god, this is so true. the worst is when she (the winsome, manic, hat-designer/grifter/cupcake baker*) teaches some dysfunctional old man-boy (richard gere) how to function/enjoy life before she selflessly and beautifully dies, leaving him to enjoy the life he does not deserve. i’m looking at you, sweet november.

*in the gq comedy issue, mindy kaling says that in the opinion of hollywood pilot producers, every young’n’sassy female character in a sitcom should work in an adorably twee bakery making cupcakes.

if i didn’t work with children, i might consider using this screensaver, for real.

What is a couched and fat-ankled preggo lady supposed to do while half watching Midnight Run in the late afternoon? Why google the past, obvs. And sometimes you come across charming discoveries like this, which my friends put together a long time ago, when I was not yet a fat-ankled preggo lady, but just another fat-ankled ingenue/writer/drunk with big New York dreams.
Also, there is this, written by one of my favorite people of all time, a bridesman at my wedding, a collector of ephemera and bittersweet oddities, a man who entitled an email to me “hells yeah i’ve had sex on a tire swing. and that shit was good”, a tenderheart, my true friend and personal physician, Mark Whoslastnamemustnotbenamed.

yeah, so i was just checking the celebrity baby horoscopes, like you do. i’m either going to have a libra or a scorpio baby, and these horoscopes tell me– the anxious expectant mother– which babies i will be incapable of loving because of the position of the stars upon their birth. it takes a lot of pressure off, frankly. i mean, if it’s just not in a gemini to be able to love, say, a virgo, then so be it. i mean, sorry baby, but mamma can’t battle the stars. luckily, i am not going to have a damn lazy capricorn baby like harlow madden:

HARLOW MADDEN - CAPRICORN - 1/11/08
“Harlow has a lot of creative potential but she lacks motivation,” Knight says of Nicole Richie and Joel Madden’s 7-month-old daughter.

let me tell you something: there will be no lazy layabout newborns in the house of roake and check, my friends, rest assured. our boy-child will be brimming with motivation. that baby is going to get.shit.done, son. trust.

I have been diagnosed (by a Doctor!) with something acute, and have been rendered powerless and whiny by this possibly deadly, probably just viral plague. “My stories” (thank God for Zarf!) and websites, that’s been about it for a few days. But I have gathered enough strength to post a link to a high-larious, dead-on, and very thorough cliffs-notes salute to The Karate Kid. My will to live and link is restored! And yes, i just took it from BWE. Back off, I’m sick.

Because there’s still love, unsettling race & gender relations, and kitty porn the day after Valentines Day!

Here is my legacy: Lindsay’s in rehab, and this piece’s publisher went under before it could be seen in their spring issue. Coincidence? No, obviously not. Clearly this piece, though read by approximately five people, is not only out of date, but DANGEROUS. It pushes starlets into rehab and worthy literary journals out of the lucrative literary journal game. I swear to God, if I had known of its power to destroy I would have written about Joe Francis and submitted it to Creative Nonfiction (yeah, you heard me, SUCK IT Creative Nonfiction!) I only saw “The Ring” once, but I’m pretty sure that if I want to avoid intense haunting by scary little girls (who go on to star as scary little mormon brides on HBO: go Deveigh!), I have to pass this on to at least three other people. Which, luckily enough, is the exact number of people who read this ‘blog’. So enjoy the 6 month old references, pray for Linds, and beware the Deveigh!

There is Only US

I know it started, as so many of the worst habits do, in Midtown Manhattan. Working at my first serious career-track post-grad school office job, I had a Daily Commute. I hummed It takes its toll, to play the happy prole to myself every morning on the subway platform, assumed what I hoped was a world-weary/wry expression, and waited for rescue. My signals– which in hindsight rendered me just another manic-depressive/drunk smirker on the F train—would, I hoped, mark me as alien to the office-bound species; a deer lost in a terrible land of wolves, financial planners, and groupacles. Perhaps some keen-eyed fellow commuter would notice the wry-expressioned deer on the train and kindly restore me to my native habitat, waving goodbye as I gratefully scampered off into the forest, or Brooklyn, or a bar. In between anthropomorphic escape fantasies, I read books that complimented my internal soundtrack– clearly non-commuter, non-Midtown titles. First person fiction about a drug addict/alcoholic/tortured young man seeking to connect in the absurd yet horribly beautiful world through black humor and one ultimately futile attempt at a relationship generally satisfied the ever-widening 9 to 5 hole in my heart.

After work: exhausted, disgusted by the foot smell of the 59th street subway station, shocked by the perversity of office casual, sucked of life juice and the will to create anything more than the next day’s hangover, well, I needed something for that long ride back. The book of the morning was too depressing at this point in the day, too many words, too much actual feeling, too much thwarting. And the Harper’s that I often had stuffed in my bag, I mean, God. I needed something heavy on images only, something completely junky, something that defied thought and refused to treat me like an intelligent, concerned citizen of the world. I needed US Weekly.

Though it’s been almost two years since I left that job, I still have a habit, and it’s getting worse. Where once there was just US Weekly, now there is US, Star, and some twenty odd websites that must be checked regularly. I used to buy US Weekly in the subway kiosk without shame, able to answer the patronizing stares from my book-reading fellow-riders with the smug satisfaction born of active literacy. I too read books; there were in fact books and a Harper’s in my bag, just waiting for me to finish catching up– ironically, obviously– with Brit-Brit. The Harper’s subscription is just for show at this point. I don’t even look at the god-damned Index anymore.

********************

I was thinking about how I would reach out to Lindsay, because I’m concerned. She’d probably ask me who the hell I thought I was and do her little “yeah, motherfucker I’m fine” routine and get really combative in that adorable Long Island scrapper way of hers, but once she saw that no, Lindsay, I am staying right here until you listen to me, we’d get to talking. We’d ease into it, because I wouldn’t want to seem like an authority figure right off the bat. So I might start with something relatively mild, like the mystic tanning. I’d point out that if she insisted on emulating Kate Moss, she might look to the English rose skin example she set rather than her nocturnal habits. I might even– in the conspiratorial tone that lets her know I’m not all business, I’m fun too!– point out that Lindsay’s mother is working the orange, leathered look enough for the both of them. I’d cool it with the mom stuff at this point, knowing that attacking her mother—as much as she deserves it for setting no limits, ‘partying’ with her child, and exploiting her daughter’s success with cynical and Jade Barrymore patented abandon– would set Lindsay on the defensive. I’d maybe segue from the issue of self-tanning abuse to her other habits thusly: ‘and no degree of copper coloring is going to disguise those bags around your eyes, sweetie. You are looking tired, beat, worked, haggard, strung out. When you’re not dead-eying the camera, you’re looking hysterically ecstatic. Add to this your recent embrace of gold lame, hot pants, and porny nude bikinis and we reach one conclusion. Cool it with the disco dust, little lady. Experimentation, fine, but when you’re on your fourth ‘exhaustion’ trip to the hospital, when producers publicly call you out on your handy ‘dehydration’ excuse and threaten to sue you unless you stop getting ‘dehydrated’ in Southland bathrooms and start showing up for work, when Anna Wintour commands you to stop going to the powder room at her Vogue party and orders Karl Lagerfeld to reign you in, when every blind item relating to promiscuous hoovering starlets is immediately identified as you, it’s time to stop. Which also leads me to a little issue that I think might be linked to your well-documented daddy issues, but also somewhat to the bathroom exploits. The men, Lindz. First of all, and here I might just surprise you, I actually enjoy that you don’t have some faux virginal image; that you seem like an agent of your own rather aggressive sexuality. In other words, I like that you’re a little slutty. But the rate of your manhood inhalation is starting to seem more like a compulsion than like something you enjoy. And with your rivals’ boyfriends? I know you were robbed of actual childhood and high-school experiences, so maybe you never learned this, but that’s just juvenile, insecure girl-hating. You don’t need to bone Paris Hilton’s Greek heir to prove you’re ‘hotter’ than she is. You have talent, and style, and a non-lazy eye! Don’t even get me started on Jared Leto; suffice to say, he is Jordan Catalano no more. I know you want to show us you’re not that adorable little girl we loved in “The Parent Trap” anymore. But you might want to think of how– if not as a child star– you want people to view you? Because right now you’re riding that train wreck coke-whore thing all the way to burnout city. Imagine the public is like a kindly old Wilford Brimley grandpa with a freckly granddaughter whom he adores. Now imagine Wilford entering a room in which his beloved granddaughter is blowing rails off of strippers while taking it from behind and screaming, “I’m not a kid anymore!” Why would you want to hurt Wilford Brimley like that?

As with any addiction, there is a ritual to preparing and consuming my tabloids. I almost always get two, US Weekly & Star, the US being the ‘good stuff’, the Star a cheaper and dirtier rush. While I know that I might be muddying the palate by sipping off the Gallo box before chugging the Barbaresco, I need the Star to ease me into my celebrity worship mindspace. Star, with its tissue thin pages, its questionable gossip, its tired dependence on the ‘too skinny’ filler, and its blatant rip-off of all US features, is there to cushion me from the too good too quick high of the US. It also makes me feel better about the quality of US, the elder statesman of glossy celebrity tabloids. (Life & Style and In Touch are even worse than Star, and I won’t buy the American version of Hello!, which sets a new low for copy editing & press releases as journalism. People doesn’t really count, since they litter their pages with ‘real people triumphing’ stories.) I bring my magazines home, I lay them out, and I take them all in: the smell, the feel, the hysterically pitched headlines that promise me I need this information now, now, now. Despite its adventures in font colors and embrace of expensive paparazzi photography, Star still looks like the paper tabloid rag it was before its luxurious relaunch, which I find charmingly honest. I’m mesmerized by how glossy the cover of an unread US is, the appropriately oily feel it has to the touch, that impossible sheen which promises to make everything shallow and plastic vibrant, important, ecstatic!

Once I’ve opened that cover and started down the hole, I focus on the tangled politics of Hollywood feuds, the interweaving love lives of my favorite starlets, the perfect abnormality of celebrities doing normal things while being photographed, the possible baby bumps, the cries for help that only the tabloids can hear and answer, the celebrities who will do anything to be photographed (i.e. Jennifer Love Hewitt, often photographed actually posing with an issue of US), the little bits of gossip which are generally far tamer than what I’m receiving on the internet, and finally, the pictures of gorgeous women with unattainable bodies and wardrobes accompanied by how-to tips for attaining/buying those bodies/wardrobes. At the exact instant when I have finished perusing the pictures of the Fashion Police (while avoiding the aggressively unfunny captioning from the Wacky Morning-DJs they employ), US loses its sheen, becomes completely cheap looking, and is done.

I feel the thrill of my new information for a few minutes– Lindsay’s lady parts have inhaled a new boy, the littlest Scientologist baby remains unseen and therefore probably made-up, Ashley Simpson’s daddy bought her an entirely new face– before the crash. I look at this little piece of trash that has stolen my mind for a period of at least thirty minutes, the contents of which (supplemented by the internet) will continue to consume my energy and imagination for hours and days and weeks to come. In lieu of the name of any leader in Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Iran or Syria, I will instead be able to recall the history, intricacies, and ever-changing alliances of the Paris vs. Nicole, Mischa, Lindsay & Olsen twins wars. At the slightest trigger I can and do discuss the personal details of musicians whose music I do not like, actors and actresses whose acting I do not respect, ‘celebrities’ whose very reason for being famous I cannot quite pin down. This is the ritual of the tabloid in my life, and no matter how many times I swear I don’t care if the under-educated, over-sexualized young pop star/actress/socialite gets divorced/cleaned up/some flesh to cover her clavicle, I will return to them again and again, week after week.

***********************

Towards the end I was buying my tabloids at the big chain bookstores, making like an old man asking for Barely Legal, nervously attempting conversation with the clerks. Usually they recognized the shame in my voice and simply smiled thinly, not asking that question, the obvious one floating in front of my face like a horribly reasonable mosquito: why would anyone buy a tabloid at a bookstore? Everyone knows that at Barnes and Nobles and the like you can read about twenty of those magazines without being pestered; if you need to do the hard research on the Paris-Nicole conflict before publicly commenting, the spacious magazine section will serve as your well-appointed, Starbucks-supplemented library. As a bonus, you’re sticking it to the Man! You have no intention of buying their corporate coffee or their books; you’re just browsing for two hours! I used to get my fix this way, but those were the halcyon days of dabbling. Now I needed to own, to hold that thin glossy volume of beautiful trash in my hands and in my home. Books went unread so that I could understand the desperate state of Britney’s marriage, about which I was genuinely concerned. The websites, which I once regarded as the more intellectually compatible way to sate my celebrity gossip needs, were no better. No degree of ironic commentary, no matter how clever, could obscure the fact that I needed to know where Lindsay Lohan was last night.

Rock Bottom: I was talking about the Firecrotch incident, like I do. Why did no one in the media fail to connect Brandon Davis’ perpetual bloat-sweat with cocaine? For that matter, at what point would the quaint euphemism ‘partying’ stop being employed to describe the clear bathroom coke-whoring of the young Hollywood set, a group of girls who actually expected me– a terribly proficient drug-taker in my day– to believe that all it took to dance on banquets until six in the morning before giggling on the Today Show was an endless supply of Red Bull and pluck? Perhaps there was a genuine lady problem plaguing the starlets of Los Angeles necessitating these continual trips to the bathroom; a scourge of urinary tract infections besieging the celebrity stylist Rachel Zoe’s client list? Could Zoe, the nefarious harbinger of the oversize accessories con undersized girls look, be the carrier, the source of her clients’ mysterious fat-eating viruses? I was building my thesis (Every Skeletal Girl With a Teen Audience in Hollywood has Herpes, a Drug Problem, and a Really Great Hermes Satchel), when I was interrupted.

“Who is Brandon Davis?” asked my friend.

And then, perhaps two years too late, it hit me. I knew all about Brandon Davis. I knew he was the grandson of an oil tycoon. I knew he had gone to UCLA for a bit, and called himself an ‘art dealer’. I knew that he had been photographed at a Taco Bell, on a Hawaiian veranda, perusing a Mercedes lot, and at innumerable clubs with his girlfriend Mischa Barton, with whom he had shared a tempestuous relationship before she dumped him for Cisco Adler. I knew all about his on again-off again friendship and present co-habitation with Paris Hilton, who giggled with him the night he called Lindsay Lohan a ‘poor’ ‘firecrotch’. I knew about the history of obesity in his family that drove him to his sweaty embrace of the good old uppers diet, a favorite on the Hollywood scene since the days of Judy Garland. I knew he had a very fat brother who had dated Courtney Peldon. I knew who Courtney Peldon was. And I was about to poison someone else– an innocent! A concerned citizen of the world whose guilty pleasures were blogs like Talking Points Memo!– with this useless, corrosive trivia. I had a problem, much as Brandon did, and I intended do something about it, though not at Promises Rehab Clinic in Malibu. I don’t have that kind of money.

No magazines, no cable, no internet gossip; I decided to clean up. There was a period of withdrawal, a shameful relapse or two. A trip to the grocery store was derailed by Kate Hudson’s divorce scandal. While I have no particular interest in daughter-of-Goldie, her marital problems as covered by US seemed infinitely more important than produce, and I may have been asked to stop loitering and actually purchase the assorted food stuffs and popscicles that sat melting in my cart as I binged on her personal misfortune. At home, I sat at my dining room table, not checking websites, not reading magazines, trying to reorder my mind. I wondered what Lindsay was doing, and who was photographing it, and whether I should be concerned. She seemed like such a stranger, and I missed the certainty I felt about her life, a certainty which just doesn’t seem to apply to a lot of other situations. Who was there for me to arbitrarily love or hate, based on some illusory sense of intimacy? What club was I supposed to want to get into, what expensive designer bag should I crave, what celebrity should I envy? Whose image and entire public persona could I consume and judge? It was easier with them in my life, less lonely, more skinny. Without them to distract me, what was I left with? A lot of wars, and grocery club cards, and myself.

And now that it’s all fading, I feel a bit wistful. It is a zen tree koan made base: if Britney is photographed barefoot and curlered while holding her baby in a precarious position and I’m not reading about it, did it happen? I don’t even remember what it felt like to feel sympathy for Denise Richards, or concern for Nicole Richie, or hatred for Wonkey-Eye Hilton.

I focus now on my life free of tabloid: I work, I talk to people with whom I do not [often] discuss the brainwashing of Katie Holmes; I read books with many multi-syllabic words and no pictures; I cook dinner without asking myself whether it is in keeping with the Latest Celebrity Diet Insured to Produce The Hottest Beach Bod; I do crossword puzzles whose answers are never related to tabloid subjects; I listen obsessively to NPR, amazed at how much news and information I’d been able to block out, and at my capacity to absorb it now; I watch movies starring actors whose personal lives are completely and purposefully foreign to me; I wonder why I feel so much better about my body; I go to restful sleep and never dream of Lindsay. I take one step at a time, and I repoen the Harper’s.

Stephen Baldwin’s God: fond of extreme sports, functional illiteracy; totally cool with eight-ball cravings. Not cool with Clinton, African debt relief, Bono.
I present to you the Radar interview with born-again Stephen Baldwin, edited and set to dinosaur imagery.

Click here to see the cartoon.

E! red carpet coverage of the Grammys highlight: some third string interviewer (still better than Ryan Seacrest, #5 on my ‘who to kill when the revolution comes’ list) is awkwardly questioning Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie. The interview is not particularly scintillating, but luckily the camera strategy of E! is designed to accommodate the ADD/pop culture idiocy attention span of its average viewer.

They continue to run the interview with Death Cab in a little bubble on the lower left quarter of the screen, and as Ben talks about the Show Box theatre the wide shot focuses on: anonymous video slut bending over in a blue satin ‘porn star interprets classy’ peekaboo dress, complete with strategic absences of fabric around the ass and fake boobs. Then, as Ben continues to prattle about great indy venues, the nameless P.R. whore taking up the majority of the screen slithers her body to full vertical glory: she convulses her chest and hair back and swivels her hips’n'butt while throwing her best ‘come-hither for I shall verily blow you’ look at the assembled cameras. I imagine it’s a reenactment of the particularly skeezy pole dance she performed in order to secure her ‘50 Cent Entourage’ Grammy ticket. She’s essentially stripping for the camera, and though no one seems to know who the hell she is, well, when a big-booty-ho has, in her one desperate bid for fame, decided to flash her goodies for the camera, that trumps Seth’s favorite band any day.

But then, because maybe your attention is starting to wane as you realize that she will not actually be performing a ping-pong from the hoo-ha trick on cable: in the top right hand corner comes an image of a tuxedoed teenage boy playing an electric violin! And Ben Gibbard is still talking! I love E!

Rarely are my deepest suspicions so eerily confirmed. Though I never could have imagined the plastic surgery angle; not in my most paranoid Frat-Frankenstein nightmares.
Salon Article.