When the subject of Victoria Beckham’s hairdo came up during lunch, my friend Tim remarked, “I think it’s assaultive.” Isn’t he a genius?! Now you know how to discuss this awful hairdo at dinner parties!
The style has been named ‘the Pob,’ as in Posh+bob. Horrible. And it’s infectious, too.
If you’ve been longing for some scholarly discussion of sperm, welcome, this is your lucky day. I have come upon the mother lode, so to speak: an essay by Camille Paglia in which she reviews three new books about male sexuality. If you’re pressed for time, here is the essence of the piece.
“Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man’s Most Precious Fluids” is the work of some lesbian professor who not only directed a sperm bank but had two children by artificial insemination. Camille loves the book’s first sentence, which begins… “It has been called sperm, semen, ejaculate, seed, man fluid, baby gravy, jizz, cum, pearl necklace, gentleman’s relish, wad, pimp juice, number 3, load, spew, donut glaze, spunk, gizzum, cream, hot man mustard…..” It keeps going on, but I think you get the picture. Camille likes this book but regrets its overuse of worn out terms like ‘hegemonic masculinity.’
“Images of Bliss: Ejaculation, Masculinity, Meaning” is by some foreign dude with a funny name, who is simply too pretentious for Camille’s taste. His ‘juxtaposition of gay porn, and semen art with Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci, and Marcel Proust is buried in a labyrinthine poststructuralist prose…’ Here, I misread Leonardo Di Caprio for da Vinci, and perked up, momentarily. But no, there was just more crap about Aristotle and Jacques Lacan. Camille was particularly annoyed by the chapter called “Significant Discharge: The Cum Shot and Narrativity,” which failed to correctly appreciate Bruce LaBruce’s gay-porn classic, ‘Hustler White.’ I’m with Camille, here. I don’t know a thing about Bruce LaBruce but he certainly deserves a more thoughtful analysis.
“Impotence: A Cultural History,” written by a professor of history in a ‘lucid, urbane’ prose style, was a welcome relief for Camille. She loves the chapter about Kinsey and Masters and Johnson. She loves the critique of Viagra and the American pharmaceutical companies. But the book has its shortcomings. She complains about the author’s over-reliance on ideological gender-studies books, and she gives us the following sentence, which will live forever in the Pseud’s Corner Hall of Fame:
“Hence he has absorbed their manifold errors – missing the fertility symbolism in the ithyphallic Athenian herms, for example, which were apotropaic vestiges of the agrarian past (rather than a sexist parading of male power), or treating Pompeii, a small, hedonistic resort like Las Vegas or Monte Carlo, as if it were Rome itself.”
I fucking love Camille Paglia, who never ceases to entertain. Her essay is a nice counterpoint to a documentary about the movie Deep Throat, that I watched on TV last week. Apart from innumerable reasons to be depressed, the movie does offer a couple of lighter moments. There’s an old clip of Helen Gurley Brown, looking like a thousand year old mummy, cheerfully noting that sperm makes a wonderful facial and neck treatment. Her own skin wasn’t too persuasive on this point, but maybe it only works for the first hundred years after menopause.
If you don’t love this skirt, you shouldn’t even be here. Scram!
If you love it, go here to see more.
“For this was the kind of paradigmatic young person it was possible to both extravagantly admire and deeply despair of, a stern intolerant moralist as well as a giddy, buoyant enthusiast, someone perhaps best viewed as a walking Rorschach test.” – Kenneth Turan, on ‘Into The Wild’
Is there ever an excuse for calling a person ‘paridigmatic?’ Someone help Kenneth Turan, before he revives ‘trope’ or ‘gravitas!’
Are any of his five sons enlisted in the army, fighting the war Mitt supports?
Click here. (Sorry about the ad)
Hillary Clinton was finally asked, point blank, about rumors that she is a lesbian. Here’s her answer:
“It’s not true, but it is something I have no control over. People will say what they want to say.”
Is that the best she could do?! She must have known that the question would be posed, sooner or later.
Wouldn’t it have been a great opportunity to say something like “How sad that in the twenty-first century, forceful women are still being called ‘lesbians,’ like it’s the ultimate insult!” Or even, “My sexuality is not up for discussion.”
Hillary is such a disappointment to me. And she’s probably a lesbian, too.
I’m in hog-heaven with all the latest O.J. shit, and it just keeps getting better. The cast of sleazy characters is fantastic! It strikes me that news stories like this one are the equivalent of Victorian novels, for people who are too lazy to pick up a book.
O. J. Simpson is in a class of his own, though. He is the ultimate anti-hero, and putting him in jail may afford us a sense of triumph that we can’t get anywhere else. Certainly not from our m*****f*cking government, to use one of O.J.’s favorite w**ds.
This is the photo he was all worked up about, only his copy was signed by J. Edgar Hoover (known as ‘Mary’ to his close friends.)
Who cares if it was a ‘set-up?’ Throw his crazy ass in jail and give the Goldmans the f***ing Rolex!
Israeli police and soldiers at checkpoints near the West Bank cities of Ramallah and Bethlehem turned away thousands of Palestinians trying to go to Jerusalem for the Friday prayers, witnesses said.
In Jerusalem, police erected roadblocks around the walled Old City, home to the Al Aqsa Mosque, one of Islam’s three holiest sites, and to sites sacred to Jews and Christians. Hundreds of Israeli police were deployed throughout the area.
But thank goodness Madonna was able to secure a meeting with Israeli president Shimon Peres, who gave her a bible. I’m sure she can help bring peace to the Middle East. I like that she’s beginning to look like Bette Davis, but I’m concerned that her husband might be some kind of pork product.
The great British satire magazine Private eye had a feature called ‘Pseud’s Corner,’ where any kind of pseudo-intellectual discourse was mocked. I miss it! So here’s my first tribute, and it’s a good one:
In the Los Angeles Times, tin-eared pop music critic Ann Powers reviewed poor Britney’s VMA appearance, and recalled a time when Britney’s “gorgeous form and defiant beauty” were “postively Nabokovian.”
Aaaaaah! First read Lolita, you idiot, before you refer to it. Lolita was 12 years old, and distinctly childlike. That was the point. God, I hate Ann Powers.
I’ve always loved the 50s style refridgerators made by Smeg, and now you can order them online! Pink is still my favorite but check out the other colors, too. The name ‘Smeg’ is just an extra bonus!
