Word Blur

Alright

I miss it here. 

I'll just point out how interesting this article on reclusive writers is (stumbled upon via Boldtype).  It recasts the enterprise of a retreat like Salinger's in light of Denis Johnson, Paris Hilton, and the reinvention (dissolution?) of privacy in the 21st century.  The article quotes heavily from Lee Siegel, whose forthcoming Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob, sounded so great to me until I read the book description on Amazon:

"Siegel argues that the Web and complementary developments—from reality television to the emergence of business prophets like Malcolm Gladwell—are giving rise to a new and malevolent mass culture..."

Just: no.  Also, I think Paris's new haircut actually looks kind of good.  Anyone?

Rains, pours

As an inveterate gossip whore and lover of all things medieval, I went all gooey when I saw Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England, a mash-up (okay, actually it's historical scholarship) of a book that looks at the way “gossip functions primarily as transformative discourse.” In a week that has seen Lindsay Lohan’s latest derailment, Mischa Barton’s fainting spell, and Nicole Richie’s birthday invite fiasco, it’s nice to feel that historical precedents suggest our collective analysis of these events might do some good toward “influencing…literary and religious discourse.”

I'm So Gloriously Happy

You can open at random to any page of Rupert Everett's autobiography, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins and find yourself awash in a mind-blowing yet delicious combination of purple prose and dropped names.  I'd been reading it for less than ten minutes before encountering the following:

On the unreleased film Unconditional Love: “The shoot was in Chicago so I gave up the house in the Hollywood hills and moved a sulky and reluctant Martin back to New York where the only hard-on seemed to be the rigor mortis of our relationship.”

On Beatrice Dalle: “Her kind of beauty was definitely pre-Botox, much deeper than the cash-and-carry bargains of today. Its origins were the gaslit barmaids of Manet, and the Parisian demi-monde between the wars.”

On Paula Yates: “Then she had a beautiful neck. It was long and slender and inspired the same head rush -- a man could break it with one hand. It rose from her lovely boy’s shoulders and the flat chest of a Bloomsbury lesbian.”

From the chapter entitled “Donatella’s New Year’s Eve Party" : “Chairs peeled off in all directions in a swastika for intimate asides over cigarettes and crossed legs, but the undertow on this particular stretch of bitch was strong and soon, they had been swept back out to sea by the acid tongue of Madonna’s brother Christopher Ciccone, the glum monosyllabic reply of Guy Ritchie, or the polite but firm dismissal of Gwyneth Paltrow.”

Instant classic.

Why I am Pro-Choice

Pro-choice vs. pro-life.

Links: defamer, candleblog.

Baby Weight

From today's IMDB celebrity news:

New mom Jennifer Garner has turned her back on the extreme diets adopted by Tinseltown mothers in favor of healthy eating and a light exercise regime. The Alias star, who gave birth to daughter Violet last December, has enlisted the help of fitness guru Valerie Waters to shed the extra weight gained during her pregnancy. Waters says, "Jen is on target to getting back her pre-baby figure through moderate exercising and sensible eating. She's not jumping on that celeb mom bandwagon of getting super-skinny, super-quickly. She is more concerned about keeping healthy and spending time with Violet than anything else. So because she's a busy career woman and a hands-on mum who nurses the baby, it's unrealistic for her to aim for a rigorous exercise regime. I think it's great that Jen doesn't obsess about her weight and is losing it at a sensible rate."

The cynic in me is all, yeah, we'll see how long that lasts, but you know in pictures, she does almost look like a normal-sized new mom.  Now when I was a new mom, I was just plain fat, but I guess that's more the route of sensible non-celebrities.

Pesky Maids

A short while ago I read The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood, a re-telling of The Odyssey and accompanying Greek myth through the voices of Penelope, Odysseus’s wife (almost always prefixed by the words “long-suffering” in literary discussion) and her twelve maids, who are murdered by Odysseus and his son Telemachus in an act of revenge. I loved it, even though I was wary going into it, because it just seemed too easy – like the kind of trick I might try to pull: feminism + the Odyssey (OK, this was the topic of my last performance work). It turns out these really are two great tastes that taste great together, especially in the hands of Atwood who is clever enough to suggest that while Penelope may indeed have been long-suffering, she might not be histories’ most reliable narrator herself. 

This was a sharp contrast to my experience reading recent Vanity Fair and Premiere articles about Lindsay Lohan, which I was just so pumped up for. You see her in her adorable movies and she’s got so much fizz, but then you read those interviews and I’m sorry, but it’s like: who left the ginger ale out overnight again? That’s right Lindsay, BREATHE.

Poor Willow

As the ultimate Buffy fan and a fairly regular critic of Fametracker's Celebrity vs. Thing column, I should be up in arms about Alyson Hannigan's recent loss to cloth napkins, but this time, the logic is just too sound.

Publishing Scandals

So James "The Man Who Conned Oprah" Frey may not have as much time in prison as he claims in his best-selling memoir A Million Little Pieces.  And JT Leroy, the troubled publishing darling behind Sarah, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, and Harold's End is just about definitively unmasked as both a 40-year old "unfullfilled" musician (actually half of the couple who claimed to take him in and save him from a life of prostitution and drug addiction) and a young "actress" (actually the sister of the other half of said couple) in her mid-twenties.  It's all good.

Links: the smoking gun, gawker, powells (books), nyt

Resolved Reading

Now that it’s the new year, it’s interesting to note how many people are making noble resolutions to read more, better, or differently.  Or to actually read all the books they own.  I, for one, can never pass by Clifton Fadiman’s Lifetime Reading Plan, a work that graces my mother’s living room, without thinking how gratifying it would be to read my way through his list of all the most important works of literature.  Imagine how wise and erudite I would be!  Actually, what I could really sink my teeth into is that Vanity Fair interview with Lindsay Lohan about the drugs and bulimia.  I mean, come to think of it and everything.

Resolution links: 43 things.

Celebrity vs. Thing, Part II

Finally, a thing beats a celebrity for the first time in a bazillion years and the thing that wins is the commemorative wristband?  If they weren't doing such a good job hypothesizing reasons that Renee Z.'s annulment papers cite fraud, I might be giving up on Fametracker altogether.  Apparently, this is going to have to be some sort of recurring critique.

Lo-Fug

Lindsay Lohan: The New Ben Affleck?  Possibly the best critique ever to come out of Go Fug Yourself, and I'm including this.

A Doom of One's Own

I’m back from vacation and illness and in-laws and more vacation. I’m going to try to be a good blogger for several weeks in a row, make things look pretty around here, link to the things I actually like, and make things work a little bit more like a library. Then I will have earned the right to remind all of you of the existence of this site. The good news is that during my prolonged silence, I was reading lots and lots of things.

I’ll start by talking about Unless by Carol Shields, a novel I really, really loved, about a woman whose daughter Nora drops out of college, breaks up with her boyfriend, and starts sitting on a Toronto street corner with a sign that says “Goodness” hanging around her neck, silently begging. This unraveling breaks her mother’s heart, in the classic sense, and much of the book, written while Shields was struggling with the cancer that eventually claimed her life, concerns the nature of grief. Everyone tries to figure out why Nora, went off the deep end – was she triggered by a traumatic event, or was it the more gradual realization of her own powerlessness, as a young woman in a society whose entire framework is still dominated by the experiences of men? In the end, every one and no one are right, and Shields manages to create a truly feminist novel of accurate and beautiful complexity. Around the same time, I read “Holy Fem-bot, Batman!” by Rebecca Traister, an article in Salon about the very public unraveling of Katie Holmes in the early days of her engagement to Tom Cruise that, well, broke my heart. Katie may not be a vagrant (not yet anyway) but her proclamations of goodness, happiness, and love for all things Cruise seem more and more unhinged. Was it a $10 million contract (a friend of a friend of a relation knows Katie and says yes!), a scientology brainwashing, a Hollywood power play, or some genuinely messed-up love? I predict it will be years before we really know how it all went down, but in the interim, it’s no longer so fun to watch the beautiful, seemingly fairly intelligent Holmes turn her personality over to a self-loathing, domineering know-it-all. I’m not sure I agree with Traister, who posits that all of us who willingly ingest the story of her transformation are somehow complicit, but when I see TomKat coverage now, my stomach often gives a little lurch, before I hold my nose and scarf it down.

I don't think so

Now normally I love Fametracker's brillant Celebrity vs. Thing column and I can even see why they came down on the side of Johnny Depp in the case of Johnny Depp vs. chocolate, even though it's slightly shocking, but there is no way that Billy Bob Thornton is better than tealights.  No way, no how!

Who's laughing?

I know I've been the worst novice third-wave blogger there is...in-laws visiting, vacation, inertia, excuses, etc.  And I've actually read lots and lots of books and I know or thing or two about The Half Blood Prince and everything (seriously stay-tuned, although who am I kidding, the three of you reading this only care about celebrity gossip anyway).   

Only this freaky news could break through my wall of silence.  Apparently Salon reported today that Katie and Tom are planning to star in a "laugh-out-loud" romantic comedy together called "Over to You."  Yeah, I'm reverse snorting my root beer out my nose already because I'm laughing so hard.  Out loud.  Ouch.

Seriously Weird Couple Alert

This morning I was very sad, listening to news of the attacks on the London Underground.  Not to trivilaize or anything, but my spirits were briefly lifted after reading IMDB's notice that US Weekly is reporting that Quentin Tarrantino and Shar Jackson are some sort of item.  For anyone who isn't, well, insane, and might not already know (as I apparently do), Jackson is the former Moesha co-star (Brandy being the actual star there) that Kevin Federline left for Britney Spears when she (Shar not Britney) was in her third trimester of pregnancy carrying their second child.  Obviously this was long before Britney also became pregnant with, persumably, Federline's baby (and her own, obviously, I mean, not to sound sexist or anything) .  Quentin Tarrantino I believe you know (but in case not -- likes movies, blood, guns, and kung-fu, preferably in some sort of combination).

This may just be the one Hollywood couple I'm going to get behind with all my heart.  First of all Shar deserves a break, god knows, and hasn't Tarrantino been suffering from his super obvious crush on the unattainable (for him, though inexplicably not for Ethan "Dog" Hawke) Uma Thurman long enough?  So best of luck to you crazy kids!

A day in the Life....

...of the TomKat Enterprise

More Bhagwan

Finished reading Passionate Journeys: Why Successful Women Joined a Cult, Marion Goldman’s study of women residing at Rajneeshpuram, the Oregon communal living experiment of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and his followers. It did little to quench the voyeurism that usually drives me to such works, in large part because Goldman uses the controversial method of creating composites of her subjects, weaving the experiences of many women into three discreet stories and changing facts to protect anonymity. So the whole time I was reading it I was acutely aware of the fact that what she was describing never actually happened as such. I’m not sure why this was such a deterrent for someone who ardently believes just about any snippet of celebrity gossip I read on the internet (Angelina Jolie is not pregnant though, my gut tells me that). Also, I guess when it comes to religious cults, I really prefer the insider’s perspective. That’s what I’m hoping to get out of Bhagwan: The God that Failed by Hugh Milne, next on my list.

For your viewing pleasure, check out these pictures (such as the one above, copyright 2003, Samvado Gunnar Kosstaz) of red/orange-y sannyasins in happier times at the first Rajneeshpuram festival: .  BONUS:  Musical interlude, El Dorado.  WARNING: More infectious than Curly Oxide.

Googlism Poetry

I have harnessed the power of the internet over at Googlism to harness the power of the internet to construct some free verse about a topic that’s very dear to my heart. Googlism uses Google to distill the essence of a person, based on what others have written about them in cyberspace.

Results have been edited to create the most beautiful art imaginable, with what are clearly the most moving results.

Untitled

tom cruise is the star of many successful movies
tom cruise is most powerful
tom cruise is more powerful than tom hanks
tom cruise is straight
tom cruise is gay
tom cruise is straight & sex
tom cruise is gay should replace have a nice day
tom cruise is no cruiser
tom cruise is not one of us
tom cruise is definitely not gay by the way
tom cruise is not gay
tom cruise is not an action star
tom cruise is shrinking fast

katie holmes is the very attractive and very beautiful young actress on the wb's hit tv series dawson's creek
katie holmes is best known for her role on dawson's creek as joey
katie holmes is the beautiful actress that stars on the hit television show dawson's creek
katie holmes is joey potter much like joey potter
katie holmes is best known for her role on dawson's creek
katie holmes is probably best known for her role on wb's dawson's creek
katie holmes is best known as joey in the wb television series dawson's creek
katie holmes is growing up
katie holmes is shredding her squeaky
katie holmes is a fairly popular movie star who should be dating a professional athlete

Remarkable, Amazing!

I'm so sorry I have to inagurate my Friday Celebrity Gossip Round Up by telling you this:

Tom Cruise proposed to Katie Holmes at the Eiffel Tower and she said yes. One person in all the world wishes them well, 11-year-old Dakota Fanning, Cruise’s War of the World’s co-star. I feel a lot like I imagine my infant daughter did when I fed her the potato that she wasn’t ready for last weekend – she projectile vomited a pungent mix of breast milk, pureed carrots, and greasy spoon home fry.

The heady analysis I actually wanted to send your way comes courtesy of my friend Neil Cleary, who is only, like, the world's biggest Lindsay Lohan fan: (although I have to say, when Parker Posey walks into a room full of girls doing lines, I don't think she's exactly rushing out to buy sandwiches): Life Imitates Art: Lindsay Re-enacts "Mean Girls" Movie.