Estudo do Caso

A Safe Walk in the Dark

By CINTRA WILSON MARCH 29, 2011

I STUMBLED into a United Nude store for the first time a couple of weeks ago in
Miami. I was curious, because I was told that the creative director of the store was the
Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. This turned out to be completely specious.

United Nude’s creative director is the Dutch architect Rem D. Koolhaas, who is not to
be confused with his esteemed uncle, the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, but there is
confusion, to the obvious advantage of Rem D. His partner in United Nude is Galahad
Clark, a member of the family that has controlled the Clarks shoe empire for seven
generations. So it is safe to say that nepotism has played some role in the formation of
United Nude. But the Koolhaas name, however misleading, got me in the door.

Once inside, a pair of black elastic X Wedge sandals managed to sweet-talk their way
onto my feet. I liked where they sat on the spectrum of summer shoes: tall enough to
keep your naked feet elevated above filthy New York sidewalks and sexy, but with a bit
of growl and bite to them — something Tank Girl might wear to a Brooklyn tailgate
party. They were relatively comfortable and not blister-inducing, so I was hooked for
$215 and curious enough about United Nude to swing by the store on Bond Street once
back in New York.

The store describes itself as “a dark-shop concept” — i.e., it’s bloody dark in there. On
the floor is what it calls a “Lo Res” sculpture: a shiny black jewel-faceted art thing that
looks sort of like a fetal Lamborghini. The only illuminated area is its trademarked Wall
of Light, a jumpy, computer-controlled LED edifice that throbs discothequishly in ever-
changing colors and serves as a backlight behind the open cubbyholes showcasing the
shoes. The colors dramatically undulate to the soundtrack, which bounces from Lady
Gaga to Edith Piaf, so if you need to know what colors the shoes actually are, you
basically need to wait for a lull in the rhythm section.

Photo

Credit Deidre Schoo for The New York Times

And the shoes are colorful. A good percentage of them are constructed of nifty, sturdy
elastics, woven (I was told by a salesman) at the company’s textile factory in China.
These are striped in glamorously clashing, saturated designer colors — neon pinks on
midnight blues on egg-yolk yellows on tree-frog greens — and a whole Pantone wheel
of kicky hues in combinations redolent of summer-camp lanyards or Pendleton Navajo
blankets. The thicker elastics are grooved, leafy and wide enough to be folded over a
bootie form (in three different heel heights, from grandma to mum to little nymphet),
from which the ankle seems to emerge organically like the stem of a skunk cabbage. (A
flat rainbow bootie with a thin sneaker sole is $175.)

There are rubberized pastel and neutral-colored flats (most around $70) and heels of an
injection-molded chemical substance that the store calls “vegetan” leather. These, for
the most part, look like what happens when a chubby little pair of Crocs is picked up at
a nightclub and ends up passed out in a hotel sauna.

The United Nude stores seem to go out of their way to employ attractive 20-something
scamps who really can’t be bothered by such annoyances as actual customers. The art-
school imp on Bond Street was barely aware of anything but her own intricate
wonderfulness until I finally walked up to the register with a two-tone elastic macramé
pump in my hand ($235) and asked for a pair to try on.

“I think that one’s probably your size,” she said, with an economy of interest. “Try that
one on and see if it fits, and then if you want, I’ll go get you the other one.”

She had mastered the soft sell, anyway.

In one of the essays in the seminal book “S, M, L, XL,” the original Rem Koolhaas
declared that, among other things, progress, identity and the city were no more. “Relief
... it’s over. That is the story of the city. The city is no longer. We can leave the theatre
now.”

It may sometimes seem that my critical approach to retail fashion has been to go in like
Laurence Olivier in “Marathon Man” with a tray of power tools intent on performing
involuntary dental surgery on designers while dementedly screaming, “Is it safe?!”

But I have been looking for generosity of vision. I ask clothes questions, like: Who are
you for? What do you say about the person who wears you? Are you functional? Have
you discovered an empowering, liberating new silhouette — like Christian Dior and
Yves Saint Laurent so nobly did in their days — that calls forth strengths never before
realized in the feminine character? Or are you bombing women back to the Goldwater
era? Does this line help my life or hinder it? In short: Is it safe!?

United Nude: Yeah, it’s safe. It’s pretty thin gruel. Nothing groundbreaking in the way
of architecture theory, certainly, but there are decent examples of footwear, if you like
that kind of thing.

This will be my last dispatch as your Critical Shopper. This column has been a singular
joy and privilege to write, and I will miss your readership. Whenever you find the mate
to your perfect bondage-boot hidden under one of the couches at Barneys on sale day, I
will be with you in spirit.
Until then, may you be United in Nudity — with or without Rem D. Koolhaas.

United Nude

25 Bond Street (between Lafayette Street and the Bowery); (212) 420-6000.

WOOED Borrowing a bit heavily from the name and fame of his architect uncle, Rem
Koolhaas, the architect Rem D. Koolhaas and his partner, Galahad Clark, present an
interesting, if somewhat dilettante-ish, collection of footwear designs and pretensions.

RUDE If you’re the type who is easily put off by an aloof sales staff, don’t bother, but
this is a fun place to go dip your toes in the pungent attitude. Part of the flora, if you
will.

SCANTILY SHOED In the end, the footwear isn’t bad for designery-looking chunks
of molded plastic with big Chinese elastic straps all over them. And, like nudity, the
price range covers just about everyone.
A Momentary Escape From Reason
By CINTRA WILSON MARCH 16, 2011

IT was one of those odd, balmy days between winter and Spring Street when the air is
gray-yellow and weirdly tropical. The barometer was spinning like a pinwheel, and
there was a fidgety animal tension in the ozone. Heads were throbbing, and SoHo
shoppers seemed dementedly giddy, like kids trying to stifle a laughing fit at a funeral.

Times of tumult occasionally make for strange bedfellows. In the brave new world of
ready-to-wear, fashion brands that wouldn’t ordinarily have anything to do with one
another sometimes find themselves shacked up after being absorbed by the same
conglomerate. As a result of one such fraternity — the Helmut Lang and Theory brands
are owned by Fast Retailing — there is now a Helmut Lang and Theyskens’ Theory
pop-up shop on Mercer Street. It appeared mysteriously, plans to stay for six months,
then will evaporate on Aug. 1 unless compelled to remain.

One can see how Theory and Helmut Lang might reasonably cohabitate — both are
known for clean minimalist lines. It’s Olivier Theyskens, the young Belgian who
previously designed luxury wear for Rochas and Nina Ricci, who is the weird roommate
in this mix. It was surprising when, last September, Mr. Theyskens introduced a capsule
collection for the mass-market Theory brand. And it was somewhat mind-boggling
when, a month later, he received the keys to the whole chocolate factory: Mr.
Theyskens is now the artistic director of Theory.

This didn’t look logical at all, more like a sudden elopement after an inflamed
whirlwind romance. Theory has always been a respectable mid-level brand: snappy
work wear for the junior executive. Not too flashy, barely sexual — a blamelessly
tasteful, nonconfrontational, utilitarian look hovering somewhere around the 60 percent
level of economic and/or human empowerment. I would hit the Theory racks at Saks
when I needed Washington camouflage; I once bought two of the same short-sleeve,
stretch-cotton button-down shirt to wear with my suits, despite the fact that Theory had
named it the Aniston.

Theyskens’ Theory is so markedly different from the rest of the Theory offerings that
the company has opted to house the collection with Helmut Lang for the sake of this
pop-up shop. (Bits of the Theyskens’ Theory capsule collection will appear in Theory
stores.)

Eric Schlossberg, one of the store employees (a refreshingly laid-back, cheerful, artistic
crew of dancers, stylists, etc.), explained it thusly: “I mean, what Theory customer is
going to be walking around in a conical bra-dress with five-inch platforms?” (To his
great credit, Mr. Schlossberg, the day I visited, was attempting to dress his own mother
in such items.)

Photo
Helmut Land and Theyskens' Theory in SoHo. Credit Hiroko Masuike/The New York
Times

Even from the store window, it is clear that Mr. Theyskens has been allowed to take the
Theory woman places she has never been invited to before. A wide-leg, electric blue
silk-satin pantsuit does not evoke a working arugula lunch in the cubicle so much as
ingesting different herbs at a Fleetwood Mac concert, circa 1978.

Theyskens’ Theory is dark, minimal and loose. A mannequin inside the door was
wearing a transparent black silk blouse rough-tucked into leather pants. The model in
the look book is an Ali MacGraw type: a wispy brunette with no makeup, hair parted in
the middle and jutty hipbones. It’s 1970s effortless: sockless, beltless, braless. A
billowy silk blouse hangs above her pleated shorts, exposing a strip of skin below her
navel. Naked white legs end in low-heeled ankle boots.

The space is a big minimal box, with the Theyskens capsule collection dominating the
right side and Helmut Lang racks on the left. The charcoal gray walls were overrun with
taxidermy. Another helpful salesman, James Lin, explained, as he unwrapped a pair of
ungodly black wedgies with straps sexily crossing across the arch, that everything in the
store — the beast heads; the jars of ibex horns; the overstuffed, distressed-leather
living-room set — was for sale; the interiors were provided by the Brooklyn shop
Holler & Squall. This made sense. Taxidermy is just the thing a fashion-forward, junior-
executive girl suddenly given to rock groupiedom and bong hits would want in her New
York apartment.

There were other fetish-worthy objects on the distressed wood and rusty metal shelves
— nicely shaped things that wanted squeezing: a zippered, football-shaped purse; a red
perch-leather version that looked like an old manual CPR pump bladder.

I was violently attracted to a Theyskens purple silk sleeveless blouse ($250), short in
front, longer in back. And the wedgies ($465) were killing me. They were so sexy, so
almost walkable. Some silky, bias-cut Helmut Lang quasi-jodhpurs ($290) seized my
affections. I wanted it all. I felt that panicked longing you get when you know that
something you want won’t be available forever. The knowledge that a store is
temporary inspires greater recklessness.

Trying to be reasonable, I bought only the blouse. But I went back a day later and
bought the jodhpurs. Still contemplating the shoes.

It’s not an excuse you can use every day — the whole “apocalypse is imminent and
therefore I must buy these pants” thing. But life is short and dangerous. Sometimes you
find rare things that really should belong to you, and you must consider your own
mortality.
Alexander Wang’s Store Opens in SoHo
By CINTRA WILSON MARCH 1, 2011

Photo

Credit Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

AFTER lying on a fur hammock for about 40 seconds, a paradigm shift takes place. I
once thought that fur hammocks were absurd bourgeois luxuries, but actually, they are
what I’ve unknowingly spent my entire life searching for.

When the economy buckled, there were heavy casualties in SoHo. My favorite
boutique, Phi, showcasing the moto-Deco designs of Andreas Melbostad, was only six
years old when it perished in 2009. When the windows of Yohji Yamamoto at the
corner of Grand and Mercer were papered over in 2010, something intangible but
precious was also lost: the downtown mood of the ’80s, the intellectually louche art-
gallery vibe that animated the customers who built their social personas around Mr.
Yamamoto’s postmodern tailoring.

The space itself, in other words, came with dauntingly huge shoes to fill. How does one
replace a cultural landmark — or the indelible image of that window, that rack of
radical black creations against the shock-white walls that informed that corner for 11
years.

Alexander Wang’s answer (to the best of my ability to squeeze text from textile) is to
absorb the Yamamoto legend — reinterpret it, pay homage to it — and thereby
transcend it. There is a new rack of angular black jackets in that window, on what looks
as if it might even be the same rack. But the clothes are all Alexander Wang.

This bouncing boy genius (27 years old, a $25-million business) appears to have enough
preternatural talent not merely to fill Mr. Yamamoto’s noble shoes; he also fills the need
for a new downtown persona, new ways to think about getting dressed, and a new mood
to animate it all.

Mr. Wang, cutting his teeth in the fashion world at the zenith of the bust, was the right
mind at the right time. He knew that cool kids wanted a new highbrow-lowbrow haute-
casual that could be worn to the prestigious day gig (modeling, interning) and would
require no change whatsoever to go out dining and dancing all night (lather, rinse,
repeat).

Even though the floors have been covered in slabs of white marble, the redesigned
space feels warm and tingly. The center holds the God-like hammock, a deep black
leather couch, a brass coffee table. What distinguishes this from other retail sitting areas
is that customers are actually sitting — nay, luxuriating — in it; talking, reading their
phones. They even feel comfortable enough to kick their dirty old Converses right onto
the fox fur, and this is the right spirit: there is permission. Nothing, it seems, is too
precious to be played with, around or on.

Mr. Wang has an uncanny ability to borrow references from his contemporaries without
seeming to knock them over and pull their prices down. Example: unisexy cotton-poly
jackets, softer than a cloth diaper, evocative of Lilies, the Rick Owens secondary line.
But the cut is a shade simpler, and way less of a wallet gouge (cocoon wrap, $160).

Several silhouettes I’ve grieved over since Phi closed seem to have spiritually
reincarnated onto Mr. Wang’s floor: skinny racer-back tank dresses, $240; pleated
harem shorts, $495; a sleeveless tuxedo jacket in ivory mesh, $645.

I saw a woman who was a classic specimen of the Yamamoto tribe: neon hair,
architectural glasses, a huge coat that looked like something Frank Gehry erected out of
sleeping bags. I hoped she was getting back part of her lost world: honeydew- and
cantaloupe-colored caftans in parachute silk with metallic tape details that would work
equally well on Grace Jones or the Sun Ra Arkestra ($695); mint-green metallic disco
jackets with rose gold zippers ($625).

The staff is helpful, playful and very sweet.

“See anything you like?” asked the manager, who looked like a Starship Enterprise crew
member.

“I like her,” I said, pointing at his co-worker: a lovely imp in a silky black V-neck,
baggy silk-satin shorts riding low on her hips ($395), black tights and ankle booties. She
skipped over. “He dressed me!” she said, spinning around. It all worked: slouchy,
flattering, elegant, wholly unfussy.

“And I am so-o-o comfortable,” she enthused.

I wanted it all. Her whole outfit was found in my size and dispatched toward the
dressing rooms.

“There is quite a line,” the manager lamented. “I am so sorry!” I received three

apologies from the staff members, and I really hadn’t waited long.

Ready-to-wear designer fashion is, to a large extent, ridiculous. It primarily caters to

that microscopic sliver of the population that can afford to buy race cars, politicians and
LVAD artificial heart pumps. But every once in a while, a smart design proves cost-
effective because it changes the game and reinvents its own medium.

An $80 black rayon T-shirt should be a grotesque plutocratic sin. But when you put on
one of Mr. Wang’s, you realize: oh. This would be equally appropriate for work,
bowling, lawn darts, gnocchi fights ... and it drapes well enough to be worn as
rebellious evening wear. It connects dots you hadn’t imagined were connectible before.
It’s hard to give an unequivocal rave to someone so young, rich and squeaky. If you
were Mozart’s harpsichord teacher, you might be tempted to knock his wig off a few
times, just to make him suffer a little. But you have to give a golden boy his A+. He has
perfect pitch, and he knows how to use it.

I bought the $80 T-shirt. It was my vote for a future of fur hammocks, and perhaps other
unexpected surprises that hit the bull’s-eye on my pleasure centers just perfectly.
Agent Provocateur, Selling Kink on
Madison Avenue
By CINTRA WILSON FEB. 23, 2011

Photo

Credit Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

I ONCE worked on a play with a dominatrix, who explained a troublesome producer

with the smiling dismissal: “Oh, don’t worry about him. He’s such a John.”

Meaning: obvious, easily manipulated. Sex, in her mind, was smeared all over men’s
faces and running down their bibs, rendering them too ridiculous for any reaction other
than amused, affectionate pity.

We’ve hit an interesting impasse in the battle of the sexes. In one corner, we have
unprecedented access to unprecedented amounts of pornography, which has been
transforming sex into a kind of performance art (in some cases, literally). On the other
side, we have actual women — who, while gamely eager to please, generally speaking,
find themselves a bit overwhelmed or upstaged (or both) by this onslaught of visual
fiction and the new standards dictated by an almost mainstream ubiquity of smut.

It has been astonishing to watch, in the slowing of the economy, how the classy sex-
shop business model has thrived. Society becomes creative when its entertainments are
confined to the home.

Agent Provocateur has “arrived,” as it were, on Madison Avenue, ready to underclothe

the hooker fantasies of a whole new class of shopper. This comes as a bit of a surprise.
Agent Provocateur in SoHo has been a rowdy counterpoint to the nearby dead-serious
upscale kink of Kiki de Montparnasse. For silk negligees and 18-karat tongue vibrators,
you’d go to Kiki; Agent Provocateur was the source for tongue-in-cheeky stuff:
gingham cowgirl bikinis, rubberized nurse costumes.

On Madison, it seems, the shop is all dressed up to role-play as Kiki de Montparnasse.

The interior is black and classy. There are sumptuous dressing rooms with billowing
silk curtains and cherry blossoms crawling up the walls. A sitting room is furnished
with vampire-luxe Victorian club chairs. Murals sweep up the staircase: Aubrey
Beardsley meets Edward Gorey in an evil garden full of nude Vargas pinups.

The saleswomen still sport the old uniform: a tightly tailored pink shirtdress, black
tights and pumps: equal parts sexy nurse, roller-skating waitress and lab assistant. It’s a
look conveying the message: we’re licensed underwear technicians, here to aid your
scientific research.

The Madison inventory seems geared to undress women in a particular “Mad Men”
fantasy, classic stuff that appeals to the stag-film-and-martini-marinated male. To wit:
marabou peep-toe slippers; lace merry widows in ivory and red. No black leather, no
latex. In short, it’s the stuff you buy the chorus girl with whom you are cheating on your
proud Madison Avenue wife.

Who, then (besides sex workers, for whom such dainties are, arguably, a professional
expense), buys this tricked-out, candy-apple shellacked hot rod of outlandishly
expensive yet adolescently cartoonish love for sale, on Madison Avenue? The women I
saw seemed to want nothing more than to throw beige cashmere cardigans over these
rococo brassieres. The store uncomfortably exposes people for their exact level of
sexual maturity — or not.

While I was trying to solve the labyrinthine conundrum of tiny straps on a red lace
“playsuit” ($370), a dapper couple in their 50s walked in, all matching glen plaid and
horn rims. “Look, $280 — for just the bra!” the woman squealed, too gamely.

Her companion overcompensated by trying to act devil-may-care. The Russian beauty

working the floor explained that the loftier Soirée collection was on the second floor
(e.g., French lace nightie, $1,990).

“Oh, so you work your way up to the luxury line?” he asked, too loudly, using the bra as
a prop. “I guess that’s when you rip this one apart!”

It was an uncomfortable moment — his cool was already blown, and so quickly. The
saleswoman gave him a polite golf-chuckle.

The main problem of the Madison Avenue Agent Provocateur: it’s on Madison Avenue,
a shopping area for ladies-who-lunch of a certain age. I’m guessing that porn gear isn’t
at the top of their shopping lists. It’s probably not even in the middle of their lists —
and those are very long lists. In fact, chafing dishes, dog jewelry and even decorative
pine cones would probably appear on most of their lists before pink leather spanking
paddles.

“I didn’t look good enough in these to pay that for them,” a 40-ish woman exiting a
dressing room said, with a joyless giggle. “But I’ll be back!”

I didn’t believe she’d be back. I doubt the saleslady believed it. She sounded as if she
had seen her own shadow in that dressing room.

BEAUTY is relative, certainly, and in the eye of the beholder. And men, bless them,
can be amazingly dumb. A set of sequined pasties with tassels doing a double
whirlybird is apt to get their attention on a slow afternoon, to say nothing of gilded
handcuffs or seamed stockings that spell “Whip Me” in cursive on the calf ($70).
Bottom line, girls: it ain’t fashion. Fashion is about glamour, which is about seduction,
which is about intrigue, which is about suggestion. In this joint, all of fashion’s
ingeniously composed double and triple entendres are burned down to one big fat
entendre.

I’d wrap it up for you, Johnny Dearest, but the only girl I know who wears anything that
skimpy is my gun, and she only wears leather. Here’s where I beat it.
Adopting a Look, No Boys Allowed
By CINTRA WILSON FEB. 16, 2011

Photo

Credit Donna Alberico for The New York Times

BACK in the dark ages of my misspent youth, the cost of used clothing was always
inversely proportional to the difficulty of finding it. Dumpster diving, though the least
expensive, was the biggest long shot, and potentially the most nauseating and dangerous
experience. Next came straight thrift — i.e., any rummage store named for a Catholic
saint or the Salvation Army (a k a Sal’s).

Then there was a tectonic fashion shift: suddenly cool trash had cultural cachet. Better
labels and fabrics were segregated from the thrift racks, and the word “vintage” replaced
terms like “used,” “secondhand” and “next-to-new.” Some hipsters became a baby
merchant class of scavenger-chic garmentos, just like the hippies before them, who
trafficked in the kitschy Victoriana of their grandmothers.

The happy medium of a “vintage” clothing store has always been an elusive sweet spot.
The ideal: a well-curated post-junk store that can articulate, anticipate and deliver style
trends without losing sight of the fact that, from a financial perspective, the clothes are
basically rubbish that happens to resemble the shapes of certain prevailing fads.

Shareen Mitchell began her retail career in Los Angeles, with both a robust eye for
hipsterism and a pragmatic sense of thrift. Shareen Vintage in New York is an eccentric
site — an unmarked black door above a hair salon — with almost obnoxiously weird
store hours. (Wednesday and Thursday, 5 to 10 p.m.; Saturdays, 12 to 6 p.m. That’s it.)

The day I visited, the shop was being run by a British gal of the young Phoebe Cates
variety who was welcoming in that popular-senior-going-out-of-her-way-to-be-nice-to-
the-hapless-new-sophomore kind of way. I hurried to keep up with her as she swept
through the three rooms of crammed racks, breezily indicating sections with a lazy hand
while reciting a breathless run-on sentence.

“Everything is organized by sleeve length, these are reworked and resort, these are party
dresses, there’s minis, these are classic length, these are staff picks, most things are $48
and under except party dresses, and anything on a black velvet hanger is $88 and above
because we paid a bit more for them, and the back room has furs and stuff for $80 and
under ... and there’s no boys allowed, so you can just change anywhere.”

(True enough: While I was there, someone’s boyfriend was refused entry and had to sit
in a desultory manner on a bench in the outside hallway.)
One of the problems with vintage stores is that they tend to cater to a limited range of
looks, usually the one personally worn by the hipster-owner. The Shareen inventory,
however, covers an impressively broad spectrum: billowy shirtdresses in Kool-Aid-
colored silks and “Dynasty”-era shoulder pads (most around $52); pouffy Lacroix-
knockoff prom dresses in taffeta and sequins; Gunne Sax dresses for that Australian
girls’-school picnic at Hanging Rock; a rack of fringed suede and multicolored leathers.

The space has the feel of a secret girls’ clubhouse. There’s a big couch in the back room
near what seems to be a functional but unused kitchen; foreign chick flicks are playing
on a large flat-screen TV near bowls of Starburst fruit chews.

“It’s a proper girl place,” another saleswoman said. “You get to see other people trying
things on. Girls say, ‘This would look better on you,’ and they swap. We serve wine in
the evenings and just hang out.”

One gets the feeling that some girls are more invited than others, but unlike, say, the
dehumanizing experience of the Loehmann’s group dressing room, being at Shareen
with a bunch of trendy 20-somethings in chatty locker-room states of dishabille does
seem to inspire a kind of situational intimacy.

I TRIED on a fluorescent pink-orange St. John knit dress from the mid-1960s — very
“Mad Men,” with gold buttons up the front. With a visible question mark over my head,
I turned to a girl who I assumed from various overheard remarks was an aspiring stylist.
She appraised me with careful and squinty attention. “You know?” she eventually
winced, through her big glasses, “maybe it’s not the greatest color on your skin.”

“Aha! I thought I looked more dead than usual. I think the pink has too much blue in it.
Thank you.”

I replaced the dress, with a twinge of regret. Wherever you may stand on St. John knits,
they are woven to an indestructible, almost antiballistic density; it was a real steal at
under $200. Some duskier beauty than I will look like a Starburst fruit chew in it.

I succumbed to my usual tendencies. I found a Nicole Miller dress: a black jersey mock-
turtleneck with big shoulder pads and a kind of harem skirt pin-tucked into multiple
pleats for a sort of triangular, futurist bustle effect. Very Tilda Swinton and Mildred
Pierce go to a Manhattan Transfer concert. It had threads coming loose, and it needed a
severe dry-cleaning, but the shape was there; there was still life in it.

“You do look intimidatingly fashionable in that dress,” Phoebe Cates said. “And it’s got
a great arse.”

Did I feel as if I belonged to Shareen’s special girl club?

No. That aspect is high-school tribal — you’re either one of their crowd, or you’re not.
But I bought the dress anyway. I wasn’t shopping for cliques, and it was only $52.

(An Open Note to the Merchants of New York: The mystical incantation uttered by the
saleswoman above is all you ever need to make my wallet magically appear. Even the
most antisocial Gorgons are subject to the usual feminine vanities, once you charm the
snakes out of their hair.)
At Dior, a New Look That’s More of a
Sneer
By CINTRA WILSON DEC. 29, 2010

Photo

Credit Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times

MY visit to the reopened Dior boutique on 57th Street coincided with a couple of
unrelated events that became inextricably relatable in my mind. (Bear with me, Gentle
Reader. I promise these threads will form a rope in the end, if I don’t accidentally hang
myself.)

That morning, I read that the 27-year-old woman rumored to be Vladimir Putin’s
mistress would appear on the January cover of Russian Vogue. Wags theorized that this
was part of a Putin campaign to rebrand Russia as a sexy Wild West for fast and dirty
entrepreneurial land sharks.

I also read that 500-euro notes are used almost exclusively by the criminal class, but,
according to The Wall Street Journal, they account for 35 percent of the euros in
circulation, even though most humans never see one.

It was with these thoughts wallpapering my brain that I visited the store, which had
been closed since July, now agleam in all its glory.

Christian Dior came to prominence in 1947 with the New Look, one of the most
inspired silhouettes ever built upon a female form. The tensions were beautifully
balanced: the lines were empowered and confident, but still ultrafeminine. The fabrics
were the most extravagant seen since World War II, as was the ample bust line. It was a
daringly modern shape for the woman entering the work force and exploring
possibilities beyond merely being someone’s wife.

Dior’s New York flagship, redesigned by Peter Marino to evoke “Paris elegance,” is a
riot of mirrors and chrome and white and silver; the entire environment seems to be
wrought out of chandeliers. It is a bit like walking into an enormous Christmas
ornament.

“They did 10 pieces that sold out immediately in Asia,” I heard a saleswoman telling a
customer at one of the jewelry consultation desks.
A woman beelined with consumer blood lust toward what is apparently one of the
season’s It bags: the Lady Dior (medium size, $2,800) in various leathers quilted in
Dior’s signature cane-work design. I noted an abundance of purse jewelry: logo charms,
chains and bangles; pearls capped in gold like acorns on tangles of gold chains. (What
cruel handbag-mom denies her mauve-dyed ostrich its own baubles, after all?)

The shoe collection sits at the top of the white marble staircase: marvelously fretful
details wrought out of silk, crystals and chemically peeled reptiles. A pair of $1,850
toeless peek-a-booties made of stiffened black lace seemed too fragile for a memorable
night in Manhattan, but perhaps if you were carried from limo to sofa, you could get a
couple of months out of them.

Christian Dior adored roses, and they are all over the place, carved out of coral, wrought
out of pink fur and pavé diamonds. “It’s a whole lifestyle,” said my lovely salesman,
Dylan Smith. Yes, I thought ... but whose?

I may have found an answer in the next room. Dior’s Couch of Shame is large and
comfy; a Frenchman was contentedly watching video of a Dior runway show in
Shanghai. There were models with big Brigitte Bardot hair wearing naughty little-girl
dresses: a frilly white crochet number perfect for First Communion; a scalloped Pepto-
pink leather baby-doll dress, equal parts Doris Day and kinderwhore. Rounding a corner
to inspect a seaweed-colored gown, I startled his significant other, an anxious-looking
Carine Roitfeld type.

I tried on a little black suit, in homage to the New Look. I loved the dress, which was
like a shiny black tulip made of wool ($2,250). But when I tried the matching peplum
jacket ($2,800), I found the bust line inadequate for my Western proportions (a hint, to
me, that the label is focusing on an Asian market).

I was shown a piece that, I was told, Melania Trump had bought that morning: a black
lambskin bustier dress with tiered ruffles, so shiny as to resemble silk-satin. Now,
granted, this kind of thing is the designer John Galliano’s forte — the Marie Antoinette-
cum-Scarlett O’Hara-cum-imperial concubine look. But something about its lavish
detail and conspicuous expense evoked, for me, the recent excesses of the Wild Wild
East: Moscow bling nonpareil. Criminal rococo.

Ordinarily I walk out of dressing rooms and swish around before the sales staff
(particularly when, like Mr. Smith, they have been so attentive) to show them how right
they were to suggest the garment, but I couldn’t leave the room in that dress. I felt
queasy, as if I were wearing a $9 million birthday party.

As I left, the manager, indicating the shop as a whole, asked, “How do you like our
creation?”

“Mind-boggling,” I said.

“Can you imagine working here every day?” he asked with rhetoric joy.

“No, I can’t,” I said. “Does it give you an addiction to opulence, like you’re living in
Versailles? Are you still capable of taking a subway?”
I exited to a chorus of uncertain chuckles.

Dior splashes shamelessly into the theater of spectacle, for those in a position to flaunt
conspicuous consumption. Today’s new look isn’t aimed at shaping an independent new
woman, but at adorning mistresses and new trophy wives in the sartorial equivalent of
hula skirts made from 500-euro notes. Badda-bling!

Opulence can be many things: fanciful, decadent, luxurious, fun, sexy, mesmerizing.
But it is healthy to remember that opulence isn’t actually beauty.

Beauty, a state beyond crime, manipulation or pretense, simply is where it is ... or it

isn’t.

Dior

19 East 57th Street (near Madison Avenue); (212) 931-2950.

DEAR No expense was spared to infuse the revamped shop with enough bling to make
a girl of any age feel like Princess Barbie in her own Parisian Fantasy Dior, right down
to the dollhouse dioramas for the jewelry.

DEEYORE The staff is charming and personable enough to lull even snarly old cobras
like yours truly into little pink furry things previously unimaginable on the gothic
personage.

DIRE Not to put a peasant in the punch bowl, but Dior would make an ideal costume
department for the Vlad Putin Hollywood vehicle, “Kremlin, Inc.: Too Fast, Too
Furious.” Moscow, after all, does not believe in understated elegance.
The Fun House Awaits
By CINTRA WILSONDEC. 14, 2010

Photo

Credit Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

LIKE any Frenchman worth his fleur de sel, the new Pierre Hardy boutique
immediately poses challenging questions.

Like, where is it?

Monsieur Hardy, an intriguing artist on several fronts, came to shoes after scholarly
forays into fashion illustration, dance and scenography. In the store literature, he
proclaims that he eschews nostalgia and history, preferring to find inspirations for his
futuristic footwear through design and conceptual art.

In an architectural sense, the shop is so understated as to be virtually invisible: a wall of

dark topaz glass is inset several feet from the sidewalk, with no identifying markings.
This is the kind of cold, tinted slickness generally preferred by military contractors
around Arlington, Va. At first glance, the shop might be the front office for an
international weaponry brokerage, an illegal plastic surgery cult or perhaps an
entertainment law office-slash-sex dungeon. The (presumed intentional) effect is to
cause the shopper to question her own validity. Should she potentially corrupt the space
inhabited by these rarefied shoes by insinuating herself into it, or should she should let
all her credit cards slide from her fingers into the middle of West Fourth Street, lie
down on them and succumb to a coma of existential ambivalence?

M. Hardy’s aesthetics of disinvitation are reaffirmed by the fact that there does not
appear to be an actual door. Getting inside requires more than galvanizing a certainty of
one’s metaphysical being; the determined shopper is forced to hurl her full body weight
across panels of amber glass until a secret hinge eventually yields, allowing her to
stumble inside, stripped of pride and balance. It is a somewhat Masonic experience; you
realize that there were no witnesses to your fall from grace because everyone who
works there seems to be somewhere in the back, and it’s really dark in there (and
therefore grace arguably never hath left you).
The floors are black leather strips cut and arranged to resemble wood planks; the
benches are black powder-coated industrial I-beams. Gray shoebox-size cubes appear to
have crystallized like raw lithium formations in corners of the space. This is where
constellations of M. Hardy’s signature items are displayed: unisex suede desert boots
($490) and high-top sneakers with Velcro ankle straps, in kicky flavors like heathery
flannel, charcoal patent leather, gold lamé ($520).

The staff, once inspired to participate, is particularly lovely and laid-back in that
casually hospitable, elegant French way — no fussiness or pretense, and a rather
effortless way of dealing with customers.

At one point, I heard thumping and fluttering and looked toward the street, thinking that
perhaps a rash of adolescent doves had performed a group suicide against the window.
But no. An incognito Andy Samberg and a comely model-slash-actress seemed to be
leaving mime handprints all over the glass, apparently having the same problem I had
with the Zen koan of the doorless door. We watched in silence until they passed the
initiation and lurched inside.

I stalked the couple for about 10 minutes before realizing that despite a distinctly
Sambergian hair, face and parka combination, this young man was an imposter, who
had obviously lured his comely date into the (Pierre) Hardy of Darkness hoping that the
dearth of lighting would cause her to continue to believe that he were actually Andy
Samberg.

Drawing my attentions back to the footwear, I began to recognize a theme. Many styles
for both sexes featured grommet portholes along the sides, laced through with a leather
thong: a Ricardo Montalban, Gucci-style loafer in creamy gunmetal suede, for example,
featured a Top-Sider bow instead of the classic business tassel. A variation on a
women’s shoe I originally dubbed the J-Lo Desert Storm Bootie, a kind of ersatz
combat-Timberland with a wooden stiletto heel, had been whimsically retooled into a
tactical boot-slash-boating pump, dysfunctional for both armed conflict and yachting.

It was finally explained to me that I was looking at the Cruise collection, which helped
me to appreciate M. Hardy’s masterful redesign of the classic jute-soled espadrille
($660), a Cubist red patent wedge with an ankle strap, designed to elongate the leg.
They were so tall, I thought they’d be difficult to wear even in a motel bed, but M.
Hardy winds a lovely way about the human foot. Even the sight of my own toes was
such a pleasant experience I reasoned that they probably weren’t mine. (It was awfully
dark in there.)

There were instances of particular beauty — a collection of evening pumps had tiny
suede straps webbed about the arch in a kind of beaux-arts crocodile pattern, sprayed all
over with such tiny Swarovski crystals as to appear condensed with dew — but the best
of show, IMHO, was a highly versatile pair of men’s black patent loafers. These were
stripped down and totally elegant, like a vintage car with what low-rider enthusiasts call
a “shave job” — all extraneous hardware and chrome is removed from the car, which is
then covered in putty and sanded down to its purest shape. It’s the one shoe I’ve seen
that I thought could stroll from Levi’s to pinstripes to tuxedo without breaking stride.
Pierre Hardy offers elite, leisure-class footwear for those with enough passive income to
support actual leisure time, and such leisurely delicacies as $520 sneakers. The rest of
us may find exiting the store a bit less painful than entering, and live to fight another
day.

Pierre Hardy

30 Jane Street (West Fourth Street); (646) 449-0070.

HARDY BOYS Pierre Hardy’s new boutique features nimbly architectural, unisexy
footwear for the romping dandies and fatal femmes.

NANCY DROOL Prepare to be lulled into dropping over $500 for conceptual jet-set
froufrou that is more decorative than on deck.

MYSTERIES As Diane Keaton might say, the space “has such marvelous negative
capability.” Bring night-vision goggles to fully appreciate it.
The Dregulator, The Dregulator 2007

Welcome, Comrades, to the New American State of Loserville!

Hey, while we’re at it, welcome back to the Cold War!
I bet you thought that show was over. Hahaha, no. That was just a long intermission.
Now that you have your popcorn and Jujubes and everyone has had a bathroom break,
it’s time for life to start sucking again, the way it did in the 1950’s…only worse.
We never thought we’d see this happen again in our clueless American lives: wiley
Russia, such a short spell after the Berlin Wall was hammered into tourist souvenirs, so
newly enriched by the power of Western-style klepto-capitalism that they’d be
emboldened enough to beat up and conquer their neighbor — i.e., civilized, democratic
Georgia, who just a few months ago even had a fighting chance at being admitted to
NATO.
Vlad Putin just shoulder-checked snot-nosed King George in the nightclub hallway of
foreign policy thug-life. Well, George…don’t hate the player, hate the game. You tried
to roll with the real pimps. Now your gull-wing Hummer has a broken window, one of
those humiliating, undersize spare tires, and is stuck in the parking lot with a Denver
Boot and full of sleeping homeless people, because nobody can afford to drive it
anymore.
You can’t blame career gangstas like Putin (who isn’t Russia’s President anymore,
um,*cough*) for stealing third base after noticing that our geopolitical monkey- thumbs
were wedged firmly up our own backside.
We can’t complain: Invading a sovereign nation that hadn’t provoked war is exactly
what our President Cheney, aka Nosferatu the Genocidal Petro-Imperialist Vampire, did
in Iraq. Big talk of some mysterious, shapeless retribution toward Russia is not only
pointless, but idiotic and perhaps even needlessly dangerous — we just don’t have the
economic, moral, or military authority to talk down to anyone anymore. More Texas
style, rodeo-clown bluffery is only going to make powerful countries angry.
Not that anyone really cares in this White House, who apparently saw the American
casualties of 9/11 as a nice starting point.
The remainder of our American lives will be under constant nuclear threat; we will have
to learn how to shut up. That loose coalition of mutually interested global corporations
known as the military industrial complex, and the greedy human slimeballs it directly
enriches, simply believes that countless (and therefore uncounted, uncountable, and
unaccounted for) civilian lives – are there to be sacrificed to their glory.
Hey, whatever: they’re foreign; they worship the wrong God. Why shouldn’t
Halliburton be allowed to sate its libido with any less savagery and barbarism than say,
Toltec King Mizcoatl? The Aztecs had no problem with child sacrifice. Blood offerings
have been a vital ingredient of imperial enterprise since the dawn of tyranny.
When this administration was given the wheel of the big global car, they let everyone
know as quickly as possible that your life is cheap and dispensable, and that our real
National Defense Strategy isn’t actually about defense, but picking fights and
generating arguments for the constant generation of new war machinery. America isn’t
so much interested in protecting the constitution or the American way of life, but in
bullying its way into the lawless outback Beyond Thunderdome to steal gasoline, and
plunder whatever else those backward tribes have that looks shiny. Your individual
needs as a citizen? Not a priority. Your quality of life? Not an issue. Your votes don’t
count, because you’re poor and stupid (unless you’re just poor and stupid enough to be
a Republican). It’s every sucker for himself; the boys at the top refuse to nurse hapless
schoolchildren and the elderly at the federal teat anymore, because they’re too busy
stealing everything they can lay their claws on, including the middle class. Hey: rich
guys need more money. Polar bears and the ocean are collateral damage. Got a
problem?
Get thee to Gitmo, domestic terrorist.
We can directly attribute Russia’s new confidence to our unnecessary and immoral war
of choice in Iraq — which has hogtied and humiliated us exactly as Vietnam did (which
is exactly what all the defense intellectuals who weren’t neoconservative ideological
lunatics like Bill Kristol were tearing their hair out and shrieking long before the
invasion).
Americans have never known what it’s like to losers, but it is the dawn of a new age.
The Olympics (apart from the coddled professionals on our men’s swim team) are good
practice for our new future as a B-rate nation.
On both the American male and female gymnastic teams, metaphors were abounding:
half of the members were wounded and absent (American gymnasts Paul and Morgan
Hamm, most notably). The leader of the girl’s gymnastic team cracked under the
pressure, made horrible miscalculations and fell down at the outset of both of her
routines, effectively crowbarring the rest of her teammates in the knees.
China’s gymnasts, however, were alarmingly perfect — particularly Chen Yibing, on
the rings, who was almost transcendental in his execution of graceful, disciplined, artful
moves that just a few short years ago were considered physically impossible.
Bullet trains, my fiends. China has them. They bring people to work in the cities from
dying suburbs. But the petro-vampires aren’t done sucking your blood. They’re not rich
enough yet. You’ll have to wait.
As our nation celebrates yet another birthday of independence from the tyrannical rule of
hereditary monarchies, what exactly is the personality of America, at this critical juncture in
our former child-star-nation’s turbulent adolescence?
In the last fortnight, seventeen-year-old fame-casualty Jamie Lynn Spears ignominiously
celebrated the birth of Maddie Briann — the third Spears baby in recent years to be given the
deep Southern equivalent of an anthropomorphic Disney chipmunk-name. Democrats in
Congress bewildered supporters by allocating another $162 billion to continue the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan until next June, while Democratic Presidential nominee Barak Obama
bewildered supporters by drifting far enough into the creamy center of the political Oreo to
change his last name to Lieberman. Meanwhile, the world waits with baited breath to view the
newest acquisitions in the Jolie-Pitt signature child collection.
Two men perhaps illustrate the current persona of the United States better than anyone else.
On Thursday, June 26 (the “World Day in Support of Victims of Torture”), there was a U.S.
House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties hearing,
featuring Dick Cheney’s chief of staff and former legal counsel David Addington, and former
U.S. Justice Department lawyer John Yoo, the legal spin-art geniuses largely responsible for the
infamous Torture Memo and Unitary Executive Doctrine (sometimes called the ‘Yoo Doctrine’
since nobody else wants to take any credit for it).
Yoo, and the elusive Mr. Addington (referred to by Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank
as “Cheney’s Cheney”) were subpoenaed in order to answer questions about the Bush
administration’s interrogation rules. Yoo and Addington are, ostensibly, the last human shields
protecting the executive office from the full weight of accountability for these policies.
The two men, who have arguably performed more radical and bizarre leaps in legal
interpretations of the Constitution than an entire Federalist Society full of crackheads, made
their case by being snide, nasty and rudely dismissive on the stand in a way that seemed
melodramatically excessive even for archetypal Scooby Doo villains.
“Think of Addington as the id of the Bush White House,” wrote Milbank.
“Though his hidden hand is often merely suspected — in signing statements, torture policy and
other brazen assertions of executive power — Addington’s unbridled hostility was live and
unfiltered…”
Addington has long been legendary for being able to emit nearly lethal malodorant toxins from
his personality glands, but both he and Yoo seemed to be resorting to the time-honored
teenage male technique of being unbearably personally unpleasant in order to wear down
their opposition, in an apparent effort to make the authority figures in the subcommittee
throw up their hands and stomp into the kitchen in frustration from a desire to strangle them.
It was lame behavior unbecoming of even a Walmart shoplifter with any self-respect. Instead
of putting on a display of stunning legal pyrotechnics to stun and silence their critics, the men,
supposed legal geniuses, resorted to the cheapest, most classic, lowball, legal shyster and
Busted Tween techniques available – hoary old reindeer games such as the ‘Conveniently
Forgetting Everything That Ever Happened’ -gambit, and the ‘Questioning the Definitions of
Even Real Simple Words Like “Implement”‘ – ruse. All they needed to complete their image of
cartoonish evil was waxed, black Snidely Whiplash mustaches.
It was a war of attrition, with the subcommittee ultimately failing to get anywhere as the
lawyers found all kinds of ways not to actually answer any questions and to casually insult the
persons asking them.
“Yoo has described his role as a lawyer advising a client, in this case the CIA, NSA and other
federal agencies, not as a policymaker,” wrote John Bresnahan for CBS News. “Yoo has also
repeatedly said that he has been told by the Justice Dept. that he cannot answer specifics of
what went on within the Bush administration regarding debates over interrogation policy. Yoo
has cited attorney-client privilege, or said he would be forced to divulge classified information
in order to respond.”
In short: I’d tell you, but then I’d have to shoot you.
“And I would have waterboarded all of the children of our enemy combatants and buried them
alive, too – if it weren’t for you meddling kids,” Addington didn’t say, but may as well have
said, given the impression he left with everyone who still cares about stuff like common
courtesy and politesse.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Washington Monument, Amnesty International opened
their “Guantanamo prison cell replica” on the National Mall, because nothing fights torture like
a diorama.
Perhaps next year, Amnesty International can convince Brad and Angelina to adopt a
Guantanamo detainee – until then, fiends, few people will really be very aware of any of this.
But in the scheme of things, it’s all just part of America’s awkward coming-of-age. But if
Lindsay Lohan can turn over a new leaf, perhaps so can the White House.
While “Furries” (persons possessing the unfortunate predilection of only being able to achieve
their most ideal sexual satisfaction by dressing up in plush, anthropomorphic, animal mascot
suits) have become so accepted as to be almost mainstream since they were “outed” in
<em>Vanity Fair several years ago, “Infantalism” devotees — grown men and women who like
to dress up like toddlers, role-play Disney movies, sit in oversize high-chairs, drink from nipple-
bottles and have their diapers changed — are still forced to indulge their fantasies
underground.Secrecy, of course, makes perversions fester and squeeze out into the culture in
other inappropriate and perverse ways; and the infantile seems to have been leaking out all
over, lately — from the population explosion of the Jolie-Pitt nation-state, to Washington’s
enduring affection for worlds within worlds of make-believe.
Congress, for example, has been wearing their ‘angry eyes’ at Attorney General Mike
Mukasey, while pretending to cite him for contempt of congress.But it’s OK – they’re not
actually angry, and won’t mean anything unless congress starts exercising ‘inherent contempt’
— i.e. sending the Sergeant of Arms over to the homes of Mike Mukasey, Karl Rove, Harriet
Miers, Alberto Gonzalesand all the other kids that used “executive privilege” to ignore their
subpoenas — and pistol-whipping them into compliance.
Dana Milbank of the Washington Post wrote a droll piece about congress, and the way they
put on a funny show of talking to Mr. Rove, who wore his Cloak of Invisibility during the
ongoing flim-flam thingy about Valerie Plame Wilson.Karl didn’t actually show up for the
hearing, because he is far too important, but he did send along a note from Fred Fielding,
which apparently said something like, “Mr. Rove is on a tropical island.He ate all the FBI files
and White House hard-drives with fava beans and a Virginia Chianti.You’ll never catch him
alive, bwah hah ha ha ha ha.”
Our congress was so sporting, they took this kooky puppet show that used to be democracy all
the way… and dove even further through the looking glass, by actually addressing their
proceedings to an empty chair with Karl Rove’s name on it! According to Milbank, they actually
scolded Rove’s chair…which is sort of like wagging your finger at him in effigy. Ho ho! Ha ha!
You can get toy congressional subpoenas for the kids, now, in pink and light green and blue
razzleberry.It’s sort of like going to one of those Wild West booths in an amusement park and
putting on a black handlebar mustache and getting photographed behind bars with a gun that
shoots a little flag that says “Bang!” Congressional subpoenas are fun now that they don’t
mean anything anymore — sort of like twenty-dollar bills.
But if you’re a kid from nine to ninety who really thinks the rule of law is more fun than Silly
Sand, there’s “Mr. Kucinich’s Fraktabulous Make-Believe Impeachment-Hearing,” which will be
exactly like a real live impeachment hearing, if you use the power of imagination… and even
like a real live dog and a pony show,if you bring your own dog, and a plastic Pegasus with a
long, combable mane, and you drink enough sippy-cups brimming with Seagrams Gin n’ Juice
to believe that the dogs and ponies actually do things after a while.
(But they won’t do things, really; you’ll just be drunk.)
Nancy Pelosi has assured Americans that nothing will happen as a result of articles of
impeachment being brought to the judiciary committee. Silly Americans: the House won’t vote
on impeachment.The hearings will focus on”general abuses of power”–“abuses” being
different from actual “crimes,”in that they’re not actually impeachable offenses, at least in
wacky wiggly moon-man lawyer-talk. So everyone is going to enjoy themselves performing this
bit of community theater, and afterward they’ll go out and eat banana splits with little paper
American flags and sparklers all over them.
Finally, Vanity Fair’s Christopher Hitchens, play-acting at journalistic bravery, just like Geraldo
Rivera, and went and got himself”waterboarded” so he could weigh in with the definitive
statement about whether or not “waterboarding” is actually”torture.”You’ll all be relieved to
know that Hitchins, who cleverly deduced earlier this year that women aren’t funny,has
declared that, in fact, waterboarding is torture!He should know; he tried it twice (because he
sort of wimped out too fast the first time and decided that he’d better try it again, and, you
know, really make sure it was torture). This is great news for our enemy combatants –
because if whining, over-soft half-men like Christopher Hitchins can endure waterboarding, it
really can’t be that bad.Waterboarding is probably going to be the next bungee-jumping.
Heck, they’ll probably have the Wii -version out next year.
And we’ll all stand in line for hours to buy it, won’t we, fiends; because it’s American.
Excerpts from a Department of Defense news briefing on November 20, 2002, during which
Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology Edward C. “Pete”
Aldridge fielded questions about DARPA’s Total Information Awareness program (source:
www.defenselink.mil):
Q: You described one of the functions as to establish connections between transactions…
Aldridge: And agencies.
Q: Right. Well, that sounds like a perpetual fishing expedition, as opposed to something for
which a search warrant would be sought. For example, if subject A withdrew a lot of money
and bought a crop duster, and then over here, bought chemicals that aren’t normally used for
crop dusting, that’s what sounds like you’re after. And you wouldn’t necessarily have a specific
search warrant for that kind of information…..
Sit right down, Fiends, and let your Old Aunt Dregula tell you a little story. Perhaps you’ve
heard these things before, but probably not in this order.
After 9/11, a certain Admiral John Poindexter — Ronald Reagan’s national security advisor –
came to DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) with an SAIC guy named
Brian Hicks, and pitched DARPA with a project that seemed like a good idea at the time.
In broad strokes: Poindexter wanted funding for a program called “Total Information
Awareness” – which would develop and deploy data-mining technologies. These applications
would arguably give intelligence, counterintelligence and law enforcement agencies a vital leg-
up in surveillance in the suddenly “asymmetric” war environment of post- 9/11. DARPA got a
big influx of money from a grateful Congress; John Poindexter was installed as the new project
manager at DARPA’s newly formed Information Awareness Office, and the future of illegal
American domestic wiretapping was off to the races.
The project had problems right off the bat with their image: nobody felt terribly comfortable
letting a guy like Poindexter — an Iran-Contra alumni and convicted felon – project manage a
department that was already crayoning way outside the lines and even off the pages in terms
of potential violations of privacy.
Civil liberties activists went into a tailspin about the ramifications TIA might have: a mass-
surveillance system used to scrutinize the private information of American citizens.
(TIA’s crypto-totalitarian logo – an angry blazing eye at the top of a pyramid, staring Big
Brotherly rays of scorching omniscience at certain sections of a hapless and naked globe —
didn’t put any minds at rest, either. )
DARPA tried to save the program in February 2003 by changing the name of TIA to the
“Terrorist Information Office” – making the focus of the terrible eye in the sky more explicitly
non-citizen offending — but Congress freaked out anyway, and stopped funding the
Information Awareness Office in 2003.
The project never stopped, though. It slipped into the shadows. Funding came from
elsewhere…other, murkier budgets from the Dark Side, devoted to your national security.
Result: the technologies were soundly developed and deployed in precisely the ways that
Congress was afraid they would be.
Data mining works by casting the widest possible net – all available data – to encompass the
broadest possible number of transactions, as opposed to focusing on individuals in whom law
enforcement has specific interests. It’s less like a perpetual fishing expedition than a perpetual
reef-dynamiting, in terms of information gathering and wholesale privacy violations.
What nobody seems to have anticipated then was that the agencies who would implement the
most widespread abuses of the technologies advanced by TIA would be private corporations
like Verizon and Comcast, who proved entirely willing and even patriotically eager to sell out
the privacy of their customers by volunteering what they presumed to be their private data to
be scrutinized with this new technology.
Opa! Shortly after TIA disappeared, suddenly the phone calls and internet traffic of American
citizens were being trolled by the NSA, with no warrants whatsoever. Data that was previously
considered “your private information” in the pre -9/11 world: bank records, hospital records,
credit card data, website URL’s you view in your own home — are now, ostensibly,
unprotected (for your own protection), gathered, and apparently… for sale.
This week we have the NebuAd scandal. According to WIRED, NebuAd, an
online advertising firm, “pays ISPs to let it eavesdrop on web users.”
This, however is not just passive data-collection. NebuAd “doesn’t just passively record traffic,
but actively injects fake packets into responses from other websites in order to deliver cookies
to users.”
In other words, NebuAd is, in all likelihood, just the tip of the iceberg. Data mining technology
is everywhere, now – and it’s not just used to fight terrorists anymore. Now it hacks into the
privacy of internet users, for no reason other than bold, capitalistic impulse-looting.
Corporations apparently have just as much right to your private information as law-
enforcement communities and security agencies. Hey, they only want to read your mind so
they can make you even happier than you already are! What’s wrong with that?
It’s future, fiends… just not the one you wanted.
STAYS IN IRAQ
cintra The Dregulator, The Dregulator 2007 1 Comment

Oil has hit $132 a barrel, which could be why Dick Cheney felt comfortable addressing
graduating cadets at the U. S. Coast Guard academy in Connecticut on May 21 while
wearing a ten-gallon cowboy hat.
(Why he thought a Texas Pope hat was an appropriate look for New London is a
mystery, unless Arby’s unveiled a line of men’s formalwear with their new Bacon Beef
sandwich.)
Cognitive dissonance is nothing new for our VP, who surreally told the new Coast
Guard officers that the troop surge in Iraq “has succeeded brilliantly.”
“The only way to lose this fight is to quit. That would be irresponsible,” Cheney said.
“More than that, quitting would be an act of betrayal and dishonor.”
Betrayal to, and dishonor in the eyes of….Dick Cheney, presumably.
The TV Guide summary of Cheney’s commencement speech might read: ‘VP pre-
emptively shames Coast Guard in anticipation of his horrible policies overturned.’
Quitting the fight he invented may be an act of dishonor, but allegations of
mismanagement, corruption, cronyism, over-billing, and fraud among contractors
directly related to his ex-company apparently don’t bother Mr. Cheney so much.
KBR (a division of Haliburton), DynCorp, and a third firm, just landed a 10-year
contract worth up to $150 billion… and there’s still nobody watching the cash register.
KBR has been accused – again — by ex-employees of engaging in brazen racketeering,
according to Bruce Falconer of Mother Jones.
“Three whistleblowers before the Senate’s Democratic Policy Committee (DPC)
accused U.S. private contractors of looting Iraqi palaces and ministries, stealing military
equipment, fencing supplies destined for U.S. troops, and even operating a prostitution
ring.”
Former KBR employee Frank Cassaday told the committee:
“The ice foreman was cheating the troops out of ice at the same time that he was trading
the ice for DVDs, CDs, food, and other items at the Iraqi shops across the street.”
Cassaday later said that he observed co-workers bringing stolen U.S. military equipment
to the KBR camp, including artillery round detonators, rocket launchers, and rounds of
small arms ammunition. The thefts of U.S. military equipment and supplies, wrote
Falconer, are so pervasive they are nicknamed “drug deals” by KBR employees.
But KBR officials don’t like a snitch.
When Cassaday told his KBR superiors what he’d seen, KBR security officers held him
in his tent for two days, transferred him into “protective custody” for four more, then
transferred him to work in a laundry, “against his will.”
Linda Warren, another former KBR employee, told the DPC that KBR employees
performing construction duties were not only “…looting, but they had a system in place
to get contraband out of the country so it could be sold on eBay. They stole artwork,
rugs, crystal, and even melted down gold to make spurs for cowboy boots.”
Ms. Warren, too, was sucker-punched by KBR brass: her vehicle was taken, her access
to phones and the Internet were cut off; she was eventually transferred out of Baghdad.
Barry Halley, a former project manager for a Dyncorp subcontractor, told the
committee, “A co-worker… was killed when he was traveling in an unsecure car and
shot performing a high-risk mission…I believe that my co-worker could have survived
if he had been riding in an armored car. At the time, the armored car…. was being used
by a manager to transport prostitutes from Kuwait to Baghdad.”
This is not new allegation for Dyncorp. Dyncorp has been accused by ex-employees of
being directly involved in human trafficking and child prostitution rings as early as
1999.
Ex-DynCorp employee Ben Johnston,an aircraft-maintenance technician, blew the
whistle on DynCorp’s practice of buying underage girls in Bosnia for use as sex slaves,
according to a 2002 article in Insight Magazine by Kelly Patricia O’Meara.
“(The girls) were from Russia, Romania and other places, and they were imported in by
DynCorp and the Serbian mafia. These guys would say ‘I gotta go to Serbia this
weekend to pick up three girls.’ They talk about it and brag about how much they pay
for them – usually between $600 and $800. …(T)here was this one guy who had to be
60 years old who had a girl who couldn’t have been 14. DynCorp leadership was 100
percent in bed with the mafia over there.”
Johnston too, was sacked for these revelations; a RICO statute (Racketeer Influenced
Corrupt Organization Act) lawsuit was filed on his behalf in Texas.
Christine Dolan, founder of the International Humanitarian Campaign Against the
Exploitation of Children, told O’Meara:
“(W)hat makes this more egregious for the U.S. is that our purpose in those regions is to
restore some sense of civility. Now you’ve got employees of U.S. contractors in bed
with the local mafia and buying kids for sex! ….The message we’re sending to kids is
that it’s okay for America’s representatives to rape children.”
The DPC, a partisan committee, sadly has no power to pass legislation, but it did wring
its hands – and it will “refer allegations to the Department of Justice and the Pentagon’s
Inspector General for further investigation,” the DPC’s communications director told
Falconer.
Senate Republicans have blocked measures that would boost increased oversight for
private military contractors.
Still a whole lot of cowboy hats in DC, fiends. Yipeee.
“If we get chased out of Iraq with our tail between our legs, that will be the fifth consecutive
Third-world country with no hint of a Navy or an Air Force to have whipped us in the past 40
years.”
— Hunter S. Thompson, November 18, 2003
Iowa, Schmiowa. Huckabee, Schmuckabee. Hilary…dammit.
Maybe it’s just the paranoia talking, but Obama’s unquestionable sex-appeal notwithstanding,
Iowa felt a little witch-burn-y. At the end of the day, boys still hate girls, girls still hate girls, and
everyone hates mom-age women with a lot of hard wind in their lungs, unless they happen to
be old whores with hearts of gold. Even Oprah is looking a bit thyroid and shrill now that she’s
thrown her huge hat into the Ring of Power and dedicated her stupendous influence to
manifesting something other than unconditional self-love.
Hilary’s defeat recalled, for me, the words of Ice Cube: “They’d rather see me in the pen/than
me and Lorenzo/rollin’ in a Benzo.”
Plenty of people would rather see Hilary’s heat chained next to Martha Stewart and Paris
Hilton than have her ovulate in the Oval Office. Yoko Ono was right – women are the N-word
of the world. After this six-year trip down Christian Republican hegemony-lane, if you have
three holes in your body and want any serious reverence, you’d better be a bowling ball.
Ironically, Hilary might have one last-ditch, all-or-nothing chance to win American female
hearts and minds: she needs to be busted in a torrid extramarital affair. This would endear her
to tabloid housewives to a degree incomprehensible by the ruling class. The supermarket
shoppers of America would gladly forgive Hilary if she’d only whup out a genuinely female
display of poor judgment based on something as real and irrational as human Love. But she’s
not that kind of animal, and they know it, and that’s why they don’t like her. Staying with Bill,
after all, was politically prudent, and even women whose greatest intellectual
accomplishments to date involve using food stamps to buy menthol cigarettes understand that
this represents a rather scurvy compromise in terms of quantifiable human feeling. Hilary, as
the queens in “Paris is Burning” might have said, just doesn’t possess Lady Realness.
Americans are so romantic and/or brain-damaged by Hollywood narratives that they would
rather gamble everything on a dreamboat trip to an unknown destination (Obama) than re-
invest in an older, wiser, proven disappointment (Hilary). As a country, we are still haplessly
immature and emotionally retarded by the Power of Dumb Mythology (i.e. the gratifyingly
infantile World of Disney, as opposed to the hardcore and sometimes depressing Joseph
Campbell). Our crazy-dreamer-style political decision-making is based on a totally optimistic
disregard for actual politics, the learning process, and logic in general. We’ve been absolutely
clobbered at the table in the last 6 years, but we’re still voting from instinct instead of intellect.
Americans would rather play Texas Hold’Em than learn to calculate probabilities… but the
interesting and encouraging thing about Americans is that we will eventually learn to calculate
probabilities by playing Texas Hold’Em.
It’s our great talent, and only hope for competing with the stunningly self-abnegating,
industrious groupthink of the Chinese: we still have the accidental genius that seems to
happen when spoiled Americans overindulge themselves. Elvis. Madonna. Lowrider bicycles.
Richard Pryor. Miles Davis. Gay fabulousness. Grand Theft Auto.
These are our proudest exports: bursts of louche creative expression that have always been
slightly too controversial, sexy, and intoxicating for our politicians to get too close to.
Obama isn’t as developed on the issues as Hilary, but nobody cares: he’s got superstar magic,
he’s the new TV toy consumers crave. The Presidency, ultimately, will probably go to the
candidate wearing the biggest codpiece, again. There’s still a slim chance it might be Hilary,
even if the junk in her trunk is alarmingly foreign to Commanders in Chief, and Americans
squirm like tweens when she tells them what to do. But it’s doubtful; Obama put the hammer
down, everyone’s skirt blew up, and that’s how the nuts are dealt.
The next President will inherit a horrible job. The lifelong enmity of a lot of guys named
Muhammad. Light sweet crude at $100 a barrel.
A Justice Department that will doubtlessly continue to investigate itself in connection to
ongoing investigations of itself.
But there is hope, audacious and otherwise. Americans are geniuses when it comes to effing
around. All it’s going to take is one guy who comes up with a car that runs on crack, and our
whole economy will boom all over again.
Dramatic reversals, fiends. It’s the one thing about life that Hollywood ever got right.
Rupert Murdoch finally got his dirty wish: he made the Bancroft Family an offer they could not
refuse. After months of bloody wrangling, Murdoch now owns a powerful 62% controlling
interest in the brains of all human beings.
With $5 billion on the table, Bancroft fought Bancroft. They wept, they rended their Hermès
garments and gnashed their laminated teeth. They consulted with their bankers, lawyers, Wall
Street advisors and other economic land sharks (who were all rumored to have been paid off
by Murdoch’s News Corporation, thus ensuring that the hapless, feeble-minded Bancrofts
would be poorly advised) because they really had no deep knowledge of what they owned or
how it worked.
The head Bancroft, Christopher, put up a good fight to selling out his family paper to the Prince
of Lies. But ultimately, Christopher’s brother, Hugh Bancroft, his niece, champion
equestrienne Elizabeth Goth Chelberg, and a host of other weak-willed, sniveling, ninny
Bancrofts forced the principled members of the family to buckle under to their whinging self-
interests. The Bancrofts took the fat dollar, turned out Dow Jones & Company like a Ukrainian
swimsuit model, welched on their own family motto (“Never sell Grandpa’s paper”), and sold
one of the last great enclaves of independent American journalism down the river, to the Dark
Lord.
Now, the front page of the Wall Street Journal will have elegant ink dot hedcut illustrations of
Britney’s torso-cellulite, boobies on page 6, and lots of domestic propaganda about how
patriotic it is to bomb foreign countries and loot them.
Elizabeth Goth Chelberg, in the meantime, according to the Monnington-Morgans UK website,
was recently congratulated for her purchase of a “wonderful Five Gaited Stallion” named “Calif
First Night Out.”
Hey! Enjoy that pony, Elizabeth. It only cost your fellow Americans a massive step backward in
their ability to make informed decisions based on anything resembling ontological Truth, for
generations to come.
Ride the pretty pony. Ride, ride, ride. Pretty, pretty, pony.
The late Christopher Reeve lost his spine horseback riding, but apparently there’s more than
one way.
But hey: Elizabeth really needed a new pony, and her needs are important too. We shouldn’t
saddle her with too much blame, or declare she suffers from galloping, unbridled greed or
anything.
And maybe we shouldn’t worry so much. Giving Rupert Murdoch custody of another major
news outlet is probably no more irresponsible, than, say, giving NFL quarterback Michael Vick
several hundred unwanted puppies, or Lindsay Lohan an Evian bottle full of Gray Goose and a
new driver’s license.
Too bad the older, smarter Bancrofts didn’t cut off their heirs the way Brandon “Greasy Dear”
Davis’s oil tycoon family recently cut him off.
Sudden poverty will be an interesting change for Brandon, whose career, up to now, has
primarily consisted of getting extremely drunk and loaded in hotels on hyperextended credit
cards and saying disparaging things about the genitalia of starlets he has had sex with.
Tragedies can be good for spoiled, lazy, self-indulgent little girls like Brandon Davis. Just look at
Paris Hilton, who as we know, found God and vowed to become smart after a short stint in
prison. Hunger artist Nicole Richie, too, has seen the errors of her ways, now that she’s
knocked-up and going to the pokey for driving on Vicodin.
“I owe this baby my life,” Richie told Diane Sawyer on Good Morning America.
“I have a responsibility now for someone else. I have to set the right examples. I want to be the
best parent I can be. I would really want to be someone my child would look up to.”
While parenthood didn’t work as an instant shaper-upper for Britney Spears or Anna Nicole
Smith or Dina Lohan – or, apparently, any of the Bancrofts –poverty seems to be the Great
Rehabilitator. It seems to have inspired a plucky usefulness in former rich girl Tori Spelling,
who now runs a bed & breakfast and performs gay weddings.
Perhaps Brandon Davis can become a janitor for the Chateau Marmont, after he gets out of
jail, and heal his place in society by cleaning up messes similar to so many he’s made.
Maybe Elizabeth Goth Chelberg will have a “come to Jesus moment” after her guilty
conscience causes her to DUI her new stallion into a Bentley. Perhaps the Equestrian Highway
Patrol will find large quantities of unknown substances in her jodhpurs – like, a wallet full of
bills in denominations so large that few mortals have ever seen them.
But, as 78-year-old Gil Won-ok told the New York Times, “Truth survives and lies never win.”
Won-ok is a South Korean woman who was forced to be a sex-slave for the Japanese military
during World War II.
Those are damned optimistic words for an old lady who has yet to receive a formal apology
from the Japanese government for raping her. Kudos, Gil Won-ok. Elizabeth Chelberg should
buy YOU a pony.
And then she should go to jail.
Decoding the Southern belle: “I have
always thought of Southern belles as a
super-elite task force of lethally
disciplined femininity”
Would being around Southern women inspire me into
undergoing some kind of Eliza Doolittle–style
transformation?
Cintra Wilson

Excerpted from "Fear and Clothing: Unbuckling American Style"

As God as my witness they’re not going to lick me. I’m going to live through this and
when it’s all over, I’ll never be hungry again. No, nor any of my folk. I will lie, steal,
cheat, or kill. As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again. — Scarlett O’Hara in
Gone With the Wind

Nothing has been more complicated or difficult for me to wrap my head around and
write about than the sartorial codes of the Southern belle.

I grew up in the Bay Area, brain-laundered by feminism. My mother always called

excessively feminine women “Uncle Toms.” I grew up snickering at French manicures
and Cosmopolitan magazine; I thought they represented the kind of training that
advanced risible sluts gave to up-and-coming risible sluts.

On some level, I thought, there was a fundamental sameness between boys and girls.
But this has led me to a world of dashed hopes and bruised expectations, because it is
basically wrong.

Southern women have never suffered from these coastal delusions. They have always
known that men are Not Like Women. They don’t treat men like equals; they treat men
like men. They know they’re not interacting as one human mind to another, but
assembling, in each conversation, a ballet of gesticulations, a music of pleasant
speech—a web of evolutionary biology–savvy, subconscious trigger points designed to
charm, delight, amuse, and ensnare.

I always thought such blatantly deployed feminine -finesse was . . . lying, essentially. I
thought manipulating people to get what you wanted was evil. I always thought that
excessively performative femininity was a kind of black magic.

Since Miami, I had become self-conscious about my own fashion handicaps. After
several years as a fashion critic, I -firmly believed that the best clothing inspires fear. I
had succumbed to a regrettable affection for shiny black things with superfluous
zippers. After growing up an uncouth, anti-establishment person informed by punk rock
and drag queens, I had let these tendencies ferment in New York unto the point where I
was dressing like I just got deported from the sadomasochistic Death Star.

Before departing for points even deeper South, I was beginning to realize, having been
pulling forty for some time, that I had never been taught—and in fact had deliberately
avoided learning—all those subtle arts and maneuvers of feminine charm, -finesse, and
tact.

Lately, when reflecting upon my abysmal romantic track record, I had been questioning
the intelligence of avoiding these skills that might make me a more viable female. I felt
I was being perceived as fairly frightening to all but the most adventurous and
vainglorious (read: sociopathic) males. Architecturally, fashion had become a moat that
was keeping most people at a distance from me, and I was feeling like I didn’t know
how to lower the drawbridge anymore, even if I wanted to. I wanted to learn how to
have the option of being softer—if this was possible.

I hoped that being around Southern women might inspire me into undergoing some kind
of Eliza Doolittle–style transformation. I have always thought of Southern belles as a
super-elite task force of lethally disciplined femininity—like the Spartans. In my
experience, they were wicked-smart academics who also ampli-ed and honed their
natural beauty, grace, and charm until they, too, were advanced weaponry. I recognized
them as being exceptionally well-versed in all of the codebreaking and covert
psychological operations necessary for competitive, ruthless, and dead-serious sexual
combat.

I -figured I could probably use their help.

Across the aisle on my plane to Birmingham (my -first trip to Alabama) was an ageless
woman, hovering in a time lock somewhere between -fifty-eight and seventy-eight. Her
curls might have been carved from cinnabar. Full face of precisely applied “natural”
makeup, bright gems, gold jewelry, spangled zebra-print shirt.

I leaned over. “Ma’am, I am a fashion writer, and I must ask: how does someone
become as lovely as you are?”

She lit up like a Christmas window. “Thank kyew!” she twinkled, with the graciously
tilted eyes and beauty-pageant smile of a woman who has heard that compliment her
entire life. “Well, my grandmother is turning a hundred this week. She was raised that
way, and she raised my mother that way, and my mother raised me.”

Her warm, trilling voice, tuberose perfume, and swirling diamonds all harmonized into
a beguiling, welcoming spectacle, like a hazy waterfall soundtracked by Mantovani’s
Cascading Strings. Her style-text spoke to me of a wholly absorbing domestic life. The
gumball-sized grey pearl, I guessed, was her silver anniversary present from her
husband. Her imperturbable hair gave me visions of the right napkin rings and
monogrammed towel sets. It occurred to me that she wasn’t just wearing her house—
she was her house. Just as her mother had once lived inside her grandmother/house, she
had lived inside her mother/house—a generational chain of nesting wooden dolls.
If her hands were her living room, her expert charm was the ultimate set of blackout
drapes. I had no idea, while she spoke, if she was actually being sweet to me. She
giggled so wickedly with her companion a minute later, I had to wonder.

***

- “Finesse. This is the word you need to meditate on. Finesse is the thing you need to
cultivate,” advised my longtime friend Dirty Bobby as we dined in Birmingham’s Chez
Fon Fon, a chic eatery full of overweight white men in at-front khakis and button-up
blue checked shirts on dates with hyper-fi-t, signi-ficantly younger women with
abundant hair, over-perfect posture, and important handbags. Dirty Bobby had lived
around the West Coast for years before -finally returning to his roots in Alabama to
become, like his daddy, a Southern patriarch. Dirty Bobby was extremely worried that I
would offend his Southern people by being my usual brash and tactless self (urbane,
ADHD types like myself having the unfortunate social handicap of saying exactly what
we mean).

“We got a good thing going on here. Have you ever heard the term ‘laughing like a
loon’? I hang out with surgeons on lakes that have actual loons laughing. If you fuck it
up for me, I’ll have to come to New York and break your kneecaps.”

“Seriously,” he said. “The South is very conservative. Let’s put it this way—we still
talk about the Civil War.” (Subtext: we may have been friends for half our lives, but
here you keep your Yankee shit offmy porch.)

I summarized, for Dirty Bobby, the narrative I’d been told about Southern women at the
Kentucky Derby. To wit: Southern belles get top-shelf educations, mainly in pursuit of a
MRS degree—land a husband, redecorate, and have kids. When the husband cheats,
they get law degrees, then expertly gouge their husbands in legendarily brutal divorces.

“Yes, but women all over do that,” said Dirty Bobby.

Actually, no.

I had never known a single woman in LA, SF, or NYC who had openly aspired to a life
of motherly leisure. The women I knew who got sterling degrees from pedigreed
universities did it because they wanted real careers. Children were a brief hiatus in their
otherwise unrelenting attack on the professional world. Divorces were usually resolved
as early and as amicably as possible. Men, especially ex-husbands, rarely occupied the
lion’s share of their attention.

The sexual politics of the South—as manifest in the way the ladies still dress (and the
way they non-ironically call themselves “ladies”)—all seemed to fall voluntarily into
submission to the aristocratic patriarchy, the old one belonging to the myth of an
antebellum Eden from which Southerners were so rudely expelled. The feminist theorist
Judith Butler described Southern belles as participating in a “regulatory -fiction” of
gender performance, which upholds the social status quo. Southern social codes are
heavily colored by the Old Southern tradition of hospitality. The noble lady is the
beautiful home; the chaste daughter is its vulnerability; the honorable father is their
protector. The beautiful, well-bred, educated Southern belle, corseted by diets and
hobbled by heels, pollenates with alluring cues of frailty, that she may be answered by
the gallant ministrations of a Southern gentleman.

“There’s a delicate ballet that happens here,” my new BFF Dr. Julie Steward explained
over cocktails at my hotel bar, the next night. Dr. Steward, a gorgeous blonde with big
nerdy glasses, is a literary theory professor and former Future Farmers of America
beauty queen whom I was fortunate to connect with through mutual friends. She had
grown up in rural Texas and relocated to Alabama—not as easy a transition as one
might think. She had endured no small dose of culture shock. “Texans are not
Southerners,” she clarifi-ed. “It took me a year to -figure out that men always open the
door for you.

“Any door. Men you don’t know. A man needs to open that door for you.” Southern
belles, Julie explained, had a different approach to feminine power: “Ixnay on eminist-
fay. That’s the f-word,” she continued. “If women like us aren’t using our femininity
strategically [Belles think], we just aren’t even being smart. Southern women are not
going to have power in the overt ways—they have it in covert ways. It’s not like they
reject the idea of female accomplishment; it’s that they’ve seen feminism in a utilitarian
way, as not being a productive means of getting what they want.

“Why do you and I reject that?” she asked, quite seriously.

We looked at each other in silence. I was asking myself the same question.

The next day, looking at clothes in a quaint row of retail shops, I stopped in front of a
window display of a little boutique that seemed fashion-forward for the South—I was
charmed by a cheerleader dress that someone had made out of butcher paper. That was
how I met the owner, Brittany Hartwell, the Southern belle who, in my opinion, came to
represent the best balance of all possible feminine worlds in that fretful fashion region:
she is a sassy, funny, cool, self-actualized chick who also happens to have been raised
to be a real, honest-to-Christmas Southern belle.

In grammar school, Brittany told me over cocktails with Dr. Steward, she had been
taught etiquette, charm, and how to give a camera the best possible smile by a
glamorous Sunday school teacher. In high school, she was chosen to be a Hoover Belle,
which is a serious honor in Alabama; girls selected for their loveliness and gracious
behavior are allowed to stand prettily around public and civic events in hoop skirts and
sun hats.

Southern belles, I commented, all seemed to want to -find their Rhett Butler.

“The girls around here all want to marry their high school sweetheart and move to
Mountain Brook,” Brittany agreed.

Mountain Brook—locally known as the Tiny Kingdom—is Birmingham’s wealthiest

enclave. (It is perhaps best known for being the home of Natalee Holloway, a teenage
blonde who was murdered in Aruba by a privileged young European man named Joran
van der Sloot.)
What had changed the trajectory of Brittany’s life, I learned, was that she had survived
the ultimate ego-death of a Southern belle—a broken engagement to her high-school
sweetheart. The devastating impact of this, in the South, really can’t be overstated.

Every American parent I know of a toddler-age girl child has had to fret over what is
casually known as “the Disney princess thing.” There is a social and consumer
conditioning that is Trojan-horsed into girl children through the princess—the spangly
pink dress is a gateway dress that leads to Barbie clothes. Barbie begets prom dresses,
then harder stuff, especially in the South: cotillion formals or beauty pageant gowns.
But encoded in every party dress (and it’s really all the same dress) is the same
unspoken goal: marriage to the handsome prince, living happily ever after in the castle
on the hill, in the Tiny Kingdom.

Down South, you are supposed to marry your high school boyfriend. That is the proper
narrative. If your life doesn’t work out that way, you are essentially exiled from the
herd.

Brittany, thus ostracized, was forced to evolve. She went to a different school, where
she found two real and sustainable passions: her husband, Brandon—an exceptionally
smart, good-looking guy—and the inspiration for her boutique: eco-fashion.

Ms. Hartwell had opened Molly Green to introduce the ladies of Birmingham to clothes
manufactured in local and/or otherwise sustainable ways. Molly Green, Brittany said,
was an act of love: she wanted to share her hard-won joys and discoveries with her
Southern sisters, and open up a whole new direction for Southern femininity. However,
she was struggling to fi-nd her audience, due to the strict conformity of local ladies and
the rules of their sartorial tribe.

“It’s hard for Southern women to change styles,” Brittany sighed. “People just aren’t
malleable in the South.”

Dr. Julie Steward assessed local women’s clothing in the area as being highly based on
SEC football. Brittany emphatically agreed. “The boutiques I connect with on Facebook
are all asking, ‘Do you have your game-day out-fit?’”

“Game-day outfi-ts” are, in fact, so incredibly important to the Southern female

wardrobe that I was compelled to drive with a photographer friend Brinky to Oxford,
Mississippi, to girl-watch after the fi-rst home game at Ole Miss, “the Harvard of the
South.”

Hugh Hefner has proclaimed that there are more beautiful girls on the Ole Miss campus
than anywhere else. There did seem to be a glut of that particular type of beauty—
Gattaca-level triumphs of all-American eugenics: button-nose blondes with long
butterscotch legs, waist-length ironed Barbie hair, guileless baby-blue eyes. Most were
wearing mini sundresses in Easter egg colors, with pearls. A few were, indeed, wearing
padded shoulder minidress versions of the team football jersey.

***
If Brittany was Birmingham’s Scarlett O’Hara—the self-sufficient woman—Amy
Bailey is its Melanie Wilkes.

Miss Mellie in Gone with the Wind is everything a Southern belle is supposed to be: so
excruciatingly well-bred that there is no ugliness in her to be found, in any corner of her
home or her psyche. She is the loving ideal—grace, elegance, kindness, chastity,
selessness. She performs herself with effortless, ceaseless prettiness, and no hell-fire.
All is softness and hospitality—and a certain learned helplessness and ampli-ed frailty
which forces men to carry her luggage. Miss Mellie never wags anything but a smiling,
loving, maternal -finger at men, as if their transgressions were some adorably
precocious thing done by her own toddler son.

Back in Birmingham, a hurricane was raging; water killed all the electricity in the hotel,
and turned the commercial streets into little brown rivers. I brought Brinky along to
meet Amy Bailey—a society It Girl around Atlanta and Birmingham who runs an
influential fashion blog. She was adorable, scampering in from the rain in her high-
heeled boots. She peeled off a white trench coat to reveal little jean shorts and a flesh-
colored silk blouse with a navy blue bra underneath. She was clearly proud of her
décolletage—quite ample for such a slim young lady. I detected vocal coaching in the
musicality of her laugh; she confessed she’d had training for both singing and
television. She had participated in “beauty walks,” and she could sing. She was in all
ways a perfect feminine ornament, designed to be loved, cherished, and admired.

Some women get whatever they want all the time, and know how to get away with it.

In an open-handed demonstration of feminine wiles, in Gone with the Wind, Scarlett

smirks to herself before putting the new hat Rhett Butler has brought her from Paris on
backward, in order to let Rhett show her how to wear it—she allows herself to be
scolded by him as he ties the satin bow under her chin. It makes Rhett feel capable,
necessary.

I never thought that kind of shit would actually work with real men, which was why I
was agog when Amy delicately leaned against Brinky’s shoulder and asked him how to
use some function of her own iPhone (and perhaps give him a better view of her lovely
blouse).

Right, I sat there thinking. Like he’s going to believe that this smart girl, who runs her
own fashion website, doesn’t know how to use her own phone. I almost laughed out
loud, until I saw that it was working. Brinky couldn’t help himself. He’d taken the bait,
hook, line, and sinker, and was compulsively jabbering instructions at her like an Apple
Store Genius. Amy had handily tied him up in a big pink ribbon and had him
chuckering like a turtledove against her shoulder within three minutes of arrival. It was
formidable.

God, I realized (for the eighty-zillionth time in my life). Playing dumb swans right past
men’s conscious/intellectual defenses, as lethally as psychological depth-marketing.
Amy had tipped Brinky’s hat brim down and made all the marbles roll out of his brain
and down the front of her blouse, just like that. What may look like the most artless
connivance to other women sure as shit wraps men around a girl’s -finger. It’s awful to
watch; the men look so dumb when they fall for it, but God—they always fall for it.

There is a point at which you realize, with enormous dismay, that men do not respect
your femininity unless you are manipulating them with it.

A few rounds of drinks happened, like they do in the South. Amy, being very sweetly
candid, showed me a picture of her handsome husband, confi-ding (with laudable
candor and real vulnerability) that they had recently separated. He was dressed just like
the Ole Miss wolves in their Harvard sheepskin, preppy camouflage.

She related an anecdote about her toddler-age little girl. They had been at a wishing
well, and Amy had taught her daughter to throw a coin in and make a wish. She asked
her daughter what she had wished for.

“And she said, ‘Mommy, I want to -find my prince!’ and I said, ‘Oh, honey . . .’”
Amy’s eyes welled with real tears. “‘I hope you can think of other wishes besides that.’
”

The hurricane was still raging outside when we -finally left the restaurant. She invited
Brinky and me to her apartment for a nightcap, which we declined. It was late, and I
couldn’t drink anymore. The photographer and I unchivalrously watched lovely Amy
toddle home to her toddler alone after midnight, in the rain, under emergency
streetlights, in her high, high heels, while I punched him in the arm and teased him for
going Full Dunce around a pretty girl (which, like any red-blooded American male, he
naturally and vehemently denied). -

Excerpted from “Fear and Clothing: Unbuckling American Style” by Cintra Wilson.
Copyright © 2015 by Cintra Wilson. Reprinted by permission of W.W. Norton & Co.

Cintra Wilson is a culture critic and author whose books include "A Massive Swelling:
Celebrity Re-Examined as a Grotesque, Crippling Disease" and "Caligula for President:
Better American Living Through Tyranny." Her new book, "Fear and Clothing:
Unbuckling America's Fashion Destiny," will be published by WW Norton.
Elizabeth Taylor: Weapon of mass
obsession
Gay icon, screen siren, devastator of men -- for all her
majesty, the actress was also, surprisingly, human
Cintra Wilson

Last week, in Miami, I stayed at a self-described “gay hotel,” mostly for the kicky
interior: Every room featured, over the bed, an enormous photo portrait of Elizabeth
Taylor as Cleopatra. She was, after all, the ultimate queen.

A friend of mine in his 60s once told me the story of accidentally running into Elizabeth
Taylor with her entourage in an alley in New York. He was a successful model and
Princeton architect — no stranger among beautiful people. But the sight of Elizabeth,
even in the mid-’70s (when the wattage of her once perfect beauty was already slightly
dimmed), was, the way he described it, something like being shot with a gun in the
chest by Beauty itself. It wasn’t just her fearful symmetry, or her big-bang eyes, but the
power of her being, the animation of her character. For him it was life-altering — in a
lifetime of looking at art, that split-second encounter in a New York alley was still the
encounter with beauty that left him most dumbstruck, some 30 years later. What he felt
for Elizabeth Taylor instantly was something akin to the seismic power of pure love.

Like uranium, Elizabeth Taylor was an unstable element that could be variously refined
unto many enormous potentialities. She was a weapon of mass obsession that could be
deployed as a means of focusing tsunamis of international money. She was a love bomb
— and, like any bomb, the very fact of her existence was a phenomenon that demanded
a certain severe, almost Calvinist moral scrutiny. Such power, after all, is terrifying —
and the tabloids never seemed quite so grateful as when the person hardest hit by
Elizabeth Taylor’s own radioactive fallout was Taylor herself.

Elizabeth Taylor wasn’t a celebrity so much as a part of cultural consciousness with as

much resonance as an established religion or a letter of the alphabet — an impossible
equation that really irritated the scientific mind in people, since she was always
considerably more than the sum of her parts. Her majesty both inflamed and infuriated
men (for whom she had a crippling weakness and compulsion to collect).

Richard Burton kept his twice-wed wife in line by undermining her. The New York
Times obituary this morning had this ghastly quote:

The notion of (Richard Burton’s) wife as “the most beautiful woman in the world is
absolute nonsense,” he said. “She has wonderful eyes,” he added, “but she has a double
chin and an overdeveloped chest, and she’s rather short in the leg.”
This, I think, was how Burton kept his own ballast: by breaking Elizabeth down into
criticizable parts — bruised fender, bad hubcaps — he could teasingly deny her the
satisfaction of his comment on her as a total driving experience. He couldn’t
acknowledge all the power she had under the hood. It probably would have pleased her
too much, and upset their ongoing libidinous struggle to passionately conquer each
other.

Elizabeth Taylor’s collaboration with life compelled her to suffer: as if to atone for her
wealth, and smite her own perfect appearance. But these catastrophes created,
ultimately, a common experience and parity with her audience. Of all people, Elizabeth
Taylor is not a star that should have had the Common Touch, but she did. She was, in a
sense, her own portrait of Dorian Gray — a walking, talking Faustian contract replete
with whiplash plot points and reversals of fortune that might have killed someone not so
well grounded in their own humanity (like her dear young friend Michael Jackson).

The friendship she shared with Jackson, which seemed so utterly bizarre in the 1980s,
seems less so now: They were both declawed jaguars kept as ornaments dead center in
the dictatorship of fame. Their lives had been deprived of any semblance of normalcy
— but the suffering of human life is unavoidable, even for stars of such magnitude.
There is no cure for life, and this is where they must have been a comfort to each other.
Michael did not have Elizabeth’s fortitude of ego or breadth of character; he was, in the
end, tragically incapable of being a mere human being — but humanity was Elizabeth
Taylor’s fallback position, and her saving grace.

She was the only conceivable human embodiment of Cleopatra, and, offscreen, a sick,
lonely, grieving person of weak constitution, prone to grave illnesses and emotional
disasters. She was the impossible luxury of White Diamonds (one of her many
fragrances) — and she used this wild surplus of personal glamour to champion AIDS
back in the earliest days, when it was still perceived as the most frightening stigma on
earth — the bubonic plague of sexual deviants — when no other persons of rank and
profile had the balls to publicly acknowledge it, let alone lend their full weight to
raising money for medical research.

When Elizabeth Taylor’s full power was unleashed on-screen, her portrayals were more
than the sum of acting: She was capable of engraving herself in certain emotional states
on your consciousness forever, to the point of symbolizing them.

Her chemistry with Montgomery Clift was so palpable in “A Place in the Sun,” you can
practically taste both the honey and the razor blade of blinding new love on your own
tongue.

The itchy quality that Elizabeth brought to the role of Maggie the Cat in “Cat on a Hot
Tin Roof” traversed the screen and became the shorthand for that eternally wretched
feminine state of gnawing, incurable desire — that devouring inner combustion that
comes of wanting more from your experience of love than your love object is capable of
delivering.
er very first breakthrough role, in “National Velvet,” crystallized the sincere innocence
and honesty of a teenage girl in love with her horse, riding to the very limits of her
strength right into the fiery mess of life, with all its fear and pain and hope — sweetly,
bravely, with inspiring optimism. Elizabeth Taylor seemed to preserve this courageous
innocence in herself offscreen, through whatever life handed her: hails of rose petals
and diseases and pills and divorces and savage indignities like John Belushi. Her acting
worked so well because she was truthful with herself, and with us — a real, honest
citizen who cheerfully bore the punishments of her life while showing no bitterness and
protecting no vanity.

Various mystical cosmologies speak of the spiritual goal of dissolving into union with
the rest of everything — a process that is usually achieved through the dismantling and
gradual erosion of the ego, unto enlightenment (or its cultural equivalent).

Even at the center of attention in Hollywood, Elizabeth Taylor was never too precious
to protect herself from ego plunder. She engaged with life on its own terms, even as it
periodically killed her hopes and her looks and her love life and her health and her
reputation. Ultimately, she was unperturbed, and unshakably generous in her good
humor, particularly when the jokes were at her expense. She bravely put her best chin
forward and gave life the simple love of an honest, human, achingly beautiful young
girl.

Elizabeth Taylor was an impossible vision driving by in a dreamy convertible that every
girl wants to be and every boy wants to marry. She leaves in her wake a dazzling aura, a
lingering whiff of perfume, a red-hot sexual need and an enduring, indestructible ability
to inspire love.

Cintra Wilson is a culture critic and author whose books include "A Massive Swelling:
Celebrity Re-Examined as a Grotesque, Crippling Disease" and "Caligula for President:
Better American Living Through Tyranny." Her new book, "Fear and Clothing:
Unbuckling America's Fashion Destiny," will be published by WW Norton.
More Cintra Wilson.
Does Oscar hate his own smell?
The academy shows American-style self-loathing by
handing its biggest trophies to foreigners and
drowning itself in montages. Save us, George Clooney!
Cintra Wilson

The writers’ strike was resolved, but not soon enough, apparently. The wounds were
deep. Much blood was lost. Oscar was deprived of oxygen, and sustained a great deal of
brain damage.

It must have been grim at that academy meeting, just a few weeks ago. No writers, just
a bunch of liminal Hollywood power brokers in $6,000 Brioni suits sitting glumly
around a large obsidian table in one of the Carrara-marble, earthquake-proof bunker-
vaults deep in the ground under CAA, too depressed even to eat their grilled seafood
salads.

“Editors,” someone finally said, the idea light bulb suddenly reflecting off his hairless
scalp.

“Huh?”

“Fuck the writers. They’ll all eventually eat each other like the Donner party. We have
editors. This Oscars? We break new territory.”

Eyes peer up hopefully through $3,000 Japanese glasses frames made of hammered
titanium and hand-carved wood.

“This year? All new: all old. We just montage the living shit out of it. Wall-to-wall
montages of Oscar footage recycled from the last 80 years.”

“Great.”

“Thank God.”

“Let’s go home.”

Five minutes later, a symphony of bloot-bloots and black Mercedes doors automatically
popping open, then the roar of fresh German engines as the identical cars began their
climate-controlled trips through the poisoned brown air, back to their home garages in
Glendale and Brentwood.

The montages, it must be said, were so numerous and so mind-blowingly stupid as to

border on sadism.
Jon Stewart, who hosted, presented it as a joke, but they actually did show a montage
completely devoted to the uses of binoculars and periscopes in movies over the years.

The unlovable animated Seinfeld Bee character from the vastly disappointing “Bee
Movie” introduced some technical award with — no joke — a bee montage.

There was a montage devoted to production design. A montage devoted to How the
Oscar Ballots Get Cast.

For nearly every major award, there was a montage of all 79 other winners from the
past.

In short: This year, Oscar honored the heart-touching magic of the film industry’s
celebration of life by sucking every possible ounce of spontaneous life, marrow and
energy out of the event by waterboarding it to the point of gag-reflex failure with
canned montages.

Hollywood executives were firmly convinced for the past several months that writers
were worthless. So, all in all, the evening was sort of like “Romeo and Juliet,” but
without a script: a frictionless battle between the Montage-Yous and the Crapulets.
They both lost. Actually, we all did.

Even though the event was way more lame than lamé, it feels wrong even taking
potshots at the Oscars now. It’s like picking on Britney Spears, at this point — it’s so
easy, it’s not even sporting. Oscar is elderly, and in dire need of hipness-replacement
surgery. In his dotage he is tiresome, dull and earnest, and employs a lot of doddering
repetition about how movies “touch the soul” and “inspire others to dream.”

Even Jack Nicholson, perhaps because of his symbiotic link to Oscar, looked frail when
talking about the “common link that touches the (heh heh heh) ‘humanity’ in all of us.”
You know when Jack is having a hard time looking convincingly inhumane at the
Oscars that some power grid in hell is in the grips of a rolling blackout.

Hollywood is always a lopsided reflection of the political situation we’re in.

In this sense, performing artists, classically a fairly high-strung, hypersensitive lot, have
always been pretty effective canaries in the cultural coal mine. What they’ve been
telling us, lately, is that we have a very, very sick culture on our hands.

It was a terrible, tooth-gnashing year of hideous self-reflection, for America: the ugly
flipside of cultural narcissism. Our country, on the back end of a rapacious tear of
sophomoric jerkbag behavior, is moving into the slightly more mature adolescent phase
of starting to hate its own smell.

I am the greatest country in the world / I am the piece of shit at the center of the
universe.

After shaving its head and driving drunk around the globe with no panties, calling itself
the Antichrist, and finally abandoning its children, totaling its SUV and getting its ass
kicked in the parking lot of the Persian Gulf, America is realizing that it is
internationally loathed, broke, soulless, tasteless, fat, drunk, malicious, greedy and
stupid, and has been generally behaving like a lousy excuse for a world superpower for
long enough to lose all its friends and position.

So, since America hates itself this year, Oscar gave the biggest trophies to foreigners:

Best supporting actress: Tilda Swinton — British.

Best supporting actor: Javier Bardem — Spanish.
Best actress: Marion Cotillard — French.
Best actor: Daniel Day-Lewis — British.

Conspicuously missing from this Oscars was any loose talk of politics or the war, until
the designated time block for dissent during the presentation of the documentary film
awards. This was especially weird: Why, if they didn’t want to acknowledge the outside
world, did they get a truth teller like Jon Stewart to host the thing?

But it isn’t totally shocking when you consider that ABC, which owned the Oscars this
year, is owned by Disney. The whole night seemed conspicuously laundered through
Robert Iger’s Great Disney Sanitizer — as if the academy came down with heavy
threats and successfully imposed a gag order on the evening (a moratorium on natural
speech so suppressive and creepy that I took to calling it the “Iger Sanction”).

This Oscars was noteworthy, though, if only because it featured the worst musical
interludes since the Great Debbie Allen Interpretive Dance Meltdown of 1999.

The Disney movie “Enchanted” somehow had three completely unsingable, perversely
idiotic, overproduced, melody-free songs nominated.

Amy Adams sang the first of these: a frantically upbeat anthem about being vermin and
doing menial labor — kind of a “Whistle While You Work” number that had
suspiciously happy housewife/sweatshop/totalitarian overtones.

Kristin Chenoweth sang the second “Enchanted” mess: a musically schizophrenic

orchestral pseudo-calypso duet with a Rastafarian who was virtually invisible onstage
because nobody bothered to light him. This big song ‘n’ dance number was somehow
supposed to convey the “cultural diversity of New York’s Central Park” via a kick line
of white senior citizens, brides and grooms, a gymnastic troupe of dancing boys in hard
hats and Con Edison drag, a flock of tuba players and, most offensively, a mariachi
band wearing sombreros … the likes of which I have never, ever, ever seen in Central
Park. In short, it was the kind of illegal gathering that, in the Rudy Giuliani era, would
have gotten you shot.

The third “Enchanted” number had waltzing couples dressed like Cinderella and Prince
Charming, which could only have been choreographed by John Ashcroft or a 6-year-old
girl.
To karmically rebalance these mortal offenses, Bob Fosse must rise and vengefully
return from his grave to fan-kick down the door of Robert Iger’s summer home and
terrorize him with zombie jazz hands.

In the nominated movies, it was a big year for painfully long shots of people having
private moments, and great swirls of emotion moving just enough under the eyeballs to
be perceptible — a forced march straight into the head and soul of the actor.

In a year where most of the actresses were shielded from their own regrettable taste by
professional stylists like Rachel Zoe, best supporting actress winner Tilda Swinton, at
least, was bravely and refreshingly fashion-forward enough to look bonkers. She wore
no makeup and what looked like a velvet Isamu Noguchi coffee table, and spoke in
insouciant, artistic free verse about Oscar’s naked buttocks in the great weirdo-artiste
tradition of Dustin Hoffman.

That was pretty much it for iconoclasm during the evening. They really should learn to
invite Björk every year.

The best moments were the unplanned injections of humanity: the ruinously beautiful
Marion Cotillard’s sincere, if stumbling, acceptance speech; Jon Stewart arranging for
Marketa Irglova — the woman from “Once” who, with Glen Hansard, sang “Falling
Slowly,” a baldly nice and stirringly emotional ballad — to come back and give her
acceptance speech after she’d been rushed off the stage.

The issue of Iraq was finally allowed to chug out all at once: A handful of grunts in Iraq
presented the award for best documentary short subject via satellite. Hollywood deity
Tom Hanks was ceremonially trotted out to lend gravity to the award for best
documentary feature, a category that pitted three films about the Iraq war against
Michael Moore’s “Sicko.”

The winner, Alex Gibney, the filmmaker responsible for “Taxi to the Dark Side,” urged
the audience to “hope we can turn this country away from the dark side.”

Helen Mirren introduced the award for best actor with the following:

“Ambition. Amorality. Greed. Deviousness. Misery. Venality. Remorse … All facets of

the rainbow of human behavior.”

And Daniel Day-Lewis won for his savage role in “There Will Be Blood.”

Day-Lewis is a wonderfully fluid actor, but frankly, that role, while a perfectly credible
Wild West, crotchety old brown-toothed prospector ultimately devoured by his own
rottenness, wasn’t the most mind-blowing performance of the year. The movie was,
however, based on the Upton Sinclair story “Oil,” and the role was an excellent allegory
for a nation that gets ruthlessly strung out on greed for the black crude, loses its soul,
abandons its children and brings about its own demise through unchecked hostility.

I know I am not alone in my contention that Viggo Mortensen deserved a special Oscar
for his full-frontal nude fight scene in “Eastern Promises.”
Tommy Lee Jones was recognized with a nomination for “In the Valley of Elah,” an
important bummer of an Iraq movie that certainly won’t make anyone feel good (but
makes you a better human being if you see it).

Tommy Lee Jones was really superb in that role: His wonderful face has always been
almost but not quite handsome, in a messed-up way — in this film, he looks almost like
an early proto-human skull that was reassembled from bashed fragments and covered
with grayish-pink modeling putty. Some unfortunate truck stop on the evolutionary
highway. A great craggy simian brow and trout mouth. But his black eyes were
crammed to the support beams with an incredibly complex emotional reality — a
skillfully compartmentalized man in a state of controlled crisis. Really amazing.

And Clooney — sigh. He deserved the trophy as well, but Hollywood knows he’s a lifer
and he’ll be around for a while. There’s time for Clooney later.

Joel and Ethan Coen, of course, were the night’s big winners, taking home the awards
for best adapted screenplay, best directing and best picture for “No Country for Old
Men.”

While I like the Coens, it is important to bear in mind that in their lifetimes, Ingmar
Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini and Alfred Hitchcock never received
Oscars for best director. Kevin Costner did, though.

Not that anyone asked me, but “Michael Clayton” was, in my opinion, the best film of
the year. There was a lot more to it than its just being Clooney’s “Erin Brockovich.”

Screw imperial corporate greed-bag awfulness, and that goes for Hollywood too,
George Clooney, via Michael Clayton, said under his breath, loud enough to hear. Glitz
is meaningless. Greed is deadly. Vanity is overrated. But you can humbly, slowly
accrue some virtue, some small but real heroism, by navigating the sometimes-invisible
line between doing your job well and doing the right thing.

Despite having one of the best social diatribe screenplays since “Network,” what was
interesting about “Michael Clayton” was the way it dialed your focus way down to the
quiet private battles of the imperfect everyperson — the unwitnessed, unrewarded slog
of trying to amass good decisions and do some small immediate good day to day — and
failing sometimes, despite fighting the good fight, and winning sometimes in a way that
goes largely unrecognized.

Like good photography, “Michael Clayton” elevates the normal into the sublime by
seeing its own world with such razor clarity that it expands the viewer’s perceptions by
reframing them with a bigger, more generous awareness.

Nan Goldin, for example, looked at her ragged life and saw art springing all around her,
even in the mirror at her own punched-out face. Real life, for all its broken noses,
cigarette butts and bad decisions, is more beautiful than the L’Oréal illusion, or six
hours in the grip of Rachel Zoe — provided you can muster enough emotional
intelligence to feel your way out of a paper bag, and you’re not so desperately afraid of
offending people or not looking pretty that you can’t move your face or be funny
anymore.

Compassion. It’s the new Scientology. A new theology for the rich and famous.
Ruthless greed and inhumanity, Hollywood seems to have recently realized, are as
suicidal as an OxyContin habit: It can really only take a career, or an art form, or a
nation, so far.

Well, in terms of national consciousness, maybe it’s a start.

*****

For more Salon coverage of the Oscars, click here.

Cintra Wilson is a culture critic and author whose books include "A Massive Swelling:
Celebrity Re-Examined as a Grotesque, Crippling Disease" and "Caligula for President:
Better American Living Through Tyranny." Her new book, "Fear and Clothing:
Unbuckling America's Fashion Destiny," will be published by WW Norton.
Christmas with the Wilsons
For one day each year, my mixed-up family of Jews,
Muslims, Christians and New Agers gathers to sing
karaoke carols, munch on jello mold and get wasted at
church.
Cintra Wilson

Christmas Day has always been an interesting time for my family because, like most
families, we really have no business being related to one another, but we get together
anyway out of loyalty and a certain strained but potent affection.

We are, to put it mildly, an ecumenical group. My mother, a jazz pianist who calls
herself “The Duchess,” was raised by Christian Scientists but now subscribes to a self-
invented theology she calls “Ishta Devata,” an unformed, New Age, quasi-Buddhist
mysticism involving psychic visions from an inner network she calls “Channel 12.” My
father was raised by members of the Anthroposophical Society and is believed to be
telekinetic. My aunt on my mother’s side is a hardcore Scientologist, who until recently
was exiled from Christmas for her tendency to hard-sell the guests on the divinity of L.
Ron Hubbard. My sister, whose husband is Moroccan, recently converted to Islam. My
mother complains bitterly that she’s no longer allowed to call my sister during the five
times a day she is praying toward Mecca, which, considering how often Mom likes to
phone, has inspired me to the revelation that Allah is most kind. I am a Santeria initiate,
which means I endure jokes every year about sacrificing chickens. If I happen to be at
the buffet table, I usually smile, grab the electric carving knife and walk toward the cat.
But most of our extended family is Jewish, apart from my best friend Mark and his
boyfriend, the Episcopal priest.

We all come together for Christmas under our one unifying conviction that Christmas is
less a religious holiday than the one day a year we all start drinking before noon.

The Duchess is a self-professed “Christmas Freak.” Every year, she converts our very
small, modest suburban home into a glittering display of fire hazards. The spatial
constraints of the living room, it being small and three-fifths occupied by a grand piano,
demands that the six-foot-tall tree be put within inches of the roaring fireplace. My
father is an art professor, who, since retiring, has undertaken a variety of projects in the
backyard, including, but not limited to, arc welding, telescope building, habanero
pepper cultivation and blacksmithing with a coal forge that projects foul smoke all over
the neighborhood. This agitates the neighbors slightly less than the 25-foot ham radio
antenna that dwarfs our roof, to which Dad annually affixes a Christmas star large and
bright enough to guide planes.
“Check it out!” Dad said, wandering into the kitchen last year looking like he just came
down the chimney, with a mangled wad of wrought iron tucked up his sleeve. “I made a
hook!”

Christmas is a time for recrudescence. Since the late 1970s, to the dismay of my sister
and me, Mother’s Christmas outfit has been an enormous red-and-green-plaid taffeta
skirt resembling something Scarlett O’Hara might wear to go duck hunting. This skirt
appears in tandem with a recipe Mother calls the “aspic,” a horrifying creation involving
V8 juice, lemon jello and pimento olives, chilled in a mold the shape of a lobster and
finally allowed to lie in state on a bed of lettuce. The aspic could be a terrific prop in a
David Cronenberg film, where it might visually explain a sinister toxicity on the ocean
floor.

The Duchess has a pathological need for Christmas carols to be sung every year,
something that many of us dread, because she requires that everyone go out on the lawn
and sing “Silent Night” a cappella, even when it is raining. Singing isn’t the problem —
we like singing, which is why Mark and I always have our annual “Pimps and Ho’s
Karaoke Meltdown” on Dec. 23. The last few years, Mark and I have mounted an
insurgency to make the mandatory caroling more closely resemble our karaoke party.
This does not please the Duchess. The first year, Mother was so piqued that Mark and I
made her play “Copacabana” instead of “Good King Wenceslas” that before a roomful
of stunned onlookers she dramatically flung herself onto the rug and went fetal for
nearly 15 minutes. She could not be roused, even when my sister obtained her
Renaissance Faire cape from the hall closet and threw it over her body in classic James
Brown fashion.

Mark and I ultimately succeeded, and now there are several new de facto Christmas
carols in the family repertoire, such as “Me and Mrs. Jones” and “Those Were the
Days,” the theme song from “All in the Family,” sung in Edith and Archie Bunker
voices. My godmother, a beautiful African-American woman who sang in my mother’s
rock band in the ’70s, must be begged every year to do her nasal Barbra Streisand
impersonation so I can sing Barry Gibb’s eunuch falsetto in the “Guilty” duet.

On Christmas Eve, we all, including the Muslim contingent, go to Mark’s boyfriend’s

service at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, but not before taking several swigs from
my father’s flask in the church parking lot. Last year Dad got the last laugh by filling
his flask with a homemade habanero vodka scorching enough to make my mother
involuntarily weep throughout the service. My brother-in-law perceived this as divine
retribution, since, being a Muslim, he resented having to listen to an Episcopalian
service delivered by homosexuals.

With all the religious differences, you can imagine how interesting things get around the
Christmas tree after a few more hits from the flask. The best part of Christmas Day last
year was when my hardcore Scientologist aunt and my hardcore Muslim brother-in-law
cornered each other and tried to cure each other of their mutual religious illusions. Since
we had all endured similar attempts at salvation from both of them over the years, it
really made the rest of us feel closer.

Finally, we all sit down to Christmas dinner. I look around the table, and there we are
… Jew, Jew, Muslim, Jew, Santerian, Episcopalian priest, Scientologist, Jew, Muslim,
and everyone else, in various undeclared states of Ishta Devata. And the dinner comes
out … Costco’s finest spiral-cut ham. And truthfully, Jews and Muslims aside, I don’t
think any of us likes ham.

Cintra Wilson is a culture critic and author whose books include "A Massive Swelling:
Celebrity Re-Examined as a Grotesque, Crippling Disease" and "Caligula for President:
Better American Living Through Tyranny." Her new book, "Fear and Clothing:
Unbuckling America's Fashion Destiny," will be published by WW Norton.
The Duke of Hazard
Hunter S. Thompson blasted through the world like a
big-finned rocket of defiance and revulsion. He leaves a
big burned hole and a safer, duller world.
Cintra Wilson

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

Last night, the night that Hunter S. Thompson was apparently shooting himself (an exit
somehow befitting the self-styled anarchy and insouciantly godless iconoclasm of the
man) my friend “Dirty Bobby,” a magazine photographer, and I were in the kitchen of
my house discussing a road trip he’d taken on a journalism assignment in Nevada.
Suffice to say there was a lot of crystal meth involved, a rental car with a V-8 engine, a
half-naked, semi-conscious female basketball player from UNLV, and a remake of an
automatic Nazi “grease-gun,” which was fired repeatedly out the window at 80 mph.

It was the first time in my life I have ever considered the possibility that Dr.
Thompson’s work might have had a questionable impact on the youth of today. This
was certainly not the first of such stories I’d heard.

While there is a lot to be said for this kind of self-consuming, skid-marks-on-the-lawn-

of-the-establishment behavior, most of the kids who imitated Thompson didn’t really
get that he wasn’t simply depraved for the sake of depravity. Thompson may have
seemed to be merely flailing violently among the vultures and wolverines wafting up
from the spilled ether in his Buick floor mat, but he actually had a point: He was
searching for the American dream. The twisted style in which he conducted this crusade
was a reflection of how twisted he felt that dream had become.

If artists are the uninsulated emotional conductors for the rest of society, Thompson was
a one-man power grid of paranoia, revulsion and defiance. He was a canary in our
collective coal mine, an ulcer on our societal tongue, a warning. He was physically a big
and strong enough man to recklessly embody the idea that we should all Beware of
Where We Are Headed. A shuddering red flag.

Alienation was a big part of Thompson’s voice, but not (I believe) because he wanted to
be alienated. HST wrote very movingly about participating in the thrillingly inclusive
group energies of the 1960s. He just didn’t really fit in very well to anyone else’s scene.
He was a bit too charismatic, clean-cut and bizarre on his BSA, with his cigarette
holder, to blend in with the Hell’s Angels. He needed to be the center of attention too
much to comfortably share the spotlight in rooms where other luminati of the day were
having their moments — rock stars, politicians, the various and infamous. Thompson
was trapped, somewhat, in the limbo between Journalist and Personality: the neither-nor
underworld of the rock-star scribe, who wields a little too much personal gravity to
yield the focus to a subject other than himself.
But nobody wanted Thompson to stop talking about himself — we loved living
vicariously and seeing the world through his yellow target-range aviator lenses. He was
our reluctant superhero of ultra-decadence. The contexts in which Thompson was
placed (in a younger, finer world, when Rolling Stone had the balls and decency to trust
the untrustworthy for the sake of Thor’s whipsong, faxed to the editor on paper napkins
in scrawls illegible) were really just an excuse to hear more of him, commenting on
anything. It wasn’t that his subjects were so terribly important, or even timely — his
deadlines came and went — it was the verbal synapse-connections — poison flowers
that could only blossom from an overheating brain: Teeth like baseballs, eyes like
jellied fire … shoot the pasties off an 8-foot bull dyke and win a cotton-candy goat …

Sure, the man had been dehydrated since 1971; he needed electrolytes and proteins and
Thorazine and antidepressants and probably something for his ailing joints because he
probably had no cartilage in his knees or hips at all, and a whole host of other
difficulties that comes of applying a lifelong scorched-earth policy to your mind and
body. Thompson was old, and life had finally become sufficiently uncomfortable for
him to check out.

I think it is improper and disrespectful to whine about this suicide. Thompson was in the
game for a very, very long time, and I think it is a safe bet that he was never
comfortable. This was a profoundly tortured guy, the smoke from whose ears always
made a whole lot of exciting colors that we all enjoyed. It was a great brain to watch but
you wouldn’t want to live in it, I’d aver. He was a butch motherfucker and I’d bet cash
he stuck it out significantly longer than he really wanted to. Let’s face it, HST was not
one for the nursing home — he’d have just stolen everyone else’s barbiturates and hurt
people trying to arm-wrestle.

May the kindly trickster gods collect you, Hunter Thompson, and drive you to where
the buffalo roam, where your mind can unspool itself forever and your spirit can go on
groping unsuspecting tits and trashing hotel rooms. You have earned it, Golden and
Immortal Son of Classic Letters. Rest in Whatever You Would Prefer to Peace. We, the
filthy and leaderless children who cherish your legacy, salute you, and will honor you
with every bullet fired out of our car windows toward the unmarked desert sky.

Selah.

Cintra Wilson is a culture critic and author whose books include "A Massive Swelling:
Celebrity Re-Examined as a Grotesque, Crippling Disease" and "Caligula for President:
Better American Living Through Tyranny." Her new book, "Fear and Clothing:
Unbuckling America's Fashion Destiny," will be published by WW Norton.
Star sex
Why are we so obsessed with two meteors of human
attention colliding in prurient orgasm? Plus: Will
Prince William become a photo slave or will he be as
the wisteria tree?
Cintra Wilson

We vicariously live our pathetic lives fawning over celebrities; one minor evening in a
star’s life is worth the prom nights of a million office temps. That is why celebrity
dating habits are so desperately important to the world. When a celebrity relationship
crashes and burns, it is an opportunity for us, the lowly peons, to chew our nails and
speculate, to worry, to analyze. We probe and dissect public relationships with a vigor,
ruthless clarity and wisdom we are wholly unable to apply to our own lives or personal
dating situations.

Why do we love to hear that a star is fucking another star, or has stopped fucking one
star to fuck another star? I will tell you: It is celebrity sexual eugenics, the circulating
provenance of famous effluvia. It is never about the fat and screwed-up children two
stars could potentially produce. It is about the Celebrated Glaring Body rubbing up
against the other Celebrated Glaring Body: two meteors of human attention
ultracolliding in a supermagnified, prurient orgasm in a fabulous hotel, all the comforts
and privileges of the world fanning out around them in a gilded mandala. Frantic
applause fills the streets below! A beehive of spontaneous information spreads the news
to the hungry world. The ripples are felt by all.

Even if you never watch TV or listen to the radio or read the New York Post, you will
know who in celebrityland is fucking who. The information is more all-pervasive than a
wondrously prolific mutation of the flu.

The lower human realms of the world assume that all celebrity coitus is superlative —
there can be no bad sex among the famous. Puffy Combs and Jennifer Lopez couldn’t
possibly have one of those limp, dry, half-drunken, stressed-out fumble sessions that
result in shrugs and apologies. They are so publicly hypersexy, always bursting out of
their $1,000 tank tops; they must always explode like tigers into each other’s wetly
electric flesh, scorching the silken couch cushions, jettisoning platinum gobs of
celebrity power into each other’s faces! Harrrragh! Klong! Muscles from the sky!
Rocket-launch columns of shivering white fire! Hosanna! Peace descends. Silvery
doughnuts pass blithely behind their dewy, exhausted eyelids. The aliens watch them —
to learn, to approve, to bless. The planets hum with pleasure; a warm eddy twirls
through a frozen wasteland and spring begins in the core of a glacier.
Which brings me to the topic of Russell Crowe. Nothing in the New York Post recently
has made my spleen curl and burn more than the revealing of the snog ‘n’ tickle
“relationship” between Crowe and “actress” Meg Ryan. Crowe is a beer-swilling Aussie
cocksmith, a Real Man, a thinking woman’s bastard, manly as beef is meat. Somehow,
the thought of all that wonderful manliness paying all that manly attention to a
sniveling, cynical, cabbage-headed, smirking, inflatable, pseudo-childlike, store-bought
half-woman like the underwhelming Ryan is biblically depressing.

Crowe should be using his powers for good, not evil, and picking on some woman who
invokes awe and fear. Naomi Wolfe, for example. Some gorgeous Oxford biochemist.
Michelle Yeoh. Somebody who kicks ass. Janeane Garofalo. Anybody but Meg Fucking
Ryan. Whom the gods destroy, they first make mad. The hubris of Crowe has somehow
led to his tragically finding Ryan comestible, indicating the trail of corrosion left by
some kind of advanced brain worm. Perhaps next year he will quit acting and, like
Caligula, wage war against Poseidon, God of the Sea, shouting on the beach in a vein-
popping frenzy.

Apropos of advanced brain worms, Poseidon and a heady analysis of celebrity dating
tragedies, one of the foremost topics of late is the saddest, as it carries with it a vile
upset of cultural mythology. The Greatest Surfer the World Has Ever Known, Kelly
Slater, has debased himself utterly, down, down, down into the blackened pit of shame
by first allowing Pamela “His Tragic Flaw” Anderson into his life at all, then allowing
her back into his life after a horrifically unceremonious dumping and then — the
ultimate indignity — being dumped again, so that Anderson could run off and hog-snog
with male model Marcus Schenkenberg.

What corruption of fate allows a glorious Ubermensch like Slater to end up as the
personal whipping poodle of a badly used, Jayne Mansfield retread such as Anderson?
The fans have been beating their heads, keening, rending their garments. How can we
live meaningful lives in accordance with ideas of our grander destiny when our heroes
are hopelessly pussy-whipped by disingenuous slags?

Perhaps he didn’t burn her forearms with the ends of his cigarettes enough. Perhaps he
didn’t slap her in front of her friends. Perhaps it was as simple as hair; Slater, in a
drastic countermeasure toward his receding hairline, shaved his head. Perhaps La
Anderson couldn’t be seen with a man without a full head of hair and brilliantine and
little rubber bands and such. It was a bad ending to a bad tale — our finest, purest
waterman dashed into the rocks, lured by the wanton shrieking of the vile rock ‘n’ roll
siren, whom we’ve all seen naked and penetrated in at least two orifices. The succubus
sucked him under. We are all the losers, the untouchable children of war.

There is only one hope. God, let Ben Affleck find true love. Let her be wise and strong.
Let her be sufficiently terrible to avenge the whole Gwyneth Paltrow thing, somehow.
Then, balance shall perhaps be restored.
––––––––––––

DON’T GO WITH THE FORCE, WILLS

Nobody is noticing that we’ve already had a version of the new TV assault on
humanity, “Big Brother,” for years and years. The British royal family has never been
allowed personal boundaries and refuge from the filthy prurient interest of other human
beings, and now Prince William will be absorbed into what has to be the most abused
civic role in society today: the celebrity-cum-public-figure-by-birth. Prince William
turned 18 on June 21, and it is officially Boy Who Will Be King season for the
predatory folk who killed his mom.

In today’s society, being a member of royalty is worse than a lifetime prison sentence or
a career in gymnastics. Nothing is more ludicrous and unkind than the imposition of a
supreme ceremonial role as a photo slave in a society that has been trained in the
cannibal-like consumption of celebrities.

To be born into celebrity is to be like one of those chickens that spend their whole lives
growing up in a tiny box so their corpses will stack better. It may be a large and gilded
box, but it is just as cruel, perhaps crueler, because the chicken can perform any
perversity it likes from its constraints in order to make its life more tolerable.

Even a few decades ago, when Queen Elizabeth was crowned, nobody would have
dreamed of obtaining naked pictures of her and posting them on the Internet, or linking
her sexually with Burt Lancaster. But fame is now a vile organism out of control, and
royalty are essentially zoo animals — with the bars there for the animals’ protection
more than for the viewers’.

If allowed to roam unprotected through fans, William would probably be kidnapped,

violated in every orifice and eaten, and his head would be kept as a trophy in someone’s
freezer until authorities found it and turned it into a holy relic.

It is a testament to William’s personal flexibility that he is able to tolerate his life at all,
and isn’t sneaking off to some Jamaican discothhque in Brixton every weekend to
smoke heroin and snog with strippers.

This gentle lad will have to conceal himself and his humanizing habits for his entire life,
concentration-camp style, from the worst, most penetrating and insidious form of
fascism there is: the public opinion of hypocritical morons who believe that public
figures should be sexless, saintly and, worst of all, totally available for inspection.

It seems that only the English-speaking countries are fucked up this way; after all, who,
besides royalty buffs, knows or cares about handsome young Prince Carl Philip of
Sweden or Louis XX of France? Who puts lurid pinup photos of them smiling shyly in
tuxedos on their walls, other than heraldry-obsessed French homosexuals, maybe?

These men abide in relative normalcy while poor William has to have his face on tea
cozies and ballpoint pens and tank tops, and have every 16-year-old girl in the English-
speaking world imagine what sex between him and Britney Spears would be like.

If William is lucky, he’ll grow into a nerdish, introspective mind who can find wide
open spaces to explore and rejoice in the worlds of electronics or nanotechnology; he’ll
grow hunched and concave and wear thick glasses in dark rooms, drinking coffee alone,
and his outside life won’t matter so very much because he’ll only be smiling from a
limousine and doing math in his head.

I was given hope for Prince William when I was walking by a parking lot in the Bowery
the other day and noticed that the wisteria trees around the perimeter of the lot had
completely absorbed all of the concertina wire that surrounded the fence — the razor
loops literally went in one side and out the other of the tree trunks, a testament to the
adaptive durability of weeds.

Be as the wisteria, young Wills. If you are relentless, you can pull the mortar out of the
bricks that hold you; you can grow around and over; you can slowly, patiently, if you’re
really smart, consume the consumers.

But you’ll probably just succumb, and end up as a crowned figure with your face on
collector plates and bronze coins in Parade magazine — a handsome, generic “King”
image for all the slavish dolts of the world to superimpose kingly fantasies on, like a
painting of a child with oversize, weepy eyes, or an adorable kitten, or a wise, wrinkled
Indian chief.

C’est la vie, c’est la goddamn pain-in-le-royal-ass, no?

Cintra Wilson is a culture critic and author whose books include "A Massive Swelling:
Celebrity Re-Examined as a Grotesque, Crippling Disease" and "Caligula for President:
Better American Living Through Tyranny." Her new book, "Fear and Clothing:
Unbuckling America's Fashion Destiny," will be published by WW Norton.
I have seen the future: It's Tenacious D
If watching these two short, fat, weird guys perform
doesn't make you happier than you've been in years,
you're withered and dead within.

I had a dream the other night in which I was the passenger in a big, new,
powder-yellow, heyday-of-Detroit mobile. All the chrome was there, the beige
leather interior was intact and I was being driven through a suburban town on a
hot late-1950s day in the Deep South. The driver was a young, handsome Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr.

It was clear by the friendly, ticklish vibrations in the front seat that I was
his latest blond daytime dalliance (I, in the decade-less logic of dreams, was
not from the 1950s, but was staring out the window tripping on the vintage
sidewalk scene in my 19-year-old post-punk persona — platinum blond, tight black
jeans, pointy black boots, CRASS T-shirt.)

Dr. King and I pulled into a lot behind a one-story motel in a glade of drooping
green trees. “Is this gonna be all right?” I asked. (Translation: Is it safe for
you to check in here with a white chick?) “Oh yeah, baby, we’re all right. We’re
on the wrong side of the tracks, now,” he said jovially, meaning: I can do
whatever I want here; we’re in the black neighborhood.

Then the scene switched and the good doctor was wearing a loud pair of Hawaiian-print
Bermuda shorts and a terry-cloth beach shirt and a nice straw fedora. He was
watering the lawn outside of the motel and I was hanging around girlishly — we
had a very friendly, flirty rapport. He was young and fit and sexy — I touched
him on the stomach and he had washboard abs. The best thing about the dream was
the elated flush of hanging around in the joyous, inspiring aura of a truly Great
Man.

Which is how everyone in the audience felt at the Bowery Ballroom April 18 and
19, when rock-comedy tyrants Tenacious D took the stage and rocked the fucking
house two times with the pungent Rocket Sauce of Unadulterated Genius.

“Rocket Sauce!” the overweight frat boys in the audience screamed all
through the opening act, a painfully mediocre sketch, a comedy abortion and perhaps
the unluckiest opening act in history. The people knew “The D” were in the
building; they could smell The Sauce, and they wanted the D and nothing else.
This is unsurprising. Tenacious D — the round boys from L.A., Jack Black and Kyle
Gass — have recently carved their names on the forehead of Goddess Fame with
solid-gold steak knives.
Jack Black is literally the most unobstructed fire hose of white-hot mega-talent I
have ever known or seen. He’s just thrashed that huge Donkey Kong of a star-turn
in “High
Fidelity” as Barry, the vituperative record-store snob, and now the star
everyone always knew would rise is blowing up at frightening speeds. The
dressing room at the Bowery was full of the Cool Young Men of stage and screen —
John Cusack, Philip
Seymour Hoffman, John C. Reilly, David Cross — all with their tongues way up
Jack’s legendary crack.

Those who have known him since childhood all feel the same way about the little
fucker — head-shaking awe. Black is an unlikely, ferocious combination of
Brando-like gravitational conviction combined with Belushian dire hilarity and
a kind of tender Seals & Crofts musical ear for the lovely harmonics, bound up
in an airtight flair for the absurd, a beautiful yodeling voice and a certain
degree of (much satirized) raw cock power. Most people have a pipeline to the
Gods of Inspirado that is somewhat occluded by the performer’s neurotic inability
to get out of his own way — not so Jack Black, who is unimpeded by vanity of
any kind, who seemingly has no psychic obstacles that prevent his continual
blasting forth of four-alarm Celestial Heat Magick.

Kyle Gass, aka K.G., aka Cage, aka Rage, aka Rage Cage, is the backbone sound of
the D, the golden 12-strings of guitar craft that pulls it together musically. He
is the acoustic metal sound. Shades of Neil Young. Shades of Zeppelin. Hefty wad
of prog. Angels and wildebeests. The Harmonizer.

It’s a tough job being the guy who accompanies the walloping tsunami of
adoration that follows Black around, and K.G. seems a little bitter and
acrimonious in his between-song banter, but I suppose that’s only human. In
Black’s bright and collateral light must he be comforted, and not in his
privileged shoes — it’s a fucked-up world. It is the Faustian contract. But Rage
does some beautiful finger work, and gets to stand on the stage, like all the
guys whose names you can’t remember in the <a
href="/people/col/cintra/2000/04/13/wankers/index.html ">Sex Pistols.</a

The D are out and nobody can pull them back into the tasty semi-obscurity in which
they once languished in dark comedy clubs and dim corners of HBO programming.

Black is a great friend of mine who I’ve known for years. Now the world knows him:
He’s been on “Conan.”
Black is a good new star: gracious, diplomatic, filled with eight seconds of
high-volume friendliness for all, in a way that makes everyone feel like they’ve
got their warm gust of special attention. Movie star, rock star, great guy.

It’s interesting to be around an almost perfectly realized human being — the

last one I sat at a table with was Best-Surfer-In-Creation <a
href="/people/col/cintra/2000/01/20/pipeline/index.html">Kelly Slater. By
comparison, everyone else starts to look like a 500-piece puzzle with only 32 or
so of the border pieces locked in, whereas with the Shining Few like Black and
Slater you can see the whole picture of the cocker spaniel pups in the basket
with maybe just a yarn ball remaining to be assembled.</a

“Shee-it,” you say in admiration. What else can you say? They’ve figured out a
safe way to be superhuman, a way to utilize that unexplored gray matter, some way
to stop being subject to the roller-coaster win/lose, win/lose whims of basic
humanity and rule nonstop.

How? Who knows.

The only thing in the entire Tenacious D set that gives me minor cause for alarm
is the fact that the D have always been predicated on the patent absurdity that
two weird, short, fat guys could be generators of stadium-filling cock-rock
power. Now that they are routinely selling out venues to throngs of salivating
fans, it’s not so absurd anymore.

At a certain point in the show, the D exhort the audience to quit their day jobs
and “Free the Artist! In here!” Black thumps his chest for emphasis.
“After a couple of years, Kyle and I will come and inspect your progress, and we will
encourage you to continue. Or, we will say
stop. And if we say stop, stop!”

This is the beginning of a song called “The Cosmic Joke,” which discusses the sad
fact that many people have no talent. “I know what you’re thinking,” Black says
to the crowd. “You’re thinking, Hey, I’ll learn some power chords, gain 40
pounds and my friends think I’m funny! But no. Not everyone is born with it,
like me and K.G. Believe me, if we could hand out bags of talent at the door,
you’d all be rocking.”

It was all so true that it was hard to tell if this was a piece of actual science
being dropped like a bomb on the sub-talented audience, or if the comedic
faux-egomania of the D has now been mixed so liberally with their actual worldly
success that it’s a joke that’s no longer a joke. In any case, it made everyone
mindful of how fucked it is that everyone can’t be Jack Black.

Don’t get me wrong. Joy, my friends, is the cornerstone of the D. If a Tenacious

D show doesn’t make you happy like you haven’t been in years, you’re withered and
dead within.

See the D.

Make pilgrimages to the D.

You won’t be able to buy a D record because they hate the music industry too much
to record one. (Another reason to love them.) You can see Jack in many roles on-screen,
but the D are the home of the Black Sauce of Victory. It is exciting to
live in this time, a time of Michael Jordan and Kelly Slater and Tenacious D.
I dig heroes you can throw your panties at.

Cintra Wilson is a culture critic and author whose books include "A Massive Swelling:
Celebrity Re-Examined as a Grotesque, Crippling Disease" and "Caligula for President:
Better American Living Through Tyranny." Her new book, "Fear and Clothing:
Unbuckling America's Fashion Destiny," will be published by WW Norton.
We love you Ricky, oh yes we do
Move over, Mick: Ricky Martin is a modern
Prometheus for the collective penis of pop.
Cintra Wilson

Nobody’s ever been quite able to successfully devise pornography for women.
Playgirl magazine attempted to invent it in the ’70s, utilizing the
primitive theory that women got as sweaty and overstimulated by brazen,
naked pictures of the opposite sex as men did, and introduced a magazine
with a hairy, brick-jawed brute in the centerfold, earnestly displaying his
semi-engorged Hollywood Loaf. Of course, the magazine was totally
laughable and not particularly erotic to women, and Playgirl ended up being
patronized more or less exclusively by gay men and sliding into obscurity.
The pop sensation machine has finally found the answer, however, to the
age-old marketing conundrum of What Makes Girls Randy, and now all media
outlets are saturated with bedroom-haired, cologne-marinated,
undergraduate-age dancing boys.

Musician boys are invariably the first big crush of a preteen girl, her
first big sloppy emotional response to the world. The creation of
puppy-lovable teen sensations is now a multinational Moloch, and such
phenomena as N-Sync, The Spice Girls and Backstreet Boys represent a whole
vital stage in the sexual/emotional development of the preteen, i.e. the
kind of biological confusion and obsessive hysteria that causes little
girls to wallpaper their rooms with gratuitous posters of dreamy,
hard-nippled thugs and tarty kinder-whores and throw high-pitched grand-mal
tantrums until albums and T-shirts and concert tickets are bought.

About 20,000 girls all stood outside the MTV window at Times Square in New York
and
screamed for teen masturbation-focus the Backstreet Boys last week, and a
few days earlier, another 20,000 girls all stood outside the MTV window and
wailed and wept and beat their breasts for multinational super-pasteurized Hispano-
sensation
Ricky Martin. America seemed slightly shocked, as if we expected all that weird
screaming
hysteria to die along with the Beatles.

Chick-porn, thy name is Ricky. Ricky wears see-through sweaters and has hips
like a lazy susan. He runs his fingers seductively through his own hair,
with his eyes rapturously closed and his moistened mouth barely parted, like
Rita Hayworth. He is often seen wet, shirtless, open-mouthed kissing and
driving sports cars. Ricky is an emblem of virility and energy and good-guy
ethics, while being a near-perfect fusion of male clichi sexual images: one
part Cary Grant self-amused privilege, one part James Bond
eyebrow raised at the way these birds just seem to tumble into my lap, two
parts Julio Iglesias-cum-Ricardo Montalban-cum-Desi Arnaz-cum-Medellin
drug-cartel-Latino mega-suave and three parts Elvis good-natured nuclear
cock-power, all shrink-wrapped into one silk ‘n’ leather Milano-pimp outfit.
He is a multicultural young Elvis for the new millennium, with hotter blood:
Ricky, an ethnic minority, has actual traces of humanity. He’s a little
smarter than the old Elvis; he’s already lived through the whiplash
agony/ecstasy of flash-in-the-pan-ism as a boy who grew too many underarm
hairs to remain in Menudo, so he has a sense of self-preservation and a
healthy arrogance: He’s not going to need shock-levels of Demerol and pork
to bolster his comfort level in the end. He knows how to “keep it real,” but
in character at the same time. He appears to be a limitless, unstoppable
font of self-enjoyment, professing an Internal Path and a Great Love of
Music and all the other stuff he’s doing. He has cracked the mystical code
that makes the young girls cry.

Ricky seems to be a successful boy-band veteran; he was able to take the

faux-conscious pop-veneer of supermarket-accessible eroticism that the
managers of Menudo taught him to radiate before he was old enough to drive
and somehow implant his own adult consciousness behind it. The
efficaciousness of boy-band pseudo-sexuality is nothing to wag a stick at:
Somehow, to the wanton fan of any age, a charismatic stage presence means
that the performer is possessed of a mature, diabolically supercharged
uber-sexuality, and fans respond to the performer as such, even if both
fan and performer are barely over 4 feet tall. New Kids on the Block,
especially, had a peculiar, sexual, Jesus-like sway over the female species:
At the peak of their success, I remember reading an actual newspaper column
about how a 3-year-old girl who had been displaying nothing
but autistic-like behavior for her entire life was watching a New Kids
concert with her older siblings when she suddenly snapped into lucidity,
grabbed her mother by the arm and drawled out her first words, her maiden
voyage into the English language, a fiery demand: “I want Joe.”
Joe, of course, being Joe McIntyre, the youngest and shortest of the New
Kids. In the early ’90s, he was probably single-handedly responsible for
more fire-hammers of sexual explosion in the 12-and-under crowd than
Elvis and David Cassidy and Mickey Dolenz combined.

Ricky has picked up where that teen nightmare left off, in a lot of ways,
and has also claimed the abandoned scepter of John Travolta’s Saturday Night Feverishness
by pulling off a look that has up to now been regarded as either totally homosexual or
ethnically slimy in a sexist way, i.e. get a load of Sergio Valente at the bar over there,
ohmigod, who does he think he is? He has resuscitated obvious male sexiness from the way it
disgraced itself in the ’70s, when it wore open Quiana shirts and gold
chains and pants so tight you could see all the veins in its schlong. Young
American boy rock stars got too embarrassed to be sexy after Mick Jagger;
Ricky has brought the sacred man-fire back to the pop stars in a way that
those weepy, drum-beating-in-the-woods, encounter-group guys have been
trying to bring it back to their own soft, gutless bellies for the last
decade or so, and he deserves some kinda credit.

However.

I was all set to make this a pure Ricky Martin puff piece, and speak of his
golden legitimacy and flawless panty-heat, but I just caught a little throwaway
interview with him on MTV. Normally, when Ricky speaks, he’s all
chocolatey corporate cheerleading; for example, when he picked up his World
Music Award in Monaco last week: “To all you leaders,” he said, presumably
meaning World Leaders, “you should take the music industry as an example —
it’s all about creating, not destroying.” Dumb, but heartfelt. Maybe forgivable.

This time, on the other hand, he gave two spontaneous answers that made me
think the Golden Ricky might be more hollow than solid. The love-struck
fan-girl interviewer asked him: “Who is your favorite singer and biggest influence?”
“Journey. Steve Perry,” said Ricky without a beat of hesitation. Oooch.

“Who is the most important person in the world to you, and why?” asked the
interviewer.

Ricky then got an un-funny, shrapnel gleam in his big puddly eyes and
started mumbling about how he always wanted to invite “his enemies” to
dinner, because he wanted to keep them very close. The most important
people to Ricky are his enemies? Hmmmm. How much Ricky is Ricky and how
much is Memorex? We may never find out, but the Wheel in the Sky Keeps on
Tur-nin’. Wo-oh-oah.

Cintra Wilson is a culture critic and author whose books include "A Massive Swelling:
Celebrity Re-Examined as a Grotesque, Crippling Disease" and "Caligula for President:
Better American Living Through Tyranny." Her new book, "Fear and Clothing:
Unbuckling America's Fashion Destiny," will be published by WW Norton.
Sex! How to write a magazine article
about a magazine party
The only revelation at the POV soiree was the libido-
engulfing Joan Jett.

(Alluring lead line, hypothetically pulling the Reader “into” the story.) You ‘re a new-
ish magazine, competing in today’s crazy magazine marketplace, and you are trying to
get a whole lot of hip young people to spend their hard-earned discretionary income on
you! So what do you do first? Well, don’t panic! (Familiar tone, reassuring the Reader
that this isn’t just a dry, impersonal how-to article, but one expressly for Them.) You
do what everybody has been doing since Condi Nast started ejaculating glossy
multicolored ego-spattered print-sputum monthlies back in the dark ages! You have a
big party at New York’s good old Limelight club (which was once upon a time a really
“hot scene,” but is now just another overcrowded, dark, loud, smoky room to feel
irritated and claustrophobic in) and invite all of the popular celebrities you’ve had in
your magazine in recent months! Also invite models, lotsa models. This will establish
you as “cool,” and everyone will like you and you will be rich.
––––––––––––

Put the most famous person you can get (who is unpopular enough to let you) on your cover!

I went to a party for “hip” POV magazine and its night life supplement, Egg. They were
honoring Goldberg, the wrestler, and Peter Beard, the photographer! Wrestle-mania! It’s
huge! There’s even a “Complete Idiot’s Guide to Pro Wrestling” now, so that even
deeply brain-damaged people can understand the nuances and subtle finesse of
professional wrestling! This is typical, I guess, and what I have come to expect of
whatever achieves widespread mega-popularity in America — I don’t fucking
understand what the attraction is at all. Put the World Federation Wrestling right up
there with Celine Dion, “Memoirs of a Geisha,” Beanie Babies and all of the other
phenomena that I feel excluded from, because I hate them, hate them, hate them.

Cluttery safari-photographer/diarist Peter Beard was supposedly at the party, celebrating

his unforgivable Egg phantasy photo layout, “The Secret World of (supermodel)
Marcus Schenkenberg.” (Six pages of the model-boy engaging in a bored-looking
dance-floor dry-hump with three or more winsome and drunk-looking she-models, then
all of them crammed importantly into limousines, then photos of all of the model-girls
wearing thongs and self-consciously cuddling Marcus in bed and “acting” like they are
going to have a slobbery bisexual supermodel foursome just as soon as gross old Peter
Beard stops snapping pictures of them. How “artistic!” How “daringly original!”
Models, acting sexy! Whoda thunk of it? Genius.) And Alison Eastwood, fetching, no-
longer-drunk, blond daughter of Clint was supposedly there, and that was supposed to
be exciting, because she was seen barely concealing her breasts on the cover of the
spring issue of Egg.
––––––––––––

Articles — uh-oh, this is the hard part

Before you can have the big party, you have to have the magazine, and this may come
as a shocker, but magazines can’t be all fancy advertisements of beautiful girls wearing
bras. They need some words in them, too! (This is the bracketed place where I, the
magazine writer, pretend to feel sorry for you, and say something disarming and
personable, like “Hey, I almost opened my wrists with a miter saw the last time I
needed to put words in a magazine. Don’t worry, you’re not alone, chuckle, bleh bleh
bleh.”)

It’s easy. You hire some starving hack writers to joylessly bleed out banal articles that
are the exact same articles featured in every other magazine, and have them advertised
in BIG LETTERS on the cover, i.e. SEX - Have A Fling! Or SEX - Making It Better
Than Ever, or SEX - 10 Secrets Only The Stars Know, etc. Make sure that all the
articles are written in the same unchanging, time-honored hack-format that all the other
magazines use, i.e. divide the article up into clear-cut little sections full of not-quite
witty information and examples, with a heading in bold print at the top of every section!
Use this article as an example!
––––––––––––

How shallow is your demographic?

What kind of hip young people do you want reading you, if you’re a hip young
magazine? Take POV. POV appears to want to be a male Mademoiselle for pink, fat,
aspiring golf bastards. It has the same artless, kiss ass to the privileged young adult
flavor of a Ron Howard film. For example, it has a one-page article by Tyra Banks on
the importance of confidence, and how she got hers. Frankly, I’d rather blow a dead dog
than read what a woman who makes an enormous, multimillion-dollar living being
photographed in panties has to say about her secrets of personal confidence. Then again,
I think all models should be required to wear a little soundproof Plexiglas head-box
when not being photographed in their panties, to discourage their offering opinions and
bringing mental pain to themselves and others. Egg magazine is POV, but drunk and
more horny.

(Hilarious personal anecdote from my very own life! Very important element of a hack
magazine article.) I’m in Brooklyn, right? (Note conversational tone.) So the Puerto
Rican car service comes to pick me up, and I’m expecting the usual silver or black
Crown Victoria sedan with the usual Hot Cherry scent effuser and Latin Soft-Jam
music, but they sent a van, with all of the horrible stripes that vans used to have, thick
bands of beige doing some kind of modern, Frank Stella-cum-Subway Sandwich design
thing around the tinted windows, and lots of extra fashion decals and accessories from
Kragen Auto Parts applied by the sullen Hispano-teen driver. Extra plastic airfoils and
flaps for the windshield wipers, just in case the van gets airborne. Crazy-sexy-cool neon
impression strips around license plate. Peacock-blue diamond-tuck ultrasuede seat
covers. No seat belts. French vanilla air freshener, shaped like a tree. Why a vanilla
tree? So my girlfriend, Mona, and I step out of this thumping teenage disco-rape van
right in front of the VIP entrance, and we’re wearing big showgirl feathers and it’s
pretty fuckin’ funny.
––––––––––––

The actual party itself

VIP passes ain’t what they used to be. It used to be, when you were getting Star
Treatment, you could walk in through a special trapdoor into a special eelskin chamber
and Jack Nicholson would be there handing out cocaine and Cuban cigars and nude
NFL cheerleaders. Now, you’re shoulder to shoulder with all the faceless, thick-necked
illiterates who compose the bulk of club-going; shuffled through the same smoky
basement hallways and rudely refused admission into various parts of the staircase by
the same hulking walls of brainless bouncer-flesh that are supposed to be keeping the
people you’re smashed against away from you. Our special “All Access” star-treatment
badges were as grotesque and worthless as the hours-old, congealing suckling pig
carcass in the belly-dancing room. With the dripping black candles and frayed grape
clusters, the savaged catering table looked like it had been arranged by Satan, or Joel
Peter Witkin.
––––––––––––

Joan Jett: Sexy!

There was one great thing about the party: Joan Jett is a totally screaming-hot babe. A
mega-fidelity robo-BABE. She’s the hottest lipstick butch dyke I’ve ever seen. Rubber
pants. Rubber midriff. Blond flattop. She’s like a really beautiful punk rock boy,
covered with real organic muscles, and she knows how to rock out with her cock out. I
never liked Joan Jett or thought she rocked before, but when you see her live, she is
unbelievably HOT-tuh-tuh. And she sounds great. Her rock ‘n’ roll energy is as libido
engulfing as that of young Mick Jagger. The whole audience of bloodless fashion
ghouls was totally enslaved by her within minutes, and wanting to give her a Lewinsky.

Cocksucking yuppie social retards who need nazi dental abuse

There is something dangerously screwed up about the young yuppie men who were
careening through the halls. They grow up with some kind of perverse sense of
entitlement, so in any given nightclub situation you have these fat, drunk, white pig-
boys in Dockers pants and button-up shirts wandering around with beers and a dumb
and ugly fifth-grade Catholic school look in their eyes; it’s recess, and they want
attention. If you catch their eye, they think its OK to walk up and touch you, pick at
your carefully applied hat or hair and make obnoxious, rude, slurry comments about
your fabulous appearance. If you respond to them in anything other than a playful or
flattering way, they start getting rowdy and abusive. This is their little game. I feel it is
time to reintroduce the 8-inch, stiletto-sharp hat pin, in order to restore and enforce
gentlemanly behavior in the chinless, subhuman dipshits who are today’s successful
young men.
––––––––––––

The party’s over - ho-hum

Mona and I finally escaped the smoky throngs and walked back outside to the line,
trying to sell our “All Access” fraud pins for $5 to the Untouchables waiting outside in
the cold. One club kid in his 20s was shivering, wearing nothing but what looked to be
an orange lace place mat strung around his neck. He had a shaved head and his naked
arms were half-arms, Thalidomide arms, particularly jarring seen against his frozen
white back and shoulders.

“Since you are the most fabulous person here, I will give you my all-access badge for
free,” I offered. He thanked me. I did a good thing, I thought. A few seconds later Mona
unknowingly tried to sell her badge to him and he angrily shrieked at her: “I already
have one, bitch!” Another proud POV/Egg reader, asserting what was his in a world of
hip. Ready to frot Marcus and Tyra on the dance floor. Jumping into the very
bloodstream of Peter Beard panty-shots and pretty bored Cuervo shots. Ow.

Cintra Wilson is a culture critic and author whose books include "A Massive Swelling:
Celebrity Re-Examined as a Grotesque, Crippling Disease" and "Caligula for President:
Better American Living Through Tyranny." Her new book, "Fear and Clothing:
Unbuckling America's Fashion Destiny," will be published by WW Norton.
Liza’s horrible so-called life
Mean boys. Badass girls. Your worst first-day-of-high-
school nightmare, to the millionth power ... and in
Marin County, Calif.

Liza’s first-day-of-school outfit, one she thought was fetching, instantly branded her as
socially undesirable. She wore a diagonally striped minidress, high, white ankle-boots,
and a braided metallic headband, having assembled the components at a strip-mall store
named “WOW! EVERYTHING UNDER $10!” that her mother Peppy had taken her to
for back to-school clothes.

In the main building, Liza could hear girls giggle as she passed by. A pack of preppy
boys stared at her with their mouths open in cruel mock-shock.

“Catching flies?” Liza snapped.

They laughed heartily.

“Want to bob on my knob?” one of the boys yelled as she clicked away on her heels.
Liza had no idea what he was talking about but flipped him the finger anyway.

Liza’s homeroom was her English class, which was taught by a species of woman
indigenous to Marin County: a fading beauty-cum-rich-ex-hippie clotheshorse, partial to
flowing “art to wear” garments of hand-painted silk with bleeding color patterns that
resembled magnified bacteria. Mrs. Gubbins — “You can call me Kay!” — had married
well, divorced well, and married so well again that she was at leave to pursue her
altruistic mission of teaching high school English as an aside to her real “life goals,”
which were apparently proselytizing for a certain faddish, Marin “self-actualization”
cult known as everBest. Her mediocre, uninspired English teaching was peppered with
shrilly enthusiastic everBest-ial axioms and smug truisms.

“Let’s situate the desks into a circle so we can all monitor each other’s eyes, shall we?”
Kay trumpeted to her class of miserable, pocky fourteen-year-olds, all craving
invisibility. Kay had all of the students go around the circle and say their names, their
nicknames, and what they’d “rather be doing other than being responsibly here, now, in
the present.”

A striking, skinny boy with sardonic eyebrows and a crooked red mouth sat next to
Liza. He had long auburn hair pulled back into two Willie Nelson braids and slouched
angularly in his seat, his eyes barely open. When the circle came around to him, a few
other boys in the class started snickering before he even said anything.

“Uh, my name is Anton Grosvenor,” he drawled in a hoarse voice that sounded

hungover. “But my friends call me Kay.”
o?= At this several boys in the classroom fell over with hysterical laughter. A couple of
them mumbled, “Go, Tonto …”

“And, actually, I feel totally actualized, here. I don’t want to be anywhere else. Ever.”

The kids became alert, watching to see how the teacher would handle such scorching
insincerity.

Kay looked at him with a tight-lipped smile.

“Kay? Shall we call you Kay?” she asked with no humor at all.

“That’d be great.”

Kay opted to ignore the fact that she had just been successfully undermined.

Liza was next.

“Elizabeth Lynn Normal,” Liza mumbled. “I’ve always been called Liza. I’d rather be at
the High School of Performing Arts in New York, which is where I’ll be next year.”

“Are you a dancer, or an actress?” Kay asked.

“Mostly a singer,” said Liza.

Liza felt a bump near her leg — Anton Grosvenor was handing her a note. She unfolded
it carefully in her lap.

IF YOU ARE A “SINGER” WHY DO YOU DRESS LIKE A WHOARE? ARE

YOU A WHOARE, ALSO?

Liza had never even kissed a boy and was shocked by the visceral power and violence
of the word whoare, even while misspelled. She ignored him.

Another note came banging against her knee:

HOW ABOUT MY UNIT DEEP IN YOUR FACE FOR $6?

Liza got out her pen and wrote back:

FUCK YOU

The note came back:

o?= OK HOW ABOUT $7

Liza ignored it. Another note came:

OK $7.35 THATS MY FINAL OFFER

Liza wrote back:

I HAVE A BIG BROTHER A-HOLE SHUT YOUR FACE

Anton smirked. He wrote for a while, as more students droned their least thoughtful
answers to Kay’s questions while nobody listened. The note came back:

CHANGED MY MIND YOU HAVE TO 1. GIVE ME $8 THEN 2. WRAP YOUR

LAUGHING GEAR AROUND MY SNOT STICK.

The bell rang. Liza got up and moved away from Anton Grosvenor as quickly as
possible.

A set of two matching girls, dressed and lip-glossed identically but clearly unrelated,
approached Liza after class.

“Hi,” the skinnier one said to Liza. “Were you passing notes to Tonto?”

“Who?” Liza asked, trying to de-code the class schedule that had been printed for her.

“Tonto. Anton Grosvenor. That guy.”

They pointed to the note giver, who was striking a criminally suave posture near the
bulletin board with several of his male groupies.

“Yeah, I guess,” stammered Liza.

“What did he say?” the slimmer girl asked, clearly burning with self-interest.

“Not much,” Liza sidestepped, unable to figure out where to go for her history class.

“You should stay away from him,” said the girl, suddenly turning ugly. Liza now
noticed the large, carefully drawn “Nikki + Tonto” tattooed in ballpoint on her new
denim binder. “Nikki” dotted all of her is with fat hearts.

“That guy is totally disgusting, I wouldn’t go near him if he paid me,” Liza blurted out.
Her brain was still so infected by the notes, she realized, too late, that the “Liza +
Money = Sex” equation was a bad thing to put into the minds of her classmates.

“You look like you’d go near anyone that paid you,” sneered Nikki.

“Yeah,pardon our mistake,” condescended Nikki’s chubbier accomplice.

Liza reddened, then purpled.

“Fuck you skanky-ass bitches!” Liza shrieked, rearing back into her past when she was
a minority in a Reno junior high, and remembering that the best way to frighten white
girls was to act nonwhite. “Bes’ get the fuck out my face ‘fo I kick both yo asses!”
Liza could hear Anton “Tonto” Grosvenor and his minions giggling down the hall at her
display.

“Oh, you’re black, I get it now,” sneered Nikki, derisive but clearly nervous.

“Thass right, I ‘mo kill your bitch-ass ugly face, too, skeezah!” Liza shouted
triumphantly, sensing that her foes were on the run. “Don’tchu fuck wit’ me, bitch, I
been jumped in wit’ the Nevada Queens!”

Liza had never been “jumped in” with the Nevada Queens, an ethnic high school girl-
gang she had heard of once, but it seemed to intimidate Nikki and her friend enough to
make them leave her alone, after giving her penetrating looks of disgust.

Enough other students witnessed that first-day-of-school display that Liza was instantly
branded as feral, trashy, violent, and suffering a racial identity crisis by her peers. They
didn’t think of her in those words — “gross” was all they were able to articulate — but
the girls gave Liza a wide berth, and the boys opted to openly deride her, since they
found her outfits sexually intimidating.

It became clear, in Liza’s first few days at Miwok Butte, that socially, the entire school
was held hostage by members of the extensive Grosvenor family: six exceptional teens
born to the famous identical twins Radcliffe and Horatio, partners in the thriving
Grosvenor and Grosvenor law firm. None of the Grosvenor kids would have been
attending public school were it not for the political aspirations of their fathers, who
considered it important that their children mingle with the Great Unwashed during their
preuniversity years, just in case they ever wanted to be mayors or assemblymen or even
Governor Grosvenors. Teachers fawned over them, seduced by the glamour of such a
healthy, wealthy, intelligent, and beautifully toothed army of teens; the Grosvenor
presence lent dignity to their second-rate teaching jobs in the way that fine china can
dignify a modest meal.

Miwok public opinion set as hard and instantly as epoxy — one was either in or under
the Grosvenor vanguard. Because there were so many of them, the deadly Grosvenor
gaze was virtually omnipresent and held the entire school in its crosshairs.

One would think, given Liza’s hapless high school debut, that she would scuttle down
to join the lowest dregs of the sub-staircase-dwelling teens and live out her next four
years suffering quietly beneath the Grosvenor boot. But Liza, as we know, is not a girl
ruled by the logic of self-preservation.

High school girls, whose hormones outweigh their brains, generally fall for the worst,
most abusive male louts available, out of some DNA-throwback, chimpanzee fealty to
the Alpha Male. Over the first few weeks of high school, the felonious visage of Tonto
Grosvenor began to creep into Liza’s subconscious and create a Feeling that Liza
thought she recognized as Mild Hate — a safe and comfortable feeling, with which one
can have a laugh and a beer, then forget about moments later.

But Liza’s Mild Hate for Tonto Grosvenor, once it had gotten safely under her skin,
shed its Wicked Wolf suit and revealed itself, when she was utterly defenseless, as the
Deadly Lamb of Love.
Cupid has rarely been so cruel. The romance continued thusly:

YOU ARE A SPUNK-DRENCHED BAG OF USED SLUT-MEAT,

Tonto wrote as Nikki and her chunky friend Beth watched the transaction with furious
eyes. While part of Liza was stung by Tonto’s notes, another part of her was impressed
with his flair for writing them. The verbal section of her mind began inadvertently
developing as she wracked her vocabulary sheet and pocket thesaurus to come up with a
laudable insult.

You are a jejune, lice-infested pariah, she wrote hopefully.

LAME THESAURAUS WORK YOU CUM-SICK HOSE MONSTER

Liza dissected Tonto’s notes during class, trying to reverse-engineer them and
determine the reasons for their toothsome violence and shock power:

MODIFIER (Somethinged-up/out/on) — NOUN (weird receptacle), PREPOSITION

(of) ADJECTIVE (weak/small or sexual), MODIFIER (suggesting gross sex/disease),
NOUN (food/weak/ugly thing).

Using this as a model to respond to Tonto’s notes, Liza began to “A.A.I.: Apprehend,
Adapt and Improve,” as Kay had been sanctimoniously harping upon them to do:

Eat yourself, you piss-stained prison puppy

AWESOME ALLITERATION, ASSHOLE

So many rules! Liza fumed. Nevertheless, spurred by this wretched correspondence, she
was doing well in English.

One wretched, gray, fifty-two-degree morning, when the gym teacher humiliated Liza
by having her paddle on a foam kickboard while other girls swam elegant laps, Liza
noticed a redheaded girl with a pink bandanna around her neck, wearing a men’s
overcoat and dirty red leather skirt, sitting in the bleachers above the pool, painting her
fingernails. Some girls got out of swimming for monthly bleeding or illness; this girl
didn’t appear to be sick at all but had sat out of class for two full weeks, scowling at the
water, never even bothering with the locker room. Liza was famished with curiosity as
to how the girl pulled it off.

Liza saw the girl later that day in the “smoking section” of the outdoor amphitheatre.

“Excuse me, um, can I ask you something?” Liza stammered, approaching the redhead.

“What?” asked the girl, lighting a Marlboro 100.

“Um, how did you get out of swimming?”

“Oh, that was totally easy. I said I had hep.”

“Is that like a school credit?”

“No, it’s hepatitis. A disease. If you have it, they worry you could give it to everyone in
the pool.”

Liza shifted in her pumps, wondering how close you had to get to somebody with
hepatitis to catch it in the open air.

“I don’t actually have it,” continued the girl.

“Then … why did you say you did?” asked Liza. The girl gave her a look.

“To get out of swimming! This is Northern California! Nobody should swim here! It’s
too fucking cold!”

“O-o-o-oh. That is so, so true.”

“I’m Lorna,” said the girl, holding out a hand with bitten red fingernails, then pulling it
back when she remembered her fresh polish was still tacky.

The next day, Liza forged a note from Peppy.

Please excuse my daughter Liza Normal from aquatics

since we think there is a possibility she might have
Hepatites. We’ll update you when the tests come back from
the hospital. Thank you,
Penelope Normal

Now Liza Normal and Lorna Wax both sat out of aquatics, and this way they became
friends. Lorna, a sophomore, was a font of experience.

“Beware the goddamned Grosvenors,” Lorna warned, after unfolding a terrible story
about her unrequited lust for Dino Grosvenor the previous school year, which had
culminated in a disappointing bout of drunken fellatio that sealed Lorna’s reputation as
a “Campus Slut” for what would surely be her entire high school career.

Lorna had also had an unconventional childhood. She lived in Sausalito, in a cluster of
ramshackle houseboats made locally famous by a legion of hippie squatters who fought
off gentrification (and subsequent eviction) in the 1970s by staging a riot. Long-haired
men shouting in rubber dinghies were teargassed on the news; braless mothers hit police
with oars. Finally, after months of bloody foreheads and pro-bono legal wrangling, the
houseboat community was written off as an intractable nuisance by the city and left to
fester. Dead, rusty cars filled the unpaved parking lot; children with dirty mouths and no
pants ran barefoot on splintering gangplanks. Lorna’s houseboat, named The Amnion
by Lorna’s Wiccan midwife mother, was a rotting geodesic dome on a plywood
platform, which floated in the murky bay on barnacle-crusted blocks of orange
polystyrene. Inside the dome, the triangular ceiling panels were strung with dusty
crystals and fading pinatas. Lorna’s father, like Liza’s, hadn’t been in the picture for
years and was, said Lorna, “probably in jail.” Her mother, Sky-Rose Wax, was a pot
dealer in addition to her midwifery. Liza felt comforted that Lorna had never fit in with
the local rich kids, either — whatever social cachet Lorna was able to cobble together
came from stealing buds out of her mother’s stash and selling them to her classmates.
Lorna herself abhorred pot; “It makes my mother so fucking stupid,” she would say.

It was Lorna’s reluctant pot-sales that got her and Liza invited to a party with the inner
sanctum of popular kids. It was the end of October; the sudden, crisp smartness of the
air and the thrilling pine and sea atoms in the sprinting wind made everyone hopeful and
ambitious, except Liza and Lorna, who had spent every recess since they had met in the
outdoor amphitheatre, huddled around the lit ends of Marlboro 100s.

Tonto’s brother Dezi walked up to the unhappy girls in a red plaid scarf, his strawberry-
blond hair sticking straight up from the wind. Dezi was clearly in a different life-movie
than they were — he looked like he should be whistling bird calls and carrying armfuls
of Christmas gifts to bouncy violin music, while Liza and Lorna evoked an exhausted,
soup-kitcheny desolation.

“Hullo! Lorna Wax?” asked Dezi, twinkling, holding out his scrubbed pink paw. “Glad
to meet ya! Hey, it’s kind of OK over here in the smoking section, isn’t it?” Dezi
surveyed the amphitheatre and its shivering teen clientele, braving a miserable chill for
the comforts of Mother Nicotine.

“I guess,” Lorna muttered, nonplussed by the invading Grosvenor.

“Smoking is what brings me here, actually,” Dezi segued, his eyes alight with
Claymation mischief.

“Oh?”

Dezi sidled up next to Lorna.

“I hear you sell a little you-know-what every now and then. Why don’t you guys come
to this little Halloween party.” Dezi handed Lorna a square of slick paper. “Annabella
Sorkin’s parents are out of town for the weekend. You know Annabella?”

“No,” said Lorna.

“Well, it doesn’t matter, I’m sure she’ll be glad you showed up. So come, and bring as
much you-know-what as you can, I’m sure you’ll sell it all.”

Dezi flashed a dazzling smile and sauntered away.

“What the fuck was that?” Lorna asked.

Liza’s eyes spun in her head.

“Our big chance,” she said, breathily.

High school, for most people, gets boiled down to select formative experiences that can
still make the person writhe like a cold ball of worms, twenty years later. The agent of
Liza’s demise, what the Greeks would call ate — the “blindness of folly” that led our
hero to her destruction — was her unwillingness to accept, during the first two months
of high school, that she would be reviled by the popular kids forever. Something had to
give, she thought. There had to be an “Ugly Duckling” moment that would subvert her
lowly status: a new haircut, or a talent contest, or maybe just the right animal-print
spandex unitard. This delusion, brought on by rapt consumption of certain films and
sitcoms, would be her undoing at Annabella Sorkin’s Halloween party. Lorna, having
lived through her own Great Death of Hope the year before, warned Liza to no avail.

“We’re just going to be, like, delivery people, like pizza guys. They’re not interested in
us, they just want drugs.”

“But maybe they’ll decide we’re cool and then we’ll get to go to more parties.”

“I don’t understand why you want to hang out with them anyway… Oh wait, yes I do,
oh fuck Liza.”

“What?!”

“You’re going to throw yourself at Tonto.” Lorna’s tone was mournful.

“No I’m not,” said Liza, hating herself for her ecstatic dreams of devouring his sinister
mouth.

“Yes you are,” said Lorna.

Liza desperately wanted to stay away from Tonto Grosvenor, but her hormones fizzed
and popped like bacon grease every time he slipped her another well-turned character
assassination:

. . . FIST IT UP YOUR CAKEHOLE, YOU SPIT-SHINED DISCO PIG . . .

. . . YOU CHEAP RENTAL BACK-HO . . .
. . . YOU DOUCHE-HUFFER . . .

Halloween had always been an incriminating holiday for Liza, whose mother had
curious ideas about what constituted “dress-up.” While other schoolchildren arrived at
Halloween parties wearing handmade panda suits, faerie princess gowns with yards of
pink tulle, or respectable, store-bought Superman or Wonder Woman masks with
printed nylon coveralls, Peppy had always dug into her box of sequined Reno finery and
tarted up Liza in cocktail dresses, wobbling lines of liquid eyeliner, and a long black
wig. “Tell people you’re a gypsy fortune-teller,” Peppy would slur. “Pull up your bra
strap.”

“I can see your future, all right,” a smirking mother once said to Liza while dropping
Tootsie Rolls into her plastic pumpkin.

Liza and Lorna rooted through a Hefty bag of Peppy’s old outfits, considering what to
wear to the party, taking occasional breaks to smoke cigarettes in the backyard.
“That’s a horrible habit!” Noreen yelled down at them from the kitchen window. “You
look ridiculous smoking with those young little faces! You should stop trying to be
things you’re not!” Noreen slammed the window shut.

“I like your grandma.” Lorna laughed.

At Peppy’s urging, Ned had gotten a driver’s license at the beginning of the month.
Peppy had taken to getting drunk so early in the day she was rightfully worried about
her ability to steer to and from the supermarket, and was sick of being berated in the car
by Noreen. For Liza and Lorna, this meant that Ned was their chauffeur, by right.

“You’re coming to the Halloween party with us,” Liza informed him.

“No I’m NOT.” Ned was petrified at the idea of being in an unstructured environment
where teens would be making out.

“You’ll be in costume,” Liza begged.

(“Get on with the horrible life-altering Incident of Shame already,” you’re

thinking at this point. To soothe your impatience, we Fast-Forward: Liza and
Lorna, moving in kung fu blurs, compose costumes. Lorna steals a bag of pot from
her spaced-out mother, and Ned is bribed with a promise of $20 in after-pot-sales.
Tonto passes more hair-raisingly rude notes to Liza. Liza and Lorna consume five
more packs of Marlboro Lights. That is all, and now it is The Night.)

The Honda wheezed up the driveway of an enormous modern stilt house perched on a
hill in Belvedere. The Sorkin home was exquisite: long and spacious with walls of
polished Carpathian elm burl, a Japanese garden with koi-filled Zen pond, enormous
picture windows and a wraparound balcony with a view that stretched and rolled like a
beautiful nude over Angel Island and Alcatraz, the marinas and dark green hills of
Sausalito, the black satin sheets of the bay and the twinkling Golden Gate Bridge,
finally meeting the horizon in the sparkling tiara of San Francisco, city of jewels — a
soul-stirring luxury view that made those fortunate enough to be standing on that
balcony, hanging over the fog as it poured like steamed milk down the hills, intoxicated
with a feeling of owning the world.

The house hurt Liza, it was so beautiful.

“I never want to go back to my shit-hole of a room,” Liza said to Lorna as they threw
their coats on the pile on Annabella Sorkin’s nineteenth-century four-poster bed. “Me
either,” said Lorna. “Me threether,” mumbled Ned, looking at Annabella’s sleek
personal home entertainment setup.

Lorna and Liza looked fairly wonderful in their mermaid ensembles. They had hot-
glued glitter and shells to bikini tops, and cut and stapled two of Peppy’s old sequined
dresses into remedial fish-tails. The crimping iron was used to excellent effect; Lorna’s
hair was big and purple, Liza’s huge and green with food coloring and glitter. Liza’s
ordinarily vulgar makeup looked appropriate and whimsical. Together they were snazzy
and fantastic; they felt full of the strange power of new personalities (as a successfully
transformative outfit will do) and strong hopes of a fabulous entrance and subsequent
social improvement. Ned, likewise, was happy to be seen in his Long John Silver
costume, and proud of how well the components had come together at the Salvation
Army. Ike had rigged him a fake peg leg with Ace bandages, big pants, and a toilet
plunger. The eyepatch hid his lazy eye, and his portliness was in character. “Arrgh, ye
swabby,” he said happily, waving his hook at the moth-eaten stuffed woodpecker hot-
glued to his epaulet in lieu of a parrot.

Most kids at the party weren’t Miwok Butte students, but private and prep-school types
who knew one another through country, yacht, and ski clubs. They seemed to be a
whiter, shinier race of superior young humans, dressed in movie-quality French Court
ensembles with powdered wigs, Sherlock Holmes tweeds, and die-cast metal armor.

“Shit, those are the best costumes I have ever seen.”

“Moneymoneymoney,” Lorna murmured, watching a girl (who must have been

Annabella Sorkin) in a huge, satin Scarlett O’Hara hoop dress swan over to the doorway
to kiss a seven-foot tennis ball can.

Dezi Grosvenor waddled up to Lorna wearing an adorable penguin suit, fanning his face
with $300 in twenties.

“You look great! You bring it?” Dezi squealed.

“I don’t know if I brought that much,” Lorna said, suddenly self-conscious.

“Meet me in the master bathroom. It’s the big black one with the Jacuzzi and the palm
trees!” With that he wobbled down the hall. Two attractive cat-girls pounced up against
his plush breast with meowling delight.

“LOOK! IT’S CAPTAIN QUASIMODO AND THE SEAWHORES!” shouted Tonto’s

familiar voice. Liza felt goose bumps spray from her knees up to her shoulders. Tonto
was dressed like an Indian — he had, in fact, dressed like an Indian for nine of the
fifteen Halloweens of his life. Each year, his schtick had gotten a little better. The long,
feathered headdress, fringed buckskin pants, beaded accessories, and hairless, painted
torso, along with his customary long braids, was more than Liza’s young lust could
bear. Behind him, Dino Grosvenor (Lawrence of Arabia) was chatting intimately with
Chantal Baumgarten, powdered and sublime in a vintage silk geisha ensemble, fresh
from rehearsals for the Eiderdijken Academy production of The Mikado. Liza looked
down at her hot-glue mermaid outfit, which was leaving a snail-trail of glitter and
escaped sequins, and the old leaden feeling of inescapable trashiness settled into her
stomach, ruining her mood.

Liza and Lorna proceeded to the bar, which boasted an impressive alcohol selection.

“I’m going to drink heavily, like I’ve never drunk before,” announced Liza.
“You’re the one that wanted to make friends with these people. Don’t make it your
personal Waterloo.” Lorna sounded ominous.

“Whatever that means!”

Liza poured herself an extra-large glass of triple sec.

“I’m gonna go find Dezi,” Lorna said, watching Liza watch Tonto. “Try not to do
anything you’ll regret later, OK?”

“How will I ever know what I regret later if I never do anything, ever?” Liza asked
loudly in a perturbed tone.

“That’s one way of looking at it,” Lorna said doubtfully.

“I’m not going to be around these assholes next year,” Liza said, as her inner disgrace
generator picked up speed. “I’m going to New York. To the High School of Performing
Arts.” She made this announcement with belligerent denial; she and Lorna both knew
that dream had shriveled on the vine. She downed the rest of her glass of triple sec,
slammed the glass down, and mock-gagged. “Jesus, what was that stuff? These people
obviously don’t know their liquor.”

“Next year’s a long way off,” Lorna cautioned, her monotone implying she knew it
would do no good.

As Lorna went off in search of the master bathroom, Liza remained at the bar to watch
Tonto and his boy sycophants play mumblety-peg in the kitchen, stabbing a paring knife
between their splayed fingers.

“Liza!” Tonto shouted. “Come here! Lay on this butcher block and we’ll amputate your
upper half so you can be all fish.”

“Yeah RIGHT,” Liza brayed artlessly, her head suddenly glowing like a kerosene lamp.
She tottered over to Tonto, her legs pinned together by her tight tail.

“Want to make a movie?” Tonto asked. “I’ve got a camcorder and a cot.”

His groupies laughed.

“It would depend on the role,” Liza said, not getting it. “You have to call my agent.”

(The only thing worse than this naive and grandiose comment was the Taser jolt of
embarrassment Liza felt, eleven years later, when she finally realized what Tonto
actually meant.)

Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Cintra Wilson is a culture critic and author whose books include "A Massive Swelling:
Celebrity Re-Examined as a Grotesque, Crippling Disease" and "Caligula for President:
Better American Living Through Tyranny." Her new book, "Fear and Clothing:
Unbuckling America's Fashion Destiny," will be published by WW Norton.
Cintra Wilson > Quotes

“If Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana were "candles in the wind," and Anna Nicole Smith was
a bonfire in a hailstorm, and Lindsay Lohan is an electric toaster thrown intentionally into a
Jacuzzi, then Paris Hilton s a strobe light in an epilepsy ward.”
― Cintra Wilson

“Right now, the economy is a whole lot like a fairly good-looking brain-dead chick in a
persistent vegetative coma. You can't really wake her up, but there's things she's still good
for.”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“Once a decision is made to be tasteful and risk-free, all spark, soul, variety, sleaze,
spontaneity and fun go right out the window”
― Cintra Wilson

“Stop pathetically believing that you deserve fame or fame deserves you. It's yucky, and it's
only making you miserable, so stop.”
― Cintra Wilson, A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Reexamined as Grotesque Crippling Disease
and Other Cultural Revelations

“I once saw a Betsey Johnson runway show that featured thongs and "ass cleavage," and I
thought, This is the future.”
― Cintra Wilson
“Fame is a perverse deformity, an ego swelling as ludicrous as an extra organ, and the people
that have it, for a huge part, are willfully and deliberately fucked-up past the point of ever
having anything sweet or human or normal about themselves ever again.”
― Cintra Wilson, A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Reexamined as Grotesque Crippling Disease
and Other Cultural Revelations

“Sometimes you have to lose a lot of Q-tips before you realize you have a hole in your head.

Colors Insulting To Nature”

― Cintra Wilson

“Look deep into your heart, Gentle Reader. Deep, deep, deep; past your desire for true love,
for inexhaustible riches or uncontested sexual championship, for the ability to fight crime and
restore peace to a weary world. Underneath all this, if you are a true, red-blooded American,
you'll find the throbbing desire to be famous.”
― Cintra Wilson

“When you have lived your life under such dominant image-leadership, its pressures put a
certain invisible English on the cue ball of your development: It influences all of your ideas
about who you should be, all the ways in which you become yourself.”
― Cintra Wilson

“I'm always looking for evidence to support my conjecture that celebrity in Hollywood is sort of
like a Joel Peter Witkin photograph: It looks like a big lush banquet table filled with abundance
and cornucopias, and then if you look at it closer you see that all the fruit is made of wax and
that entree in the middle of the table is actually a dead baby.”
― Cintra Wilson
“I figure that if there's a heaven, then there's a room in heaven where you can look over all of
history and be anyone you want to be, at a peak moment in their lives. For example, I always
say I would choose to be one of Stevie Wonder's backup singers on the "Innervisions" album.”
― Cintra Wilson

“Nothing in life was ever clearly drawn, obviously just, or totally emotionally satisfying, but the
moment-to-moment stuff of reality featured infinitely more complication, sleaze, struggle,
true beauty, unfairness, profundity, passion, and depth of consciousness than she, in her
frantic struggle to be somebody other than her unspectacular self, had been previously aware
of. page 302”
― Cintra Wilson, Colors Insulting To Nature