A Brie Grows in Brooklyn

Icon of the Week: Mia Wasikowska

I’ve been watching the first season of HBO’s In Treatment (which I abhor) because it’s at the top of my Netflix DVD queue, and I’m too lazy to sign into my account and delete it. Every time I get the little red envelope with the next disc inside, I’m like, fuck! I hate you.

In Treatment is obviously well done. It has “intelligent” dialogue, and famous actors. But honestly, almost all of the characters are insufferable, especially Laura, played by Melissa George, whose puffy lips and tales of awful sexcapades afford her no sympathy, even though she is completely gorgeous.

Even worse, it’s fucking boring. It’s the only show I’ve ever watched, including the mostly irrelevant House, and Big Rich Texas, that I don’t even bother paying attention to fully. Instead, I listen to it as background noise while I Gchat, or wash dishes, or sit and pick at the dead skin on my toes.

The only redeeming factor of the entire show are the episodes with Sophie, played by Mia Wasikowska.

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Icons of the Week: Nafissatou Diallo and Tristane Banon, the Women of Dominique Strauss-Kahn

For whatever reason, whenever I see a picture of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, I immediately think of Bernie Madoff. Maybe it’s because they look vaguely similar, or maybe it’s because they both like to rape people, either literally or metaphorically—Dominique seems to prefer women, and Bernie, the children and grandchildren of Holocaust victims.

Bernie Madoff has already had his day of reckoning, but fortunately for those of us who love a good scandal, Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s public stoning has only just begun.

Unfortunately, the case of Nafissatou Diallo, the hotel maid who claims that Dominique Strauss-Kahn assaulted her in an elevator, seems to be going down the shitter, a reversal that might have brought the spectacle to an abrupt end if it weren’t for Tristane Banon, whom we will get to a bit later.

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Wendi Murdoch: Icon of the Week

A few weeks ago, my friend Jamie introduced me to the Daily Mail’s website, which is basically the best thing that exists online. Here’s a round-up of some of today’s headlines after a cursory glance at the homepage:

• “The runaway migrant bride: Jamaican dumps new husband 20 MINUTES after arriving at his UK home”
• “Why human-like robots are so creepy to watch (they spark conflict in our brains)”
• “Catherine Zeta-Jones cuts a colourful appearance in a psychadelic kaftan as she hits St Tropez with Michael Douglas”
• “Parisian politician’s wife ‘dressed as catwoman and hid with gun outside flat to kill husband’”

Honestly tell me you don’t want to read these articles, and I will remind you that you’re not my friend.

The best thing about the Daily Mail is that it’s text-light, and extremely image-heavy. You know how normal gossip blogs, like Gofugyourself and Dlisted, show only a few images of a celebrity’s outfit at an event? You’re like, ok, I’m not sure I like Kate Moss’ wedding dress, I wish I could see like 80 more angles of it to make a final judgment call? Also, I kind of need to know what she wore to her rehearsal dinner, and oh yeah, who was the prettiest of her 15 bridesmaids??

The Daily Mail will give you everything you want, and more. It is fucking awesome.

Anykatemossnipple, I was meandering around the homepage, looking for someone worthy to make my Icon, when I stumbled upon these images of Wendi Murdoch beating down the guy who threw a shaving cream pie in Rupert’s face today at his parliamentary hearing.

And I thought to myself, “Now this is a bitch I can look up to.”

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Icon of the Week: Charlene Wittstock, The Future Princess Consort of Monaco

Basically the only articles The New York Times website recommends for me are pieces about war atrocities and royal weddings.

Which is how I came upon a sweet little item that Albert II, the Prince of Monaco, is to wed Charlene Lynette Wittstock, a former Olympic swimmer from South Africa, this coming Saturday, July 2.

Is it just me, or should someone with the name Charlene be precluded from bearing a royal title?

Charlene is just about the hottest piece of ass to marry a European royal since Grace Kelly, which is fitting, considering that she’s marrying Grace’s son.

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Icons of the Week: The Not So Numerous Lovers of V.S. Naipaul

Those of you who aren’t consumed by the “Sexts, Lies and Videotape”* scandal involving Anthony Wiener might have caught the news item that V.S. Naipul, the novelist, recently proclaimed that no female writer is his equal…in history.

(*Headline by the ingenious Rony)

Naipaul said: “I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me.”

He then went on to claim that not even Jane Austen could rival him.

I mean, the claim is so ridiculous that it almost seems absurd to report on it. First of all, how many BBC miniseries have been made on a V.S. Naipaul novel? My count is zero. 

Second of all, basically no one that I know gives a shit about V.S. Naipaul, or has read really anything that he’s written unless they are an academic, or live religiously by The New York Review of Books. Last summer, while I was alone and happily marooned in Buenos Aires, I gave A Bend In the River a shot, and found it to be so dull that I never finished it. Which says a lot, considering that under the threat of death of boredom, I have read the entirety of Pride & Prejudice. 

So as a female writer, I say to V.S. Naipaul: “Honestly, I don’t give a shit if Mr. Biswas has a house or not. But that’s just my sentimental opinion. What interests me about you is your apparently wild sexual history. Perhaps it could have spiced up the beginning of A Bend In the River, which as far as I could tell, was mostly about how boring it is trade with Africans along…a bend in the river.”

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Icon of the Week: Octavia E. Butler

I might have to lay off this fantasy/science fiction kick that I’ve been on lately, because to be totally honest, it’s getting a little embarrassing, especially in mixed company. There’s really nothing that alienates another girl more than sitting at a table with a group of dudes, waxing poetic about how much you like Neal Stephenson, and complaining how uncomfortable it is to have such a big…

Wait, what?

I call it Hiro Protagonist, is that sexy?

Before I go back to reading Philippa Gregory,* however, I’m going to prepare for my next book club, in which we are discussing The Hunger Games (read it when it came out in 2008, bitches), and also write this post about Octavia E. Butler.

*I don’t read Philippa Gregory. 

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Icon of the Week: Gloria Vanderbilt

Gloria Vanderbilt was, and always will be, just endless amounts of glamour.

She was born in 1924, in the height of the Golden Age, to Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt, the railroad heir, and his second wife, Gloria Morgan, who was a real piece of work. 

In the same year as his daughter’s birth, Reginald died of cirrhosis, leaving her with a $5 million inheritance. Gloria Morgan, neé Mercedes Morgan, a Swedish-born daughter of an American diplomat, jumped upon that trust fund, and began to waste it gleefully.

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Icon of the Week: Mariamne

For those of you who aren’t either Irish-Catholic or somewhere in Latin America, today is Holy Thursday, which means that all of the blood and gore and redemption of Easter Weekend is about to begin. 

If we were living in the BCE in Jerusalem, Jesus Christ would probably be sitting in a garden with flowering trees right now, getting his feet oiled by thirty virgins while at the same time preaching about peace and self sacrifice and the eternal love of his father, God Almighty. You wouldn’t be sitting with him—I might be, because of all of the figures in the bible, I most identify with that reformed whore Mary Magdelene—but you’d probably be like judging people at praetoriums or strolling through the streets, making minor proclamations. I say that because we in America these days all think that we are of the ruling class, and that’s what the ruling class did, according to me, in the ancient Roman empire.

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Icon of the Week: Julie Delpy

For whatever reason I’ve been thinking a lot about Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinéma, a four-part viedeo series he made about (just in case you can’t read cognates)…the history of cinema. 

Honestly, getting through a four hour screening of it requires some strong tape with which to keep open your eyes, and a handful of amphetamines. I didn’t have either when I watched it the first time, so I kept myself awake by occasionally banging my head against the wall behind me. 

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Icon of the Week: Elizabeth Taylor

I still remember the first time I ever heard of Elizabeth Taylor.

My mother was putting National Velvet—in which Elizabeth Taylor plays a young girl whose obsession with horses leads to a number of improbable things—in the VCR, in our wood-panelled, 1980s drab den, where every Friday night she screened a classic movie. While everyone else I knew was watching popular shows likes “Saved By the Bell” and “Full House,” my mother, who refused to allow us to watch ordinary television, was showing us Laurel & Hardy movies, the original episodes of the Little Rascals, the entire oeuvre of Shirley Temple, and the first films of great icons such as Elizabeth Taylor.

After the credits opened, and the sound of the tinny, wailing violins filled the room, my mother turned to my sister and I, curled in balls against one another, in matching cotton nightgowns, and said: “Many people say that the star of this movie, Elizabeth Taylor, is the most beautiful woman in the world.” And then added. “She has violet eyes.”

Mothers can often be pointedly cruel. I burned with jealousy for the entire night. Purple, you see, is my favorite color.

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Icon the Week: Annie Jones

I’m watching the HBO series Carnivalé right now, a show with enormous fantasy potential that makes Lost-sized missteps in terms of narrative clarity. It’s about a traveling circus act drifting around California’s Dust Bowl during the Great Depression that features snake dancers, dwarves, lobster-clawed ladies, a telepath, a ferris wheel, a gimp-legged mechanic, a cooch show and plenty of love and intrigue and mythical lore. 

From this mix of outcasts and rebels and freakshows arises Ben Hawkins, a savior, a man with the power to change the weather, bring dead people back to life, and re-live the trenches of World War I—which occurred before he was born—over and over and over again in his dreams for no discernible reason. I think it’s because he occasionally sees through the eyes of a legless, armless, blue-blooded (literally) Russian man who “manages” the operation, and is imbued with similar savior abilities. I’m not done with the second season yet, however, so that’s just a theory.

Ben Hawkin’s purpose in life, as far as I can tell, is to oppose Justin, a radio preacher whose following of hundreds of thousands of migrant worker “sheep” conceals the true evil of his nature, which manifests itself in the ink black eyes found in those possessed with the devil in contemporary television shows and movies.

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Icon of the Week: Farah Pahlavi

I was in the midst of a 2am, Lambrusco-fueled Netflix Instant “Suggestions For You” rating frenzy when I came upon the documentary The Queen and I (2008). It is about Farah Pahlavi, the former Empress of Iran, who was deposed from her throne, along with her husband the Shah, during the Iranian revolution in 1979.

“This,” I thought to myself, “is exactly what I want to be watching when I’m not thinking very hard.”

So I clicked on the “play” button, and Netflix Instantly fell in love with Empress Farah, who must be one of the most beautiful royals ever to be born without hemophilia.

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Icon of the Week: Cookie Mueller

I’ve wanted to make Cookie Mueller, whom Nan Goldin described as the “starlet of the Lower East Side”, my icon for many months. The reason why I’ve abstained is that I can’t do her enough justice, not compared with all that’s been written about her by friends, lovers, and true fans. Even her Wikipedia page is a masterwork of biographical fiction. 

“Mueller had many pets as a child, including many turtles, one she named Fidel, a dog named Jip, snakes, tadpoles,” the anonymous Wikipedia biographer wrote of her early life. “Cookie began to write at age 11, when she wrote a 321-page book about the Johnstown, Pennsylvania flood of 1830. She stapled it together and wrapped it in butcher paper and Saran wrap and placed in on the shelves of the library in its proper order. The book was never seen again.”

This is the kind of fact that I read  about another writer, more famous than I’ll ever be, that makes me think: “Damn, all that I was doing when I was 11 years old was reading the Babysitter Club series and eating onion grass my rhododendron bush home with my best friend Alison.”

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Icon of the Week: Coco Chanel

I kind of never knew that Coco Chanel was so beautiful.

It explains a lot about why she was so successful, however. Not that she wasn’t naturally talented, because she was, to the extreme. It’s just that she was born in 1883, the midst of the industrial age, to a market stall-holder and a laundrywoman with five other children.

Her upbringing was anything but pedigreed. It had to have been her beauty that first sparked attention, and allowed her to date some of the most famously aristocratic men of her generation, including the Duke of Westminster, aka the third richest man in England. But as Chanel herself said:

 ”There have been several Duchesses of Westminster. There is only one Chanel.”

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Icon of the Week: Severine in Belle Du Jour

I first watched Luis Buñuel’s Belle du Jour (1967), when I was the in the throes of my own middle class malaise. It’s a movie about Severine (played by Catherine Deneuve), a rich housewife who escapes her sexless marriage by becoming a prostitute at a brothel from 2-5pm every day.

I was negotiating my way through being an appropriate member of the society I was brought up in, which is upper middle class, tight-lipped and privileged, and the person I really wanted to be, which is free. 

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