Every now and then, in circumstances best left undisclosed, I find myself wondering “What would Zooey Deschanel wear?” The Fug Girls remind us (via slideshow, so consider yourself warned) that some of her fashion choices over the years have been neither charmingly quirky nor quirkily charming.
(See also this video, which names no names but doesn’t really have to. Via Joan of Argghh!)
It’s been a pretty decent week — I’m mostly caught up at the office, a sudden flurry of yard work at midweek didn’t actually kill me, and there were a few extra coins in the ol’ pay packet — so why not celebrate?
Reduced photos may be rebigulated at the merest click.
That which hath Palooza’d before: ZP 1, ZP 2, ZP 3, ZP 4, ZP 5, ZP 6, ZP 7, ZP 8, ZP 9, ZP 10, ZP 11, ZP 12, ZP 13, ZP 14.
“Zooey Deschanel is Twilight Sparkle.”
Hmmm…
“Dear Princess Celestia: What is your stripper name?”
I’m not seeing it. Though I appreciate the effort to push two of my smaller obsessions into a larger one.
Robert Krulwich, who reports on “science-y” things for NPR, announces the discovery of a Jennifer Aniston-specific brain cell:
A few years ago, a UCLA neurosurgeon named Itzhak Fried, while operating on patients who suffer from debilitating epileptic seizures, discovered what he now calls the “Jennifer Aniston Neuron.”
This obviously calls for a “Wait, what?”
Fried asked his patients if they wouldn’t mind doing a little exploratory science while on the operating table, and a bunch of them said yes.
So he showed them a set of photographs, and he noticed when they came to a picture of Jen, very often a particular neuron would begin to flash, multiple times. When he showed these same patients pictures of Julia Roberts or random (not famous) people, or animals, or places, the neuron was quiet. Back to Jen? Back came the flash. He found this Aniston-specific brain cell in a number of people, and he wondered, what is going on?
Then again, not everyone responds to Aniston, or refuses to respond to Roberts:
Since Fried reported his findings, other neurons have been found that flash only for Julia Roberts, or for Halle Berry, or for Kobe Bryant. It may be that certain very famous people literally occupy special places in our brains…
So when Fried showed his patients pictures of Jennifer, (or maybe if he just mentioned her name) that reference might have triggered not just one, but a cascade of neural firings. And this may be the brain’s way of storing a memory. Jennifer is not a single neuron, she’s a plural, or as MIT professor Sebastian Seung puts it, she’s “hierarchical organization.”
Perhaps I should rewrite the old Living Will to specify a desire to search for hitherto-undisclosed Deschanelization of the brain.
Despite Zooey Deschanel’s public disdain for the band, I have always been a fan of Gary Lewis and the Playboys, though in terms of what we laughingly call “authenticity,” in terms of playing on one’s own records, they fall somewhere in the general vicinity of Monkeeville, despite the fact that like the Monkees, the Playboys could actually play reasonably competently, and had been doing a live gig at Disneyland (with Lewis’ surname left off) at the time they were picked up by the Liberty label.
Producer Snuff Garrett was having none of that. He brought in members of the Wrecking Crew, top-rank L. A. session players, and singer Ron Hicklin, and anywhere the Playboys were deemed inadequate, the pros were employed. Which explains the tympani, for instance, on “This Diamond Ring.” (And maybe on the answer record, Wendy Hill’s “(Gary, Please Don’t Sell) My Diamond Ring,” which, said Dawn Eden, had “the loudest, scariest tympani I ever heard.”)
I did know that Leon Russell played on several of those Playboys sessions, especially “She’s Just My Style,” which he cowrote. (Complete credits: Al Capps, who sang the bass part; Russell; Lewis; and “Thomas Leslie,” which is almost Snuff Garrett’s real name.) I did not know, though Roger did, that this was drummer Jim Keltner’s first session. (Keltner would go on to play with three of the Beatles, albeit not simultaneously.)
Knowing that Ron Hicklin was spelling Lewis on vocals explained neatly why Lewis sounded so much like his dad on the last half of “Time Stands Still” (B-side of “Everybody Loves a Clown”) and nowhere else. What I never did quite figure out was how it was that neither of my LP copies of “Sure Gonna Miss Her” sounded anything like the 45. Steve Kolanjian, who wrote the heavily-detailed liner notes for the Legendary Masters compilation in 2000, didn’t find out why either.
After “Where Will the Words Come From”, Lewis was drafted and packed off to ‘Nam; his last big hit was a cover of “Sealed With a Kiss,” which barely scraped into the Top 20. After that, he opened a music store, and after a few years eventually settled comfortably into the nostalgia circuit.
Disclosure: One of these songs is uncomfortably close to my heart. No fair guessing which one.
As I may have mentioned before, I used to date someone four foot nine, maybe a shade taller than that but well within the qualifications for the dwarves’ union. Then again, since I’m only a hair above six feet, and not much hair at that, there was only a 15-inch difference between us: noticeable, but not noteworthy.
Now this would be noteworthy:
Behold Zooey Deschanel, five foot six, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, five foot twenty-six. Kareem uploaded this picture himself yesterday; Zooey noted that she was wearing four-inch heels at the time.
And you know, he looks pretty darn good for almost 65, if you ask me.
I know, I know; these mythical creatures aren’t supposed to exist except on celluloid, generally played by either (1) Zooey Deschanel or (2) someone who looks vaguely like Zooey Deschanel; one generally tends to lump them together with other presumed-nonexistent creatures such as Rodents of Unusual Size.
Except for the minor detail that Andrea Greb knows one (an MPDG, not an ROUS):
N is, without a doubt, the happiest person I’ve ever met. She’s always smiling, always laughing and everything is always “AMAZING!” Sometimes I feel like she really shouldn’t exist, because she does seem to be the embodiment of a male fantasy — the pretty, socially functional computer programmer. As someone who went to an engineering school, I can tell you that cute girls who code are a rarity, and cute girls who code and like sunlight and have a consistently positive attitude about life? N’s the only one I’ve ever met.
To be a true MPDG, things must happen to her that simply don’t happen to other people. Check:
The first time she went to a concert by her favorite singer, the night ended with him singing her favorite song to her at the afterparty. The next time he was in town, he got her tickets to his sold out show, she got up on the stage and danced and he invited her back to his hotel, but she didn’t go, because not only is she cool, she is classy. She’s the kind of person that not only takes the bus (in southern California, no one uses public transportation!) but will meet a guy on the bus and manage to find and friend him on Facebook without ever talking to him, and when she finally does talk to him, he’ll ask her out and they’ll date for six months. She once met a guy from Craigslist to sell him a ticket to an event, realized after he had walked away that he was really cute and actually sprinted down the street after him to ask him out.
This sort of woman would take five, ten years off my life, I just know it. And I’d probably thank her for it.
Bonus punchline: Greb’s article appears on a site co-owned by Zooey Deschanel.
Last time we had a Zooeypalooza it was my birthday. Today it’s her birthday. (She’s mumbly-hum years old.)
Click ye, and thou shalt embiggen.
Previous Paloozas: ZP 1, ZP 2, ZP 3, ZP 4, ZP 5, ZP 6, ZP 7, ZP 8, ZP 9, ZP 10, ZP 11, ZP 12, ZP 13.
And if that isn’t enough, here’s Life’s gallery of ZD at her cutest. (Via Jeff Brokaw.)
I am, of course, distraught at the collapse of the marriage of Ben Gibbard and Zooey Deschanel, but judging from her disclosure sheets, she’s not going to be hurting financially:
- Zooey — who stars in New Girl — makes an average of $95,000 a month
- Her expenses average $22,550 a month
- She has 3 credit cards … AmEx, Visa and Mastercard, all of which have a 0 balance.
- She has $1,578,000 in the bank
- Zooey has an additional $1,645,000 in stocks, bonds, etc.
- Zooey has real and personal property valued at $693,300
Those monthly expenses are detailed at that second link.
Wilkins Micawber was not available for comment, but I have reason to believe he would approve.
(Via this Bill Peschel tweet.)
A seriously wonderful headline: Samoa Skips Over Last Friday of 2011, Rebecca Black Not Pleased. I have to admit, it was funny when she tweeted that.
And somewhere between home and 30 Rock — she appeared on NBC’s Today Show on, of all days, Thursday — she got to meet Zooey Deschanel. If you thought for a moment there was a chance I wasn’t going to notice something like that, you haven’t been reading this stuff for very long. I have no idea what brought those two together, but obviously it did happen, despite the total absence of, um, pictures.
As for “Friday,” if you couldn’t stand the original, perhaps you’ll like the remake:
“When we re-recorded it, I talked to my producer and said, ‘I want this to sound like we’re on the beach with friends, someone’s got a guitar, there’s drums’ … I love it.”
Wait, what? Oh, don’t be silly. All beaches have drums, don’t they?
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.
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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.
My Misspent Youth: Essays by Meghan Daum
