Nothing to really talk about right now--show's off for the summer, so is
House, and nothing exciting is going on. So I'm just posting a couple of blips for no particular reason.
Well, I've finally gotten around to reading
Bitch, which I really think ought to be titled
Beeyotch, and I wonder why I never really peeped into it before. I've read the other Wurtzel books (except for
Radical Sanity--but then who's read that?!), but not this one. Which is weird, considering that she wrote the thing during a huge, extended Ritalin/cocaine binge, part of which took place in Florida. So you know it's going to be chock
full of, well, everything! Sure, sometimes it seems to ramble (she came at the Samson & Delilah story from so many different angles that I wasn't sure what I was supposed to take from the chapter), but every now and then there's something either funny or interesting or confirmatucious of something I thought/knew. Here's something confirmatucious:
It seems that when people deal with the word in binary oppositions, choosing one thing only because it negates another, they are inevitably startled by the discovery that the quest for something completely different has only given them more of the same. That's why Oedipus killed his father and slept with his mother while doing everything to avoid that fate.
That's right, goonatches. My light reading contains references to Greek mythology and all that shizzle. I wonder if I could use this book in a show. There's a whole chapter essentially on Hillary Clinton; it could come in handy if it weren't so outdated (the book's copyright is 1998). But since I mentioned the Clinton chapter, here's an interesting li'l bit from it:
Of course, what is interesting about all this speculation on Hillary's possibilities is that they are precisely the assumptions and ambitions you project onto a gifted youngster, a very bright child, or an adult--no older than twenty-five or thirty--who is thought to be so full of promise. These are not really the kinds of things you say about someone who is full-grown--unless, of course, that person has somehow failed to live up to expectations, or just plain failed and disappointed by any measure. Because all these notions--serving on the Supreme Court, heading up the State Department, getting an elected office, maybe becoming the first woman to chair the Arms Services Committee in the Senate, or perhaps withdrawing to the academy and achieving tenure at some law school or having a chair endowed in her honor for the study of family law or children's rights--all of these grand ideas are pie-in-the-sky dreams. As far as Hillary is concerned, it ought to be clear to everyone that these dreams are gone--not deferred; they are gone completely. But it doesn't matter, because she has surrended it all to wifedome. Looking after Bill Clinton has been her job.
Aha! What a difference a few years can make! If Hillary Clinton could have been so decisively written off roundabout a decade ago, maybe there's hope for the rest of us. I'll beep to that!
Another blip: I smelled the new JP Gaultier fragrance the other day,
Fleur du Male, and I gotta say--
Bravissimo! Or, in other words,
Hell fuck yeah! I wasn't expecting to like it, because I think
Le Male is vile pollution; and since
Fleur's bottle is shaped like the original, I feared its scent would be more of the same too. But since it had fleur in the name, I thought I'd give it a try. And I'm glad I did--it's quite different from
Le Male. It's very floral, and actually kinda feminine, but not like, say,
Oscar or
Paris or
Gio. It's nearly all orange blossom (with some hay and a fern accord), and some people seem to be shocked about that (A man's fragrance that's mostly orange blossom! Gasp!), but I don't see why. Gazillions of men's fragrances have orange blossom, so what's so shocking about that?! Actually,
Fleur smells a little like
Joop! to me (the intense sweetness). And it seems distantly related to those cheap orange-blossom single note scents that a lot of Spanish men seem to wear. At any rate, I don't think the scent is all that feminine, and even if it were, so what?! Really, you could wear a woman's perfume any day and probably no one would even notice. Unless it were, say,
Oscar or
Paris or
Gio. I may have to pick up some Fleur one day--you can't deny that, with all its orange blossom, it's a
great Celeditude scent. Beep!
Lastly, I might say a blip about Paris Hilton. Something I overheard today:
No one knows where Osama bin Laden is, but Paris Hilton is in jail! Something a friend told me:
Paris Hilton has become Bush's America: spoiled and brash and confident in her ability to elude consequence and limit, until finally it all crashes down, and she is left to do only that which she fears the most and finds absolutely unbearable, which is to endure the tyrannical threat of parents and pet owners alike: "Sit there and think about what it is you've done." As for me, although at first I was cheering her return to the slammer, now that I realize that most people wouldn't have been sent back (overcrowding in the LA jails), I feel a little bad for her. (Her teary scene made me sad for her.) Not only is she being made an example of, but now she has to be the target of everyone's rage about class/money in America. And all the venom is a bit hard to stomach. Moreover, I can't imagine that Paris Hilton herself understands any of it. I'm not terribly worried, though. Fortysomething days is nowhere near long enough to stamp out Paris Hilton-level skankstrionics. Maybe no amount of time is. Like a nearly nude, night vision, banality-spouting Phoenix, Paris Hilton shall rise again!!!
And that's the beep for now.
Beep!
Ed Shepp
