Best Buy’s Geek Squad jumps on ‘Sex’ fever

Posted by Caroline McCarthy

The movie spinoff of Sex and the City hits theaters Friday, and if the estrogen-fueled near-rioting at its New York premiere is any indicator, it’ll be a cinematic event of such shriekingly girly proportions that the average straight man is bound to run and hide.

But Geek Squad, the electronics help service owned by Best Buy, saw it as a potential marketing opportunity. I got an e-mail pitch in my inbox on Thursday explaining a gimmick that the company’s pulling in a few cities geared toward men who have been dragged to the theaters for Sex and the City by wives, girlfriends, moms, co-workers, and other female tormenters.

“Not even the Geneva Convention can save us from the torture about to hit screens tomorrow,” the release read. “Sure, Sex and the City will be adored by fanatic females that sip cosmos, adorn Manolos and look for their Mr. Big to get them out of credit card debt, but what about the unfortunate men that get dragged to this film?”

Consequently, Geek Squad “agents” will be stationed at select megaplexes in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles to hand out promotional packets containing excuses for maneuvering one’s way out of the movie at the last minute, along with quarters for use at the nearest video game arcade. The message: Look, Geek Squad won’t just fix your computer, it’ll fix your sense of masculinity!

Cute. But here’s my advice to the men of the world: If your significant other is making you go see this pink-and-fluffy pastiche, grow a backbone and say no. Unless you forced her to go see 300 with you. Then you’re obliged.

Smoove Is Waiting

BY SMOOVE B
LOVE MAN

APRIL 2, 2008 | ISSUE 44•14

Girl, there comes a time when even a strong, well-dressed man must admit defeat.

It has been a long time since we broke up and you left me standing in the rain outside of your condo. As I walked home that evening, it never would have crossed my mind that four years from now you would not have returned to me, that you would have nearly gotten married, that you would not even receive one of my phone calls. Or my letters, text messages, faxes, or instant messages.

Four years ago this would have been inconceivable that you, my one true girl, could have stayed away from me for this long. Do you not remember how it once was? We were like two love prospectors who discovered richer and richer veins of pure ecstasy. We would bump and grind in the dimly lit tunnels as shining white donkeys would carry wagons of our love to be washed off and then smelted down into fine pieces of jewelry, which I would place on your naked chocolate body while you slept. When you awoke, we would freak again.

How could a love this sexy end? After many long nights in my round circular bed wondering, and long days looking at myself in my large oval mirror, I have come to the realization that we may never do the nasty again.

Damn.

I just wanted to use this opportunity to say that no matter what happens in my life or what happens I will be here, waiting for you. Even if I am married, living in the suburbs with three children, if you were to send me a note saying “Let’s give it another chance” I would immediately abandon my life, rent out my old penthouse apartment, take my clothes out of storage, and immediately start creating a sumptuous dinner or breakfast for me to feed you, depending on the time of the day it was. That is what you mean to me.

I would, at this point, like to ask any women that I am currently dating to stop reading this column.

So, girl, if you doubt that I no longer love you, I ask you to remove that doubt, for this love is deep. Too deep to fade by the mere passage of time. If you worry about how you have treated me in the past, which, I think we both can admit, was cold, I would say that having you back in my arms was worth the pain and torment I have endured by your absence. If you worry that we will no longer be physically compatible, that somehow we will no longer be able to light the fuse of the atom bomb that is our sexuality, I have to say, you know that not to be true.

While a small sliver of hope will always remain inside of me, Smoove has come to the hard understanding that you are not coming back to me. It is like a part of Smoove has died and, for this part, he has begun to grieve. I am not certain of which stage of the mourning process it is that one begins making lists, but Smoove has begun making them. I now present to you Smoove’s Happiest Memories Of When We Were Together:

#5: That time I broke you off nasty outside of that club.

#4: Making love until the dawn on Christmas morning.

#3: The night you invited your friend Cherise into our bedroom and I then hand-fed both of you the succulent berries before getting freaky with both of you in my whirlpool.

#2: The many nights you rode my pony until I couldn’t take it anymore.

#1: Waking up before you, and just holding you in my arms until you woke up and then hitting you doggy-style until you lost your mind.

That is only one list of many. I have many complex emotions to work though. And while my hair remains impeccable and my clothes are fresh, the feelings that lie beneath Smoove’s surface roil like a volcano waiting for you to calm the tempest by saying those three little words; “I need you.” If you were to add the words “now” or “right here on the floor” I would have no problem with that.

Even if you are not interested in once again contacting Smoove, arranging a time to meet, getting picked up in fine white automobile, dancing all night at a popular nightspot, enjoying a late dinner before being loved so hard and long you will think your heart may explode from pure 100 percent uncut pleasure, I will accept this. It has taken Smoove a long time and many heart-to-heart talks with my main man, Darnell, but I have come to grips with the situation.

What Smoove would like you to understand is this: No matter where you are or who you are with, there is a man who smells of exotic lotions who loves you and wants you to be happy. And if you are ever need another taste, Smoove will always be here, ready to break you off some.

Smoove out.

It’s Not You, It’s Your Books

by RACHEL DONADIO

Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend. She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!”

We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility. These days, thanks to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, listing your favorite books and authors is a crucial, if risky, part of self-branding. When it comes to online dating, even casual references can turn into deal breakers. Sussing out a date’s taste in books is “actually a pretty good way — as a sort of first pass — of getting a sense of someone,” said Anna Fels, a Manhattan psychiatrist and the author of “Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives.” “It’s a bit of a Rorschach test.” To Fels (who happens to be married to the literary publisher and writer James Atlas), reading habits can be a rough indicator of other qualities. “It tells something about … their level of intellectual curiosity, what their style is,” Fels said. “It speaks to class, educational level.”

Pity the would-be Romeo who earnestly confesses middlebrow tastes: sometimes, it’s the Howard Roark problem as much as the Pushkin one. “I did have to break up with one guy because he was very keen on Ayn Rand,” said Laura Miller, a book critic for Salon. “He was sweet and incredibly decent despite all the grandiosely heartless ‘philosophy’ he espoused, but it wasn’t even the ideology that did it. I just thought Rand was a hilariously bad writer, and past a certain point I couldn’t hide my amusement.” (Members of theatlasphere.com, a dating and fan site for devotees of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead,” might disagree.)

Judy Heiblum, a literary agent at Sterling Lord Literistic, shudders at the memory of some attempted date-talk about Robert Pirsig’s 1974 cult classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” beloved of searching young men. “When a guy tells me it changed his life, I wish he’d saved us both the embarrassment,” Heiblum said, adding that “life-changing experiences” are a “tedious conversational topic at best.”

Let’s face it — this may be a gender issue. Brainy women are probably more sensitive to literary deal breakers than are brainy men. (Rare is the guy who’d throw a pretty girl out of bed for revealing her imperfect taste in books.) After all, women read more, especially when it comes to fiction. “It’s really great if you find a guy that reads, period,” said Beverly West, an author of “Bibliotherapy: The Girl’s Guide to Books for Every Phase of Our Lives.” Jessa Crispin, a blogger at the literary site Bookslut.com, agrees. “Most of my friends and men in my life are nonreaders,” she said, but “now that you mention it, if I went over to a man’s house and there were those books about life’s lessons learned from dogs, I would probably keep my clothes on.”

Still, to some reading men, literary taste does matter. “I’ve broken up with girls saying, ‘She doesn’t read, we had nothing to talk about,’” said Christian Lorentzen, an editor at Harper’s. Lorentzen recalls giving one girlfriend Nabokov’s “Ada” — since it’s “funny and long and very heterosexual, even though I guess incest is at its core.” The relationship didn’t last, but now, he added, “I think it’s on her Friendster profile as her favorite book.”

James Collins, whose new novel, “Beginner’s Greek,” is about a man who falls for a woman he sees reading “The Magic Mountain” on a plane, recalled that after college, he was “infatuated” with a woman who had a copy of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” on her bedside table. “I basically knew nothing about Kundera, but I remember thinking, ‘Uh-oh; trendy, bogus metaphysics, sex involving a bowler hat,’ and I never did think about the person the same way (and nothing ever happened),” he wrote in an e-mail message. “I know there were occasions when I just wrote people off completely because of what they were reading long before it ever got near the point of falling in or out of love: Baudrillard (way too pretentious), John Irving (way too middlebrow), Virginia Woolf (way too Virginia Woolf).” Come to think of it, Collins added, “I do know people who almost broke up” over “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen: “‘Overrated!’ ‘Brilliant!’ ‘Overrated!’ ‘Brilliant!’”

Naming a favorite book or author can be fraught. Go too low, and you risk looking dumb. Go too high, and you risk looking like a bore — or a phony. “Manhattan dating is a highly competitive, ruthlessly selective sport,” Augusten Burroughs, the author of “Running With Scissors” and other vivid memoirs, said. “Generally, if a guy had read a book in the last year, or ever, that was good enough.” The author recalled a date with one Michael, a “robust blond from Germany.” As he walked to meet him outside Dean & DeLuca, “I saw, to my horror, an artfully worn, older-than-me copy of ‘Proust’ by Samuel Beckett.” That, Burroughs claims, was a deal breaker. “If there existed a more hackneyed, achingly obvious method of telegraphing one’s education, literary standards and general intelligence, I couldn’t imagine it.”

But how much of all this agonizing is really about the books? Often, divergent literary taste is a shorthand for other problems or defenses. “I had a boyfriend I was crazy about, and it didn’t work out,” Nora Ephron said. “Twenty-five years later he accused me of not having laughed while reading ‘Candy’ by Terry Southern. This was not the reason it didn’t work out, I promise you.” Sloane Crosley, a publicist at Vintage/Anchor Books and the author of “I Was Told There’d Be Cake,” essays about single life in New York, put it this way: “If you’re a person who loves Alice Munro and you’re going out with someone whose favorite book is ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ perhaps the flags of incompatibility were there prior to the big reveal.”

Some people just prefer to compartmentalize. “As a writer, the last thing I want in my personal life is somebody who is overly focused on the whole literary world in general,” said Ariel Levy, the author of “Female Chauvinist Pigs” and a contributing writer at The New Yorker. Her partner, a green-building consultant, “doesn’t like to read,” Levy said. When she wants to talk about books, she goes to her book group. Compatibility in reading taste is a “luxury” and kind of irrelevant, Levy said. The goal, she added, is “to find somebody where your perversions match and who you can stand.”

Marco Roth, an editor at the magazine n+1, said: “I think sometimes it’s better if books are just books. It’s part of the romantic tragedy of our age that our partners must be seen as compatible on every level.” Besides, he added, “sometimes people can end up liking the same things for vastly different reasons, and they build up these whole private fantasy lives around the meaning of these supposedly shared books, only to discover, too late, that the other person had a different fantasy completely.” After all, a couple may love “The Portrait of a Lady,” but if one half identifies with Gilbert Osmond and the other with Isabel Archer, they may have radically different ideas about the relationship.

For most people, love conquers literary taste. “Most of my friends are indeed quite shallow, but not so shallow as to break up with someone over a literary difference,” said Ben Karlin, a former executive producer of “The Daily Show” and the editor of the new anthology “Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me.” “If that person slept with the novelist in question, that would probably be a deal breaker — more than, ‘I don’t like Don DeLillo, therefore we’re not dating anymore.’”