiO babies with her. Here’s why.
There follow various minor issues, but the real one seems to be this:
What made the nerds of the world ever think she was one of them?
At what point did ordinary guys who were maaaaaybe a little too into video games or anime or not-sports look at a girl with perfect skin, a tiny little figure, a face that’s pretty by every measurable standard we’ve got and say, “Yeah, that’s attainable.”
Now answer me this: What is the color of the sky on that hitherto-undetected planet on which Ben Gibbard, front man of the indie band Death Cab for Cutie, who grew up in the midst of the Pacific Northwest grunge explosion in the Nineties, who has a college degree in Environmental Chemistry fercrissake, is not a nerd? And we know what the Z-girl thinks of him: she married him. For all I know, they’re making filthy casseroles together at this very moment, while Kristin drops another $7 at Panera and sobs into her tea.
(Not surprisingly, a lot of people sent me this link, though Dave was first.)
Zooey Deschanel flies with “The Wayward Wind”:
(Snipped from HelloGiggles, in which ZD is a partner.)
Scott Collins of the Los Angeles Times ShowTracker blog has the numbers:
New Girl, which has bespectacled alt-goddess Deschanel playing a geeky young woman who moves in with three men after she catches her live-in boyfriend cheating, opened to a relatively modest 10.1 million total viewers, according to early data from Nielsen.
But it was among young adults that New Girl really shone. The comedy was, impressively, the top-rated program of the night among adults ages 18 to 49, the demographic most sought by advertisers. New Girl notched a 4.7 rating/12 share, waltzing past its rivals in the 9 p.m. half-hour.
As a resident of the Flyover Zone, I am required to add: “8 p.m. Central.”
Fishersville Mike has a theory on why this show is successful:
We know it’s not reality-based. Cute girls just drop in on a group of guys and bring their friends. All. The. Time. Big Bang Theory started with one girl and now has one for every nerdy guy. Zooey’s new show has Hannah Simone as the first of many potential models to visit the apartment.
Incidentally, Hello Giggles, partly owned by ZD, is running recaps of the show every Wednesday with Fox’s blessing. And Zooey herself sent up this picture (no, not to me specifically), which is apparently a still from episode three:
“Still,” incidentally, also works as an instruction to one’s heart.
My absolute first reference to Fox’s comedy New Girl, from the end of May:
I’ve seen the promo, and it bothers me for some reason. And what’s with this “eccentric charmer” business? … It’s not like anyone expects Zooey Deschanel to play Margaret Thatcher.
And if I’m bothered, Hank Stuever is downright incensed:
Deschanel plays the same character that has endeared her to a specific kind of mainstream/alternative market. She capitalizes on a lot of tee-hee and emotional fragility, with eyes as big as a kitsch painting of wildlife. It’s that whole flowery sundress, nerdy horn-rims, bicycle basket, put-a-bird-on-it tweeness of the forever child. Also, she records indie rock albums and makes a point of singing a lot in the new show — tra-la-la-la — which only makes it more awful.
Regarding that latter: they should have hired ZD’s partner in She & Him, M. Ward, whose twee filter is surprisingly effective. (And oh, here’s a bicycle basket.)
When her character, Jess, answers an ad seeking a roommate in a houseful of bachelors, I started looking up the ages of the actors playing the characters: Although they are bestowed with lives and situations resembling 23-year-olds, their average age tops 30.
Well, of course. The 23-year-olds are all playing high-school students.
Maybe she should play Margaret Thatcher next time around. At least it would be more of a stretch.
(Suggested by Nancy Friedman. The article, I mean.)
Addendum: Smitty suggests a duet with Katy Perry. Hey, if it works for Rebecca Black…
Charles Pergiel is happy to quote a tweet by Jess Day, the character played by Zooey Deschanel in the Fox comedy New Girl, as follows:
If you get a memory foam mattress, make sure you sleep really comfortably that first night. Otherwise, it’ll never let you forget.
Now this line (which you may remember from here) was attributed to the character, and although it does sound relatively Zooeyesque — spellcheck wants “picaresque” or “romanesque” or even “statuesque” instead — we have no way of knowing who actually came up with it, which prompts this question from Mr. Pergiel:
[S]omeone wrote this line for someone else to say in a TV show, so it was said by an imaginary character. Does that mean the words are imaginary too?
Um, no. I just read them out loud, so now they officially exist.
For comparison, here’s the opening paragraph of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:
You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly — Tom’s Aunt Polly, she is — and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before.
Huck, of course, was an imaginary character, though we can presume that this paragraph was written by Mr. Mark Twain in a flurry of truthfulness.
Stipulating for the moment that no one connected with New Girl is likely to be considered alongside Twain in the Pantheon of American Writers, I ask: would Jess Day’s one-line tweets be less “imaginary” if we knew exactly who wrote them?
And just to make this a little more meta: There is a @realhuckfinn Twitter account, though its purpose is to deflect attention away from expurgated versions of the original Adventures and toward the Genuine Article, as written by Mr. Mark Twain, who told the truth. Mainly.
I have yet to watch New Girl, the Fox comedy starring Zooey Deschanel, at least partially because the official premiere is not until next week. On the other hand, Z’s character Jess Day has been given a Twitter account, and I’m a sucker for one-liners, so:
If you get a memory foam mattress, make sure you sleep really comfortably that first night. Otherwise, it’ll never let you forget.
You may be sure that Zooey is doing her best to promote the series for the network:
I can just see her walking into a boutique asking “What do you have today that’s adorably goofy?” One of these days she’s going to show up in a dirndl, just to make everyone’s eyes bug out.
Okay, not every blessing, but this works for me:
(From meme-meme.org. Previous my-don’t-they-look-alike coverage here.)
Last month, I grumbled ever-so-slightly about one of Zooey Deschanel’s outfits: “[T]he dark tights really don’t work here, though I’m starting to believe she had them tattooed on.”
I am a year round tights girl. I will wear tights even if it’s 100 degrees outside. Tights are my safety blanket. In them, I know that I can do a sweet row of cartwheels anytime, anywhere without anyone catching a glimpse of my knickers.
From almost anyone else, this might sound fatuous.
Then again, it’s not like they’re perfect or anything:
My biggest complaint with tights is that they do not accommodate skinny-ankled people like myself. I spoke with Hello Giggles BFF and designer Kate Harmer — a fellow tights lover and skinny ankle-haver — about this recently. We are tired of being judged for having bunchy tights. We don’t want to be held accountable for our lazy stockings.
I duly combed through the archives for a shot of ZD not wearing dark tights, and in no time at all came up with this one, taken at the BAFTA Brits to Watch event earlier this month:
And you know, as Hillary Clinton never said, there are worse things in life than having skinny ankles.
Sunday, Los Angeles Times columnist Patt Morrison complained about the seeming lack of civic spirit exhibited by Zooey Deschanel at BAFTA’s Brits to Watch event on Saturday:
To my friend and former Times colleague Claudia Puig, now the USA Today critic and film writer, Ms. Deschanel worried aloud that the neighborhood around the fabulously restored Belasco Theatre might look shabby to the regal couple. “I just don’t want them to see the worst of L.A.,” said Deschanel.
Excuse me? Downtown, the worst of L.A.?
What, Ms. Deschanel, you don’t have any homeless people there near your Westside home? Or does that not count, because they’re on the beach, not the sidewalks?
Apart from the fact that ZD doesn’t live on the Westside — well, let her speak for herself:
[T]he quote from USA TODAY that you used as the foundation of your piece was taken completely out of context. I NEVER said that Downtown LA was “the worst of LA”. I did make a reference to a parking lot adjacent to the theater that had a lot of trash in it in an attempt to be humorous. I simply said, “It’s funny they brought royalty here, there is a parking lot with trash around the corner.” It wasn’t an opinion. It was true. There was indeed a parking lot with trash around the corner. I thought that the juxtaposition of British Royalty and trash was amusing in a high-brow + low-brow sort of way, but I never said that I, personally, didn’t like downtown, the Royals, or even trash.
Maybe she thought that one particular location in downtown L.A. was the worst: say, around First and Spring.
Ostensibly, this is Zooey with her Self cover, but truth be told, the cover photo really doesn’t look like her. It’s like they flattened her cheekbones out or something:
That, at least, can be blamed on Photoshop. This, maybe not so much:
I’m calling it right now: bun in the oven. Don’t laugh, WE’VE BEEN RIGHT BEFORE.
The dress? Like the print, wish it had straps or something. And the dark tights really don’t work here, though I’m starting to believe she had them tattooed on.
So I’m reading HelloGiggles, because — well, just because, okay? — and this startling revelation comes across the screen:
You are never too old to own Hello Kitty products. I have a Hello Kitty credit card, Zooey has a Hello Kitty sewing machine and Molly has Hello Kitty earphones.
Now how hard is it to find a Hello Kitty sewing machine? For the below-average Googler, it takes all of 500 milliseconds:
This obviously isn’t a Bernina-class machine — I used to own something like this, in a mundane Nineties PC beige — but what the heck. (I actually did some minor stitchery on a Bernina, back when I was married; she got custody of the machine, which cost nearly as much as the children.) I will not ask when Zooey has time to sew.
Entertainment Weekly’s TV critic Ken Tucker picks Fox’s New Girl as the most promising new show this fall, saying this:
Stars Zooey Deschanel as an eccentric charmer who moves in with three guys after a bad breakup. Bottom line: if you like Zooey, you’ll like this.
I dunno. I’ve seen the promo, and it bothers me for some reason. And what’s with this “eccentric charmer” business? Come on, Ken. It’s not like anyone expects Zooey Deschanel to play Margaret Thatcher.
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Over the weekend I relayed a plaint by Zooey Deschanel about how no matter what her starting point, the iTunes Genius would send her several songs by Gary Lewis and the Playboys.
This suggested an experiment. I duly cranked up iTunes and instructed Genius to match ZD’s cover of Nancy Sinatra’s “Sugar Town,” an iTunes bonus track from the soundtrack of (500) Days of Summer. Genius declined for some reason.
Okay, fine. Be that way. I went back to that same soundtrack and ordered up the She & Him cover of the Smiths’ “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want.” This time Genius actually coughed up some tracks:
The Smiths, “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out”
Feist, “Mushaboom”
Jem, “Yellow”
Vampire Weekend, “Holiday”
Ben Folds featuring Regina Spektor, “You Don’t Know Me”
She & Him, “Sentimental Heart”
Neko Case, “People Got a Lotta Nerve”
Phoenix, “Lasso”
Yeah Yeah Yeahs, “Zero”
The xx, “Heart Skipped a Beat”
Of Montreal, “Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games”
She & Him, “Thieves”
Feist, “I Feel It All”
The Raveonettes, “Dead Sound”
Death Cab for Cutie, “Lovesong”
Belle and Sebastian, “The Boy with the Arab Strap”
Vampire Weekend, “Oxford Comma”
Neutral Milk Hotel, “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”
Yeah Yeah Yeahs, “Dull Life”
Phoenix, “Lisztomania”
She & Him, “You Really Got a Hold on Me”
The xx, “Basic Space”
Florence + The Machine, “Cosmic Love”
Death Cab for Cutie, “Grapevine Fires”
The first two tracks are indeed from that same soundtrack. The first Death Cab track is a remake of the Cure’s “Lovesong”; Jem’s “Yellow” covers Coldplay’s. (And of course, the head Death Cabbie is Ben Gibbard, who is married to Zooey Deschanel.)
Not a speck of Gary Lewis, though. And who would have thought anything would match up with Neutral Milk Hotel?
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I have reported a couple of times about my experiences with the iTunes Genius function, which takes any given song and then generates a playlist of putatively-similar stuff. (See, for instance, what came up from Tim Curry’s “I Do the Rock.”)
Zooey Deschanel eschews this bit of artificial intelligence, and is happy to explain why:
Aside from the fact that I ENJOY making mixes, here is my practical answer: because “GENIUS” has placed, not one, but TWO gary lewis and the playboys songs on EVERY mix I have ever attempted to make using this feature — I mean gary lewis and the playboys? really? REALLY? These guys made like, one record; I have, literally, thousands of records in my itunes and somehow jerry lewis’ son’s band makes it twice onto every attempted “genius” mix. I am convinced, no matter what, “genius” will find a way to inexplicably include “just my style” and “everybody loves a clown” into all its endeavors; and that is, frankly, unacceptable.
I toyed with the idea of sending her Al Kooper’s version of “This Diamond Ring,” recast as an R&B ballad — which apparently was what Kooper, who co-wrote it, had in mind for the song originally, judging by the Jimmy Radcliffe demo, and the Sammy Ambrose single released about a week before Gary’s version — but it occurred to me that she probably already had it.
