Never mind the pedophilia and rape, what really bothers me about Jeffery Epstein is his fancy crib, as described by journalist Vicky Ward, for Vanity Fair. It is said to be Manhattan’s largest private residence.

Inside, amid the flurry of menservants attired in sober black suits and pristine white gloves, you feel you have stumbled into someone’s private Xanadu. This is no mere rich person’s home, but a high-walled, eclectic, imperious fantasy that seems to have no boundaries. The entrance hall is decorated not with paintings but with row upon row of individually framed eyeballs; these, the owner tells people with relish, were imported from England, where they were made for injured soldiers.

Individually framed eyeballs??? Motherfucker!

Next comes a marble foyer, which does have a painting, in the manner of Jean Dubuffet … but the host coyly refuses to tell visitors who painted it. In any case, guests are like pygmies next to the nearby twice-life-size sculpture of a naked African warrior.

Okay, so, menservants wearing white gloves and a sculpture of a giant naked African? This sounds like some kind of satire, maybe an Evelyn Waugh novel making fun of Colonialists. But no, this is a real person, someone admired by the heads of industry and rulers of nations, Nobel Prize winning scientists and Harvard Professors.

Guests are invited to lunch or dinner at the town house—Epstein usually refers to the former as “tea,” since he likes to eat bite-size morsels and drink copious quantities of Earl Grey.

Earl Grey tea, for fuck sake. But wait.

Tea is served in the “leather room,” so called because of the cordovan-colored fabric on the walls. The chairs are covered in a leopard print, and on the wall hangs a huge, Oriental fantasy of a woman holding an opium pipe and caressing a snarling lionskin.

Now it sounds like a Monty Python skit or a James Bond movie. And it keeps getting better!

Upstairs…the office features a gilded desk (which Epstein tells people belonged to banker J. P. Morgan), 18th-century black lacquered Portuguese cabinets, and a nine-foot ebony Steinway “D” grand. On the desk, a paperback copy of the Marquis de Sade’s The Misfortunes of Virtue was recently spotted. Covering the floor, Epstein has explained, “is the largest Persian rug you’ll ever see in a private home—so big, it must have come from a mosque.”

What a fucking cunt!!! Isn’t this just stupefying? How could people take this cunt seriously? It’s like his whole deal is to personify decadence, in the most obvious and trite way possible. I’m surprised he didn’t insist on speaking French or flaunting a pair of pet leopards wearing diamond necklaces. His lifestyle reminds me of Huysmans’ vision of a depraved aesthete, but without the artistry or novelty.

What a waste of money Jeffrey Epstein is. The grown men who were impressed by this shit deserve to go to jail just on principle. What repulsive fuckers. I hope he was blackmailing all of them and that they are outed with all due fanfare.

While I can’t excuse Epstein’s failure in the pet leopard department, here’s a little flourish that deserves a few points for pretentiousness:

[There is] a stuffed black poodle, standing atop the grand piano. “No decorator would ever tell you to do that,” Epstein brags to visitors. “But I want people to think what it means to stuff a dog.”

Aww, that’s nice.

What do you want for Jeffrey Epstein? Don’t hold back.

What an awful week.

I have been struggling with the shock of losing David Bowie and its attendant triggers, and then the more prosaic helpless rage of dealing with my malfunctioning website that some fucker has been trying to hack.

I can’t add anything to the many beautiful words already written about David Bowie and his impact on music and culture. Lots of us feel the loss so personally that it has permeated everything…I am playing his music in my head every day. I am thinking about what it means to face death when you don’t welcome it. A new and heartbreaking perspective for me.

I can’t handle it. I can’t dwell in this sadness without going under so I am turning to hate.

Want to join me?

If you too are having an awful week for whatever reason, I invite you to redirect yourself to the cleansing joy of righteous disdain if not downright hatred.

I could not have discovered this awful girl at a better time!

Her name is Jessica Gebhart and she is featured in a video series called Denim Dudes.

Stop what you’re doing and watch this 35 second video. It is heaven. It will take your breath away.

Thank you Jessica, you are a fucking gift from god and I hate the ground you walk on! Never leave me.

I’m making it official. After twenty years of devotion to Johnny Depp as my go-to romantic fantasy, I’m breaking up with him.

The silly hats and the hobo outfits have been trying. The prayer-hands in response to applause have been embarrassing. The unceasing bromances with every male cultural icon from Hunter Thompson to Marlon Brando, ick.

Through it all, I excused his pretentious bullshit because he was Johnny Depp. He was just quirky.

But according to a new interview in Rolling Stone, Johnny Depp “always carries around a copy of Finnegan’s Wake, which he’s been puzzling through for years.”

Jesus, no.

There are limits to what is forgivable, and this is mine. Just last week, I defended Johnny Depp when my friend denounced him for dating a 27 year old model. I told her that he deserved a 27 year old model. His taste in women has always run to perfect doll-like beauties. Who could blame him, I lectured, he’s Johnny Depp.

But now I’m sorry I took his side. ‘Finnegan’s Wake?? ‘Ulysses‘ wouldn’t be poseur enough for him? Nobody can understand Finnegan’s Wake except my brother-in-law, and the rest of us know to stop trying after two pages. Johnny Depp is like a college girl carrying around Anais Nin. People who try to seem intellectual are just sad.  I’ll always remember a pop singer who said in an interview that her idols were Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina. Every time I hear her voice, I feel sad for her. That’s how nice I am.

Goodbye, Johnny. You were so cute, so sexy, so fucking adorable in ‘What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.’ But it’s over.

A company called SRANGEBEAUTIFUL has come up with some sets of nail polish designed to appeal to the Proustian-minded among us.

“….a range of 10 diaphanous veils of wildly haunting colors with inspiration ranging from the vampiric gradations of a healing bruise; the moody rusts of menstrual blood; sooty, phantasmal India ink; the profile of a gray blue Heron scooping fish against a background of gooey river runoff and the apocalyptic color palette of Medieval Flemish paintings. Visceral and private, each shade cloaks the finger in an aqueous film of color for an effect that is strange, beautiful, and impossible to forget.”

Hahahahaha! Isn’t that fantastic???? Other sets are avilable, each absurdly pretentious.

I like how this set includes the color “Menstrual Last Day.” Hopefully they have “First Day of Menstruation” in one of the other sets.

I love colors and the names for colors. I loved my box of crayola crayons as much for the names as the actual colors. When Max was little, we deferred to his acute appreciation of color by showing him something of indeterminate hue and asking him, “What do you call this color, Max?” He would take a moment to consider and say something like, “I call it tan.”

In the spirit of STRANGEBEAUTIFUL, I want to invent my own set of nail polish colors:

Cubism
Gruyere
Still Spotting
Hep C
Wittgenstein
Virgin Birth
Mishima Cultist Coral
Clogged Drain
Hypothermia Blue

Have a look at the nail polish here.   $85 per set.

And contribute your own colors if you are so inclined!

Reading the little profiles of  people on tumblr, I noticed that a few people described themselves as eccentric. Like, ‘eccentric 19 year old art student loves cats, drawing, photography cupcakes and  random  cartoons.’

My feeling is, you don’t describe yourself as eccentric. That’s a conclusion made about you by someone else. It  just  seems unseemly. Like calling yourself ‘classy,’ it’s kind of a self-negating word.

Naturally my husband failed to see the problem. I explained that actual eccentrics would not describe themselves as such. They tend to take no notice of how odd they are, but rather to find others baffling. The most eccentric people I’ve ever known would never describe themselves that way.

Therefore, almost by definition, these self-described eccentrics are just being pretentious. My husband then asked me what other words I would categorize as unseemly. I came up with “complex” and “complicated’ as well as ‘lanky.” I don’t know where the  lanky came from, but it’s certainly not a word to use about  oneself unless you want to be sickening.

It was frustrating to try to make my point when to another wordist, I’m sure it’s all a given. It’s pretentious to use certain words about yourself, even if those words are fairly accurate.  Maybe you’re quirky, but don’t bill yourself as quirky. It’s an evaluation for others to make.

I was excited about getting into this conversation  with someone as sensitive and prohibitive about words and word-usage as I am. I though of calling Cousin Russell, who’s always up for a word discussion. But what I really wanted was Max, because he would know exactly what I meant and he would be eager to throw in some other words that he found unacceptable in the same way.

I need someone to be Max. When it hit me, I started to cry, even though we were on our first weekend vacation in a year and a half.  Maybe my other nephew can help. I need someone who cringes when they hear a room or building called a ‘space.’

Anyone care to help out? Agree or disagree, as long as you have strong opinions about words.